Moxey maintains that art history is a rhetoric of persuasion rather than a discourse of truth. Each chapter in The Practice of Persuasion attempts to demonstrate the paradoxes inherent in a genre that -- while committed to representing the past -- must inevitably bear the imprint of the present. In Moxey's view, art history as a discipline is unable to recognize its status as a regime of truth that produces historically determined meanings and so continues to act as if based on a universa