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E-book
Author Lang, Karen Ann

Title Chaos and cosmos : on the image in aesthetics and art history / Karen Lang
Published Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2006

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Description 1 online resource (xiii, 295 pages) : illustrations, map
Contents Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Theory Begins with Looking -- Chapter One. Points of View in Panofsky's Early Theoretical Essays -- Chapter Two. The Dialectics of Decay: Rereading the Kantian Subject -- Chapter Three. Goethe, Warburg, Cassirer: Symbolic Form as Orientation -- Chapter Four. The Experience of Time and the Time of History: Riegl's Age Value and Benjamin's Aura -- Conclusion: Encountering the Image -- Afterword: Toward an Aesthetic Way of Knowing -- Notes -- Index
Summary Writing in 1940, the prominent German art historian Erwin Panofsky asked, "How, then, is it possible to build up art history as a respectable scholarly discipline, if its objects come into being by an irrational and subjective process?" In Chaos and Cosmos, Karen Lang addresses the power of art to resist the pressures of the transcendental vantage point-history. Uncovering the intellectual and cultural richness of the early years of academic art history in Germany-the period from the 1880s to 1940-she explores various attempts within art history to transform aesthetic phenomena-chaos-into the cosmos of a systematic, unified field of inquiry. Lang starts by examining Panofsky's approach to aesthetic phenomena in his early theoretical essays alongside Ernst Cassirer's contemporaneous publications on the substance and function of scientific concepts (and on Einstein's theory of relativity). She then turns to the subject of aesthetic judgment through a rereading of Kantian subjectivity and Kant's uneasy legacy in art history. From here, Lang considers the different organizing theories of symbolic form proposed by Aby Warburg and Cassirer, as well as Goethe's inspiration for both; Alois Riegl's notion of age value and Walter Benjamin's conceptions of the aura; concluding with an extended examination of objectivity and the figure of the art connoisseur. Extensively illustrated with works of art from the Enlightenment to the present day, this venturesome book illuminates an intellectual legacy that has profoundly shaped the study of the history of art in ways that have, until now, been largely unacknowledged. Addressing the interplay of chaos and cosmos in terms of history, art history, philosophy, and epistemology, Lang traces shifts in point of view in art history and the way these shifts change aesthetic objects into historical objects, and even objects of knowledge
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 215-278) and index
Notes Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212 MiAaHDL
digitized 2011 HathiTrust Digital Library committed to preserve pda MiAaHDL
Print version record
Subject Art criticism -- Germany -- History -- 19th century
Art criticism -- Germany -- History -- 20th century
Aesthetics, German -- 19th century.
Aesthetics, German -- 20th century.
Object (Aesthetics) -- History -- 19th century
Object (Aesthetics) -- History -- 20th century
20.01 history of the art sciences.
PHILOSOPHY -- Aesthetics.
Aesthetics, German.
Art criticism.
Object (Aesthetics)
Kunstkritik
Ästhetik
Kunstgeschiedenis (wetenschap)
Esthetica.
Chaos.
Art criticism -- Germany -- History -- 19th century.
Art criticism -- Germany -- History -- 20th century.
Aesthetics, German -- 19th century.
Aesthetics, German -- 20th century.
Object (Aesthetics)
Critique d'art -- Allemagne -- 19e siècle.
Critique d'art -- Allemagne -- 20e siècle.
Objet (esthétique) -- 19e siècle.
Objet (esthétique) -- 20e siècle.
Germany.
Deutschland
Duitsland.
Genre/Form History.
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9781501731129
1501731122