A recent paper of Deodáth Zuh, "Art History Without Theory. A Case Study in 20th Century Scholarship" aims to demostrate that the practice of art history needs a solid theoretical backgroud. One also has to consider, whether in the case of art, internal-normative history is governed by the problem of aesthetic value and whether the external-empirical history could be only formulated in these terms. If so, then a theory-unaware history of art would fail to reconstruct how different art-making individuals conceived of aesthetic properties. In line with this idea, the second part of this paper reflects on the status of research programmes in art historical practice.