Columns:: Worth repeating

since 12/15/98

Columns::April 21, 2003

Worth repeating

Herbert Lindenberger of Stanford University presented a Center for Humanities and Arts visiting scholar lecture April 15, discussing his work toward a theory of modernism. Some excerpts:
“Boundaries between media . . . are not different in kind from boundaries between genres within the medium. The classical system of the arts maintains the boundaries between media at least as firmly as it did among the arts themselves. During antiquity it was the boundary between genres . . . that occupied commentators far more than the interrelations between the arts. . . . Propriety—whereby each genre could be linked at once to an appropriate style and subject matter—was to become the guiding principle that justified the separation of the arts from the Renaissance onward. . . .
“The boundaries between what we classify as art and what we don’t include in that classification have changed in ways like those among media and genres. When that which is generally assumed to be non-art gains entrance into the aesthetic ground, it usually takes the form of lowly personae and lowly materials invading the higher precincts of what hitherto counted as art. The sense of shock and expression of disapproval on the part of critics and viewers have generally greeted the introduction of such seemingly indecorous matter.”

--Beth Roberts

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