scholarly journals Art as a Cipher of Transcendence

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marina Mikhailovna Novikova

The article is devoted to the problems of artistic creativity at the end of XX - beginning of XXI centuries, defining its role in modern culture; culturological, art history and aesthetic concepts of modern art are analyzed in the article.

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 532-554
Author(s):  
Ivan D. Sablin ◽  
◽  

On the example of the activities of the German art historian Kurt Badt, the article reveals the complex relationship between modern art and contemporary art history. The outstanding and, obviously, underestimated figure of the scholar, who throughout his long life was ready to confront the rest of the discipline unwilling to become a part of the university system, with all his creativity embodied the very idea of freedom that modern artists and sympathizing art critics strove for. Due to the availability of English-language versions of the art historian’s texts mainly on the masters close to modern art — Delacroix, Constable, and Cézanne — his position in the dispute about modernism seems more or less unambiguous. The aim of this article is to show that this is far from the case, discovering the points of contact of Badt with many of his colleagues who have earned a reputation as unconditional conservatives. First of all, it concerns the Austrian art theorist Hans Sedlmayr, an interest for whom, especially in recent times, is predetermined by widespread ideas about the fundamental incompatibility of academic art history with attempts of unbiased consideration of the history of modern art. Moreover, a deep kinship of such research activity with the most reactionary political ideas is also widely discussed, which, as it should be noted, this outstanding critic of the modern culture was not absolutely innocent of. Nevertheless, his clash with Badt, a polemic that took place in the 1950s and 60s, centered on the work of not Cézanne, but Vermeer van Delft, can be considered from the point of view of the attitude of the two scholars to phenomena less distant in time. This makes it possible to raise the question of the paradoxical similarity of the views of these two authors — with such a different creative and human destiny.


Author(s):  
Vlad Ionescu

The paper shows how modern art history integrated speculative aesthetic concepts in its attempt to describe art historical styles. Mood (Stimmung) is such a concept and it appears at the core of Riegl’s and Wölfflin’s art histories. Further, it examines the experience of the landscape and the ruin while relating it to François Jullien’s debate on the notion “blandness” in Chinese aesthetics.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Angel Angelov ◽  

The prevailing part of art historians, critics and theoreticians from the mid-1950s even until today feels related to the means of expression of the modernist art trends from the last decade of 19th c. until the end of 1960-s. Modernism has become a sacred text, whose complexity should be interpreted, but not criticized. Sedlmayr’s conception of art is built on moral, religious, aesthetic and political grounds, which are the very reason for the actuality of his works – both in the specialized sphere of art history and in the wider public debate on values. That is why I will analyse his structural approach mainly in relation to his anti-modern conception of art. This is the task of this study. Sedlmayr’s effort to turn art history into a “strict science” is an independent part of his scientific pursuit; it is in relation, but is not subordinate to his conception of modern art. Those publications of his are discussed but only in the specialized literature on history of the methods in humanities, while his conception against modern art acquires an exceptional popularity. Because of that reason his theoretic contribution to the study of art remains in a penumbra. I argue that Sedlmayr’s conception has the following coinciding points with the official understanding of art in the time of socialism: – A denial to estimate art with aesthetic criteria, which the ideologists of socialist realism define as formalism, and Sedlmayr as aesthetism; – In socialism art should represent a positive ideal; Sedlmayr calls this ideal “human measure”; – Art should habituate to morals; – A conviction that the modern art from the end of 19th c. on is decadent; – A criticism against the “dehumanization” of art.


Author(s):  
John Elderfield

This chapter presents the text of a lecture on the role of visual medium in art-historical study. It addresses the relationship of art history to the existential acts of painting and looking at painting and describes how the so-called story of modern art has been narrated in the history literature. It also considers how modern histories can accommodate the unfamiliar that is normally part of the story.


2013 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 10-17
Author(s):  
David Senior

In the past few years, several new publications and exhibitions have presented surveys of the genre of artists’ magazines. This recent research has explored the publication histories of individual titles and articulated the significance of this genre within contemporary art history. Millennium magazines was a 2012 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art that traced the artists’ magazine into the 21st century. The organizers, Rachael Morrison and David Senior of MoMA Library, assembled a selection of 115 international tides published since 2000 for visitors to browse during the run of the exhibition and created a website as a continuing resource for information about the selected tides. The exhibition served as an introduction to the medium for new audiences and a summary of the active community of international artists, designers and publishers that still utilize the format in innovative ways. As these projects experiment with both print and digital media in their production and distribution of content, art libraries are faced with new challenges in digital preservation in order to continue to document experimental publishing practices in contemporary art and design.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hanna Chmil

The monograph represents the extremely topical issue of screen research as a specific phenomenon of (post)modern culture, which functions in a dual way: it properly reflects human life while forming new ways of human thinking stipulated by the interaction of screen discourse and subject. It shows that the general space of screen display of modernity most accurately reflects the existing socio-cultural reality, which levels the usual culturological differentiation of types of culture into high and mass, and the totality of being-with-screen makes hegemony of any social group impossible to happen, because each of the modern subjects has the opportunity to produce own screen knowledge without restrictions and to snatch one’s own subject(-ivity)/similarity from the space of typical identification patterns to making oneself a free person. The publication is intended for specialists in the field of cultural studies, philosophy of culture, art history, researchers of academic institutions and creative higher educational institutions.


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