Scarcely any twentieth-century author rivals Walter Benjamin's influence on the contemporary understanding of art and the aesthetic implications of new media. His thought has left its mark on all areas of contemporary theory and practice, from architecture, painting, and sculpture to installation art, photography, and film. From his research as a graduate student on truth and experience in idealist philosophy to the enormous study on the nineteenth century, the Paris Arcades Project, that consumed him for the last decade of his life, Benjamin investigated the formal, historical, and political dimensions of visual phenomena with unparalleled creativity. In a similar vein, the academic discipline of art history preoccupied him from an early age and, throughout the course of his life, he would continue to reflect on its methodologies and practices.