The Persistence of Modernity: Essays on Aesthetics, Ethics, and Postmodernism

Wellmer, Albrecht; Midgley, David

doi:10.2307/431534

Cited by 26 publications

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“…The lack of any clearly demarcated distinction between modernity and postmodernity is also reflected in Richter's continuing attachment to a series of ostensibly outmoded aesthetic strategies ranging from collage to abstraction. In questioning the possibilities for romantic utopian ism through his ironic engagement with nature-based themes, Richter contributes to the on-going internal critique of modernity that has developed since the earlier explorations of Benjamin and Adorno (see Wellmer 1991).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Contradictory Modernities: Conceptions of Nature in the Art of Joseph Beuys and Gerhard Richter

Gandy

1997

Annals of the Association of American Geographers

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In this paper, I explore the tension between different intellectual traditions concerning the relationship between nature and modernity as they are manifested in the work of postwar German artists Joseph Beuys and Gerhard Richter. I show that they represent contrasting intellectual and aesthetic traditions. For Beuys, nature holds innate meanings capable of guiding human thought and action, whereas for Richter, nature is simply a screen onto which we project our own cultural imprints. I conclude that these differing perspectives help to elucidate contemporary intellectual concerns over the relationship between nature-based ideologies and the ecological critique of modernity. By extending our understanding of "social nature" to the cultural arena, we can discern new ways of exploring relations between society and nature.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Contradictory Modernities: Conceptions of Nature in the Art of Joseph Beuys and Gerhard Richter

Gandy

1997

Annals of the Association of American Geographers

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“…Postmodernism, on the other hand, offers an intellectual context for a struggle over denning the world of "mass" culture; it has become an important terrain of experience, reflection, and affirmation of being in the late twentieth century. As such it is the extension of an ongoing critique of modernism, or perhaps, as Albrecht Wellmer (1991) suggests, a "persistence of modernity," in which postmodernism becomes a preoccupation with identifying and defining change.…”

Section: Critical Theory Postmodernism and Cultural Studiesmentioning

confidence: 96%

Authenticity, communication, and critical theory

Hardt

1993

Critical Studies in Mass Communication

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“…One might attempt to elucidate the distinction in terms of Wayne Booth's contrast in The Rhetoric of Fiction between showing and telling. This…transformation of perception is the healing…of an incapacity to perceive and experience reality in the way that we learn to [do] through the medium of aesthetic experience' (Wellmer (1991), 26). 43 However, showing can be as didactic as telling; there is a continuum in art from didactic to non-didactic, from telling via showing to presenting possibilities and 41 Murdoch (1990), 87.…”

Section: The Most Persuasive Cases: Literature Film and Dramamentioning

confidence: 99%

Artistic Truth

Hamilton¹

2012

Roy. Inst. Philos. Suppl.

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According to Wittgenstein, in the remarks collected as Culture and Value, 'People nowadays think, scientists are there to instruct them, poets, musicians etc. to entertain them. That the latter have something to teach them; that never occurs to them.' 18th and early 19th century art-lovers would have taken a very different view. Dr. Johnson assumed that the poets had truths to impart, while Hegel insisted that 'In art we have to do not with any agreeable or useful child's play, but with an unfolding of the truth.' Though it still exerts a submerged influence, the concept of artistic truth has since sustained hammer-blows both from modernist aestheticism, which divorces art from reality, and from postmodern subjectivism about truth. This article aims to resurrect it, seeking a middle way between Dr. Johnson's didactic concept of art, and the modernist and postmodernist divorce of art from reality. It argues that high art aims at truth, in something like the way that beliefs are said to aim at truth, that is, it asserts an internal connection with truth. Each artform aims at truth in its own way or ways. This relatively modest claim contrasts high art with art with a small 'a' that aims merely to please, such as sentimental or sensationalist art. The claim is developed by appealing to a post-Romantic conception of art, which says that art is autonomous, and so is its audience in responding to it; artworks present truth-assessable possibilities that should be freely interpretable. On this conception, the most valuable art leaves open to the audience how it should be interpreted, and does not preach or broadcast messages, whether religious or political. In contrast, committed or didactic art with its fixed, often quite simple meaningmedieval wall-paintings in churches, socialist realism, agitprop cinemaleaves no such freedom. These then are the options under consideration:

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The Persistence of Modernity: Essays on Aesthetics, Ethics, and Postmodernism

Cited by 26 publications

References 0 publications

Contradictory Modernities: Conceptions of Nature in the Art of Joseph Beuys and Gerhard Richter

Contradictory Modernities: Conceptions of Nature in the Art of Joseph Beuys and Gerhard Richter

Authenticity, communication, and critical theory

Artistic Truth

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