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The Role of Art in History and the Art of the Future

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Gerhard Seel
Gerhard Seel*
Affiliation:
Bern University, Switzerland
*
Gerhard Seel, Bern University, Hochschulstrasse 4, 3012 Bern, Switzerland. Email: gseel@net2000.ch
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Abstract

The main thesis of this paper is that art has an important role to play in the fulfillment of the promises of historical progress and that this progress is the necessary condition of the flourishing of the art of the future. We make progress in economic history because we improve the productivity of our labor by inventions and cooperation. Its aim is the liberation from the necessity of labor. However, the leisure time we thus gain has to be filled with meaningful activities. Here art has to play a central role.

To show this I have to determine what art is. In my view, art is a close cousin of playing games. Arts and games have in fact a common ancestor: the feast. Both are executed freely according to self-invented rules. This explains why arts and games yield us extraordinary, quasi divine, pleasures.

Therefore indulging in art and playing games allows us in the best possible way to fill our ever larger leisure time with meaningful activities. However, this role belongs to the art of the future, i.e. the art after the end of the history of art. I explain the features of this art and its role in my last chapter.

Type
Articles
Information
Diogenes , Volume 59 , Issue 1-2: Why New Aesthetics? , May 2012 , pp. 158 - 167
Copyright
Copyright © ICPHS 2013

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