Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, Band 56. Heft 2

In this article we investigate the astonishing variety of emotions evoked by filmic melodramas. Closely analyzing a deeply moving scene from Alejandro Gonzáles Grams, we criticize the limited view of the emotional effects of this genre. We show that melodramas elicit more than just sadness or pity; they cannot be reduced to their tear-jerking potential. Melodramas move their viewers precisely because they send them on a rollercoaster ride with ups and downs of very different emotions.

The process of artistic creation represents a research subject that involves diverse theoretical and methodological challenges. Thus, for example, the question of the epistemological dimension of artistic creation poses itself and of whether philosophical investigation of the processes of creation demands a special epistemology that goes beyond the classical theory of knowledge. In this article both questions are answered in the positive. At the same time it is argued that the philosophical investigation must go beyond a purely conceptual and theoretical level, because the concrete processes of creation point to discrete aspects of activity that are theoretically demanding. For this reason an analysis of methodological approaches is essential where it concerns an approach to the artistic praxis. Both the theoretical and the practical research problems thus compell aesthetics to a closer interleaving with empirical social science and the theory of practice.

The paper presents a new proposal how to explain pictorial representation. Starting point is the phenomenological idea that pictures, in the first place, make something visible (instead of being a sign of something). Making something visible is taken as an achievement of the faculty of imagination, and the faculty of imagination in turn is taken to be a variety of our faculty to simulate (referring here to the concept of simulation as it is used in contemporary cognitive psychology, according to which the ability to simulate e.g. other minds is the ability to reenact somebody else’s cognitive processes). Taken together, these pieces come down to the claim that pictorial representation of some x is simulating the perception of x with pictorial means; pictures prompt and guide such a simulation. Crucial is the addition »with pictorial means«. Picture-based simulation has constraints, which differ from those of perception and imagination. Therefore, in picture-based simulation perceptual processes are not simply copied but re-modeled and open to modification. The primary means of such modification are provided by the properties of pictures as material objects, such as their having a frame which encloses a two-dimensional surface. Therefore, being a material object promotes and shapes pictorial representation, instead of hampering it.

From the Romantic era onward, many of the discourses surrounding artistic creativity have merged the artist and his working space: the place of work is viewed as the mirror of the man and his oeuvre, a sanctuary, a social or an exhibition space. A popular topos in this context was the view of the empty studio. This paper explores the 19th-century empty studio image as a self-portrait of the artist. It examines how the depictions of the space and its objects work to inscribe the artist’s presence, and to express his or her  artistic self-conception and identity within the changing artistic-social structures of the period.

The text considers the possibility of a mediatic historiography, that is, a form of historiographic writing in which the media, in this case images, participate. The central object of investigation is the strategy of reenactment that is traditionally regarded as a means of eventorientated historiography. Contemporary art has recently questioned these strategies and proposed to replace the totalizing or globalizing approach of history and historiography with a more fragmentary and critical perspective. On the backdrop of Michel Foucault’s methodological reflections on history that he develops in Archeology of Knowledge, the text analyzes different forms of a politics of history of the images through three examples of reenactment taken from film, theatre and the fine arts.

Paul Klee’s significance for painting is undisputed. This article argues that Klee’s theoretical writings, especially those written during his time at the Bauhaus, present a seminal contribution to aesthetics. The argument will proceed in three steps, using the notions of generative thinking and aesthetic cognition: First, the notion of generative thinking will be outlined as a process of aesthetic cognition on the basis of an analysis of Klee’s theoretical writings. The second step extends the inquiry beyond Klee and considers problems of contemporary art. Finally, the results will be established by discussing two exemplary paintings by Klee.

Arthur Danto proclaimed the »end of art«, that is, the end of the history of art structured on a narrative and unidirectional basis. But in contrast to Danto’s ideas, we detect a telos in the contemporary art world, especially in historiography. This telos is globalisation. At present, we have a clearly expansive unidirectional narrative in which the norm can be summed up as »network legitimation.« A network that is growing in extent (more regions of the world), saturation (more objects) and historicity ( further-ranging chains of development). The network also has a centre, the West, although it may not last forever.