Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-xxrs7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-29T07:38:30.693Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

1 - The problem of a modern art

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 December 2010

Get access

Summary

That Hegel bears witness in his lectures on aesthetics not to a cessation of artistic activity but to a decline in its significance for human self-understanding is quite certain. Less evident is the extent and nature of this decline. The debate over the proper interpretation of the “end of art,” in other words, centers not on the likelihood that plays and paintings will cease to be produced (or even, in some narrow sense, enjoyed) but on the possibility that their production will largely cease to matter to their intended audience, the cultivated European publics of the nineteenth century. Interested non-specialists have often subscribed to this pessimistic view. Scholars of the Aesthetics, meanwhile, have long divided on the issue, some defending the pessimistic account, others retrieving from the half-dozen editions and several thousand pages of the lectures the sense of some enduring role for art. If the idea that art has no real place in Hegel's mature system is still defended, the balance of opinion has shifted in the past decade in favor of a more optimistic appraisal. More than one commentator has recently asserted the ongoing indispensability of the arts on a properly Hegelian conception of the modern world, and the prospect of some rough convergence of opinion on such an old question is encouraging.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bubner, Rüdiger, Innovations of Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003 [1995]), 254CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×