Autonomy of the work of art
Autonomy of the work of art is an idea that has been developing since the 18th century and which demands the freedom of the artist and the art viewer. Autonomy here means something like: “The work of art gives itself its own laws.” - Essentially, it is about three aspects: that artistic ideas do not have to imitate nature, that they do not have to be useful or morally good and that they do not have to be social influences would be shaped.
enlightenment
The ancient view that art should imitate nature ( mimesis ), and the connection between the beautiful and the good, such as Thomas Aquinas considered necessary, were called into question in the Age of Enlightenment .
The ideal of an “autonomy” of art is mostly traced back to the aesthetics of the philosopher Immanuel Kant , who in his work Critique of Judgment (1790) stated “that the judgment about beauty in which the least interest is reduced is very partial and not pure Judgment of taste is ”( Analysis of Aesthetic Judgment , I / 1, § 2). Beauty consists in a “purposefulness without a purpose” (§ 15), which triggers “pleasure independent of all interests” (§ 42). A palace can also be found beautiful if, like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one has an aversion to noblemen. Kant wanted a common and free judgment. From this point of view, artists and citizens are still allies who work for such freedom together by emancipating themselves from the church and the nobility.
According to Karl Philipp Moritz, art “does not need to have any relation to anything but itself”. The political background to these thoughts is shown by citing the state as an example of such a work of art . A bourgeois state was still a dream in most parts of the world. Art sponsorship was directed by the court .
19th century
Since the end of the 18th century there has been a need for artists to differentiate themselves from bourgeois society (which they continually assimilated with clichés of misunderstood or rebellious artists). Autonomy was often demanded by the artists for the self-assertion of the individual against social interests. Thus the claim to autonomy was increasingly directed against the bourgeois state. The autonomy of art is a consequence of this doctrine of the legislative and non-legislative faculties of genius.
Autonomy tendencies can be seen in times of strong but taboo political and social polarization and also as a counter-movement to the commercialization of art. Such a view of literature and the visual arts had the different variants of aestheticism or the anti-bourgeois bohème in Paris around the middle of the 19th century with the slogan " L'art pour l'art ". The public museum , which gained great influence on culture and education in the 19th century, was a more neutral exhibition space than a palace or church and gave art (at least superficially) a free space in relation to commercial and ideological interests.
Parallel concepts in music are absolute music after the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 or autonomous music with the emergence of the music industry after the First World War (e.g. with Theodor W. Adorno ).
20th century
After the end of aristocratic rule in 1918, bourgeois states were the norm in Europe. Culture subsidies replaced the contributions of the noble courts. However, not all artists were satisfied with the conditions the new states offered them. The Russian comrades in the 1920s demanded, for example, an autonomy for art from the Soviet state.
For Theodor Adorno, the autonomy of the work of art is “laboriously forced from society” and thus something that has been temporarily achieved and which should be preserved by critics and scientists. With this demand, the so - called work - immanent interpretation tried to bridge or circumvent the social tensions after the Second World War. A suspicion of ideological character, mere functionality or foreign determination by fashion trends called into question the unity of the viewers about the value of a work of art.
When looking at art, for example, the main focus was on formal analyzes, stylistic classifications and the assessment of aesthetic quality. The historical and mainly the social embedding occurred at most as a connection between the work and the artist's biography. Only the iconological approach (“What is represented?”) Took social phenomena into account when analyzing the individual work of art.
After 1968, art in the context of the political movement of the autonomous was also called autonomous art.
criticism
The demand for art to be independent of moral purposes, which was originally intended to free us from ecclesiastical tutelage and secular censorship , was repeatedly called into question: the young Friedrich Schiller wanted to see a “ moral institution ” in the theater . In naturalism since the end of the 19th century with its socio-political engagement and in the avant-gardes at the beginning of the 20th century with their protest against bourgeois aesthetics, the concept of an autonomous art was heavily criticized. Likewise, in the course of the 1968 movement in the 1970s , this approach was abandoned in many interpretations or at least took a back seat.
literature
- Hanna Heinrich: Aesthetics of Autonomy. Philosophy of Performance Art . Transcript, Bielefeld, 2020, ISBN 978-3-8376-5214-7 .
- Harry Lehmann (Ed.): Autonomous art criticism. Kulturverlag Kadmos 2012, ISBN 978-3-86599-158-4 .
- Andrea Marlen Esser u. a. (Ed.): Autonomy of Art? On the topicality of Kant's aesthetics. Academy, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-05-002793-2 .
- Michael Müller (Ed.): Autonomy of Art. On the genesis and criticism of a bourgeois category. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt 1972.
- Jürgen Fredel: Autonomy of Art. In: Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism . Volume 1. Argument, Hamburg 1994, ISBN 3-88619-431-0 , Sp. 774-779 ( online ).