CONCEPT/S: Hegel/s Aesthetics
Conference, Ljubljana, Museum of Modern Art, 11-14 Jan 2018
Organized by IHA Aufhebung (Martin Hergouth, Ana Jovanoović, Bara Kolenc, Mirt Komel, Goran Vranešević)
Hegel’s lectures on Aesthetics–perhaps the least explored work by the author of the Phenomenology of Spirit–is part of the vivid German tradition stretching from Lessing, Kant, Schiller, Goethe, to Nietzsche, Heidegger, Adorno, and others. Hegel’s philosophy of art encompasses a wide range of topics, from ancient architecture to modern theatre, from religious paintings to secular literature. However, the most interesting interventions by Hegel are not only those that were influenced or that themselves influenced the distinctive philosophical discipline of aesthetics, but also those that provided us with a very precise conceptual apparatus for our own contemporary debates on art. One prominent example is Hegel’s thesis that art became more and more philosophical in the course of its history according to the logical development of the idea(l) of beauty; a thesis that was the springboard for speculations about the end of art and that anticipated different debates regarding the status of conceptual artworks. All these themes are significant not only for contemporary art theories, but can, even more importantly, redefine the status of philosophy as such.