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Modern aesthetics and modern theories of art (and by "modern" I mean those born with Mannerism, developed through Romanticism, and provocatively restated by the early-twentieth-century avant-gardes) have frequently identified the artistic value with novelty and high information. The pleasurable repetition of an already known pattern was considered typical of Craftsnot Artand industry. |
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A good craftsman, as well as an industrial factory, produces many tokens, or occurrences of the same type or model. One appreciates the type, and appreciates the way the token meets the requirements of the type; but the modern aesthetics did not recognize such a procedure as an artistic one. That is why the Romantic aesthetics made such a careful distinction between "major" and "minor" arts, arts and crafts. To draw a parallel with sciences, crafts and industry were similar to the correct application of an already known law to a new case. Art (and by art I mean also literature, poetry, movies, and so on) corresponded rather to a "scientific revolution": every work of modern art figures out a new law, imposes a new paradigm, a new way of looking at the world. |
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Modern aesthetics frequently forgot that the classical theory of art, from ancient Greece to the Middle Ages, was not so eager to stress a distinction between arts and crafts. The same term (techne, ars) was used |
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A different version of this chapter was published as "Innovation and Repetition: Between Modern and Post-Modern Aesthetics," Daedalus 114 (1985). |
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