Traces the decline of beauty as an ideal from early German romanticism to the twentieth century. The American abstract expressionist painter Barnett Newman famously declared in 1948 that the impulse of modern art is to destroy beauty. Not long after that, Andy Warhol was reconciling the world of art with the world of everyday life, painting soup cans and soda bottles. In this book, Federico Vercellone provides an account of the decline of beauty as a Platonic ideal from early German Romanticism to the twentieth century. He traces this intellectual trajectory from Goethe, Dilthey, and Nietzsche, through modernism and the avant-garde movement, to the work of Adorno and Heidegger. Rather than the death or destruction of beauty, Vercellone argues instead that beauty in the twentieth century came back to live in reality and everyday life. He suggests this is a new edition of the classical ideal rather than an abandonment of it, and further makes the case for the ecological significance of this orientation and outlook.
This book is a journey through the defining moments and choices in the life and career of Christian Boltanski, which led the artist to reflect upon the outcome of some of the main historical events of the twentieth century and on the need to reconsider appropriate methods of representation. History, histories and the statute of the image are the fulcrums of the conversation he proposes. This conversation focuses in particular on the following fundamental themes: the difference between collective memory, recollection and oblivion; the relation between the individual and the crowd; the entity of absence intended as proof of a destroyed presence, but also as a device for the reactivation of memory; the incidence of an isolated gaze, that of the observer, upon whose primacy the history of western art has built its foundations."--Back cover.
Traces the decline of beauty as an ideal from early German romanticism to the twentieth century. The American abstract expressionist painter Barnett Newman famously declared in 1948 that the impulse of modern art is to destroy beauty. Not long after that, Andy Warhol was reconciling the world of art with the world of everyday life, painting soup cans and soda bottles. In this book, Federico Vercellone provides an account of the decline of beauty as a Platonic ideal from early German Romanticism to the twentieth century. He traces this intellectual trajectory from Goethe, Dilthey, and Nietzsche, through modernism and the avant-garde movement, to the work of Adorno and Heidegger. Rather than the death or destruction of beauty, Vercellone argues instead that beauty in the twentieth century came back to live in reality and everyday life. He suggests this is a new edition of the classical ideal rather than an abandonment of it, and further makes the case for the ecological significance of this orientation and outlook.
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