In the context of postmodernism, how are we to answer the question, 'What is art?' (original) (raw)
Related papers
Postmodernism and the Limits of Art .pdf
This is a renamed version of Chapter 1 of my book Geneses of Postmodern Art: Technology As Iconology, published by Routledge in their Advances in Art and Visual Studies series, 2019. In the book, the chapter is entitled ‘Contingent Objects, Permanent Eclecticism’. If you wish to cite this discussion please refer to the version as presented in the book . This discussion describes how Postmodernism takes art to its logical limits. The origins of this are found in the delayed influence of Duchamp's legacy of the 'found object'. In Part 1, we discuss the emergence of minimalism, conceptual, and performance art. In Part 2, it is shown how the legacy of the found object is made into the positive basis for artistic creation in the form of Pop Art and other tendencies that affirm the worth of mass culture. It is argued further, that effect of all the tendencies described is to exhaust the possibility of further radical innovations in art. Part 3 explores some key aspects of the permanent Postmodern eclecticism that is consequent upon this.
The traditional conception of art is about sensual beauty and refined taste; modern art on the other hand has introduced an entirely unexpected dimension to the visual arts, namely that of 'revelatory narrative'. Classical art aspires to present works which can be appreciated as sensually beautiful; modern art, when it succeeds, presents us instead with the unsettling narrative. This radical difference in artistic purpose is something relatively new, and not yet fully appreciated or understood.
Contemporary art: 1989 to the present
Choice Reviews Online, 2013
Inhabiting the technosphere. Art and technology beyond technical invention Prepublication Manuscript "Media convergence under digitality actually increases the centrality of the body as a framer of information: as media lose their material specificity, the body takes on a more prominent function as selective processor in the creation of images." 1 The body as a framer of information: This notion, presented in the introduction to Mark Hansen's 2004 New Philosophy of New Media, could also stand as an introduction to the general condition under which art after 1989 thinks, produces and engages with technology. It marks not just a shift in thinking that concerns our general understanding of media technologies and practices-but an equally significant shift taking place within the type of artistic practice where new media and information technologies are not just deployed but are themselves also objects of thinking, investigation and imagination. The 1 Timothy Lenoir, Foreword, in Mark Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, MIT Press, 2004, xxii task for art history is then to try to understand the newly prominent mediatic body that emerges with this shift-to discover its various manifestations in artistic practice, as well as its implications for aesthetic theory. In particular, we need to conceptualize its double relation to, on the one hand, technological media and the realm of media production and, on the other hand the notion of the artistic medium. With this shift, several influential conceptions of the relation between art, technology and media may be questioned. Firstly, the notion of the body as a framer of information challenges some of the most influential theorizations of the cultural shift that took place in the 1990's, as the Internet became a global phenomenon and digital processing emerged as a communal platform for all previously separate media and technologies of expression. One was the marginalization of art in the realm of new media. Digital media leave aesthetics behind, Friedrich Kittler claimed, with all the apocalyptic gusto of the early computer age: In distinction to the consciousness-flow of film or audio tape, the algorithmic operations that underpin information processing happen at a level that has no immediate correlate to the human perceptual system. Humans had created a non-human realm that made obsolete any idea of art based on the sense apparatus. And this turn of events was related to the way in which technologies of the information age severed any tangible connection with human existence beyond what pertains to the control practices of capitalist superpowers, notably warfare, surveillance and superficial entertainment or visual "eyewash". 2 Yet, against Kittler's bleak description of posthuman technologies it could be argued that information will still necessarily have to be processed by human bodies-even if the interaction between the human perceptual
16 Sociology of Art: New Stakes in a Post-Critical Time
The international handbook of sociology, 2000
During a long period, sociology of art has been divided mainly between two major directions. Both show art as a social reality but they do so from quite different points of view: one is frontally critical and aims at revealing the social determination of art behind any pretended autonomy (be it the autonomy of the works, following the objectivist aesthetics, or the autonomy of the taste for them, following an aesthetics of subjectivity); the other is more pragmatic and, without pretending to make statements about the works or aesthetic experience, procedes through a minutious reconstitution of the "collective action" necessary to produce and consume art. Against a purely internal and hagiographic aesthetical commentary of art works, sociology has thus filled back an "art world" which formerly included only very few chefs-d'oeuvre and geniuses. Mainstream productions and copies, conventions and material constraints, professions and academies, organizations and markets, codes and rites of social consumption have been pushed to the front of the scene.
Art and Communication as a Novel Experience in Modern Culture
Arhe, 2020
In this paper we discuss the deadlocks of defining art in modern culture. The lack of criteria and modernism revisited are of crucial issue in this account. The theoretical mainframe of our approach is founded on the Frankfurt School thinkers (Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin), and of course Jürgen Habermas. This theoretical apparatus also draws on contemporary accounts given by Sorbonne Professor Marc Jimenez and art critic John A. Walker.[1] The paper discusses whether fine art may survive, in what forms – and to what purpose – in an age of mass media and in conditions of rapid networked communication. The paper sets off from the critical role radical art plays in today’s divided yet global world and on the continuing debates between high art and low culture, but reflects on the interaction between art, media and technology. To support our argument we suggest Body Art and other web/digital and technological applications in art, and the cyber-art currently being prod...
AM Journal of Art and Media Studies No 19, 2019
The article will juxtapose the modernist, contemporary and post-contemporary general conceptualization of art and aesthetic appearance of an artwork. Even though all three conceptualizations can be understood as intertwined because they are largely established in mutual relations, for our purpose they will be analyzed in terms of the basic epistemologi-cal terrain on which art enters the Western tradition of knowledge and power: the terrain of aesthetic education. The conceptualization of modernist art/artwork will mainly draw from its link with the autopoietic image of artwork/artistic creativity that can be traced to Romanticism as well as the tradition of the so-called aesthetics of form at the beginning of the 20 th century, while conceptualization of contemporary art will be primarily reconstructed on the ground of cultural studies and its reception theory that focused on the analysis of social mediation of cultural texts where the text itself loses the status of an exclusive source of meaning. On the one hand, this article attempts to expose the difference between the two by focus-ing on conceptualizations of their modes of production of meaning (modernist autopoiesis as producing the artwork's meaning by, through and of itself versus contextually determined meaning of the artwork within conceptualizations of contemporary art), while on the other, it will expose a general aesthetic appearance of the two based on the differentiation of avant-gar-de and dialogical aesthetics. From there on, the article will focus on conceptualizations of post-contemporary art in the last ten years that also offered a critique of how contemporary art has been (self)limited to aesthetic experience and by it the present time. In the final part, post-contemporary art will be compared with modernism, for instance in terms of the mod-ernist aim for the transcendent standpoint and its methods of aesthetic alienation in contrast to the post-contemporary aim to eliminate aesthetic experience as such and demonstrate that there can be knowledge without aesthetic experience, or the modernist media research to the post-contemporary media archaeology.
Drawing insights from sociology and philosophy, particularly the work of Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas, this paper proposes a theory of art as a mode of communicative action which plays a vital role in the symbolic reproduction of social life. The focus is on autonomous art in the context of modern society. The analysis touches on art’s significance for individual identity formation; the interdependence of the intellectual, moral and aesthetic dimensions of culture; and the relation of moral consciousness to art which accounts for the historically specific societal significance of art, e.g., art and industry in first half of the 20th century, and art and ecology in the late 20th century. As a mode of communicative action, first, art assumes the outcome, but also marches ahead, of the process of socialisation, opening up and exploring new sensibilities and competencies. In so doing, it serves the formation of identity, displays individual competencies and a style of life practice, and contributes towards the maintenance of both culture and society by generating interpretations and motivating actions. Secondly, as regards cultural reproduction, art while basing itself on cultural resources, at the semantic dimension at the same time renews valid cultural knowledge by interpreting subjective experience in terms of cultural values, thereby serving the continuity of tradition and the coherence of knowledge. But it also explores and proposes new cultural values, and contributes towards the maintenance of both society and personality by legitimating existing institutions and providing models for the acquisition of generalised competencies. Thirdly, as regards a process of social integration, art while assuming certain action patterns and basing itself on stabilized group identities, at the dimension of social space co-ordinates actions and stabilizes group identity, thereby contributing towards the maintenance of both personality and culture by creating legitimately regulated social or interpersonal relations and generating normative or moral obligations.
Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics
Art writing normally contrasts art with "everyday life." This book explores art as integral to the everyday life of modern society, providing materials to represent class and class conflict, to explore sex and sexuality, and to think about modern industry and economic relationships. Art, as we know it, is not common to all forms of society but is peculiar to our own; what art is changes with people's conceptions of the tasks of art, conceptions that are themselves a part of social history. The history of society does not shape art from the outside, but includes the attempts of artists to find new ways of making art and thinking about it.
Postmodern Philosophy and Contemporary Art
Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Arts, Design and Contemporary Education (ICADCE 2018), 2018
The author of the article reviews the major ideas of the postmodern philosophy that have found a visual embodiment in the artistic forms of contemporary art. In this context, the author analyzes the conceptual understanding of modern society, the position and tasks of an individual, included in the postmodern social processes. Special attention is paid to J. Baudrillard's concept on the "hyperreal" essence of the social. There are some images by contemporary artists included, which, according to the author, illustrate the proposed philosophical ideas.