Katharina Münchberg

The art of the modern age, particularly the lyric poetry, develops an own aesthetic conception of the movement which breaks with the classic idea of the movement as a spatial change of a body in time. Baudelaires À une Passante, Rimbauds Bateau ivre and Paul Valérys Le Cimetière Marin are three paradigmatic texts of the French modern age, in which movement is reflected as a time-space-continuum and materialized in the dynamic of language. Modern art is itself movement and causes movement. It becomes an art of the development, not sub- stance, an art of pure sensory perception, not concept, an art of discontinuous adventures, not experience.

The concept and central place ›work of art‹ has been neglected by the turn to aesthetic experience. But the work of art cannot be grasped fully by the act of aesthetic experience; it is rather a place, where the essential relation between aesthetic and existential experience becomes known. The work of art is mere potentiality, which appears in the actuality of aesthetic experience. Beyond the difference of potentiality and actuality, object and subject, the work of art exists in the ontological mode of can-being, of being open to the world.