engleski

Coming to Terms with Images: Visual Studies and Beyond

The problem that visual studies is particularly focused on is what happens when artifacts at some point enter into a different kind of existence: for example, when culinary recipes become important formal and structural elements in an artistic performance, or inversely, when pictures like Mona Lisa or Warhol’s silk prints enter into the vernacular context of global visual culture, when the use of a once ontogenetically pure artifact gets “out of control”. At this point an art historian loses his or her priority of overseeing the aesthetic value of a painting, because the time and space of social interactions have attached to it a different sort of value altogether. This does not mean that the ontogenetic code of the artwork has been lost, just that several of its “genes” (to make an appropriate metaphor) have been passed on to different species of objects. The role of art history or hermeneutical aesthetics may be to either create sub-disciplinary discourses capable of dealing with genetically impure objects—as was much earlier envisioned by Aby Warburg, Erwin Panofsky and Ernst Gombrich—or to create a new image theory, regardless of its name, that would deal critically with semiotically or commercially inherited meanings and offer a counterposition to dichotomous (art/non–art) systems of value.

visual studies Bildwissenschaft, image critique, ontogenetic fallacy, art/non-art

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