ESPES

8

Authors: Mortu Ancuta

My aim in this paper is to address some difficulties related to the development of an emerging discipline called world art studies. While it originates as a European discipline in the German scholarly tradition around 1900 (Pfisterer, 2008), world art studies comes to the fore only recently (Onians, 1996, 2016) with recent advances in natural and cognitive sciences, which hold promise for providing more inclusive categories that could serve the study of art as a worldwide phenomenon. I focus more specifically on the strengths and weaknesses of psychology as explanatory framework for world art studies. While contemporary scholars no longer dwell on collective mentalities or “spirits” of an age (Gombrich, 1967), the problem of postulating mysterious faculties in relation to art behavior and aesthetic response is still present when adopting as an entry point the universality of human nature.

10

Authors: Ihringová Katarína

Experiencing aesthetics and aesthetic experience has, for a long time, been perceived as the purpose and goal of art. The aesthetic features of a work of art have been the only criteria used in its evaluation. However, these modernist aspects cannot be applied to the conceptual and neo-avant-garde art of the 2nd half of the 20th century that has not only brought a radical change in the artistic form, but, especially, the ontological nature of the work itself. Modernist theories of art and normative rules which apply to perceptual art are no longer able to reflect the changes brought by the art of mind. The traditional history of aesthetics oriented towards the definition of art should, therefore, overlap with, for example, the history of ideas. In the text, I will thus focus on the crucial moments which stood on the border between the old, modernist traditions, and the new, which has brought radical changes into the study of aesthetics as well as the theory of art. The text is focused on three issues: ontological issues of art, the criticism of aestheticism and tautology as a possible problem in interpretation, which will be dealt with from the comparative viewpoint of the art of sense and art of mind.