Nominalist re-turn in contemporary art
Journal Title: Art Inquiry. Recherches sur les arts - Year 2015, Vol 0, Issue
Abstract
Hans Blumenberg has shown (Die Legitimität der Neuzeit) that the appearance of nominalism in the debates of the Middle Ages had laid grounds for modernity. Nominalism assumes that only individual, concrete objects exist and that common properties are not grounded in any kind of supra-individual properties or relations that would exist independently of what is singular. In Thierry de Duve’s interpretation, “pictorial nominalism” of Duchamp puts stress on a particular or a singular name, stops the process of reference and shows its “plastic being”. This aesthetic idea opens up a new field that we now call “art”, where art becomes a “proper name”. I would like to follow his analysis, but also to re-think it the context of the present, to explore the specificity of the nominalist re-turn in contemporary art. The contemporary aesthetic experience of art as such is nominalist in the sense I would like to examine in this article.
Authors and Affiliations
Piotr Schollenberger
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP315807
- DOI -
- Views 66
- Downloads 0
The Art and Craft Divide – on the Exigency of Margins
The subject of the art/craft distinction continues to occupy a marginalized position in the history of modern and contemporary art and remains almost invisible as an object of critical inquiry. The marginalization of cra...
Foreword
-
Can we talk about contemporary avant-garde outside Western cultures? The case of contemporary art in the Republic of South Africa
The appreciation of the importance of the avant-garde, and of its re-thinking of the sociocultural reality, ensues from its fundamental role for 20th and 21st century art practice and theory. However, in the contemporary...
Transit Monumental – The way of Independence. Aesthetics in the identity projects of late modernity
The paper presents the performative project by the K.A.U. collective and Małgorzata Wdowik, Transit Monumental – The Way of Independence, as an example of the late modern use of artistic fiction in order to examine exist...
What the avant-garde stands for today
The main question of this article expresses doubts as to whether the end of the avant-garde was not in fact declared too early. Did we state too hastily that postmodernism has completely nullified the significance of the...