Are we condemned to mass culture? Problems of today's art and their reflection in theories of art

Proceedings of 20^th International Congress of Aesthetics, Seoul

Abstract: 

Contemporary forms of art and the artworld (fifty years after its definition) always place art in the zone of non-disposability. This seemingly paradoxical formulation against contemporary art – the really global art, disposable regardless of its space-time situation, instantly available not only by the way of technical transmission but, all the more, thanks to the universality of coding and supranational topics by the communicability of contents – is yet legitimate. However, the artworld, in its birth generated by A. C. Danto’s problem of undifferentiability between art and non-art, and extrapolated into institutionalized theory of art by G. Dickie and others, has noticed several tendencies that are not graspable, not even by the turns made by aesthetics and theories of art in the past decades. Multiplication or maybe even exponential growth of mass culture and also mass art, their inclination to be consumed and their schematic forms puzzle the answer to the repetitive question: “what is art?”. There is no guaranteed notion of art at our disposal. The latest answers to this key question that have attracted more significant attention are meant to be confronted in the paper with characteristics of contemporary mass art (its forms, manifestations and consequences) in the context of mass culture. The subsequently mentioned loss of autonomy, originality and authenticity, the acceptance of the loss of Heideggerianly understood world in the work of art in favour of its – often appreciated but actually inadequate – substitute will uncover the theme of non-disposability of art in currently unemphasized position.

The main topic of my paper is the issue of non-disposability of art. The paper aims to outline the following themes:

1. non-disposability of art in the era of universal disposability;
2. non-disposability of the notion of art;
3. criticism of mass culture and the role of art;

admission of the loss of Heideggerianly understood world in artwork and an appeal for its re-thinking.