Main entry:

Lang, Karen Ann.

Title & Author:

Chaos and cosmos : on the image in aesthetics and art history / Karen Lang.

Publication:

Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2006.

Description:

xiii, 295 pages : illustrations, map ; 25 cm

Notes:
Includes bibliographical references (pages 215-278) and index.
Introduction : theory begins with looking -- 1. Points of view in Panofsky's early theoretical essays -- 2. The dialectics of decay : rereading the Kantian subject -- 3. Goethe, Warburg, Cassirer : symbolic form as orientation -- 4. The experience of time and the time of history : Riegl's age value and Benjamin's aura -- Conclusion : encountering the image -- Afterword : toward an aesthetic way of knowing.

Summary:

"Writing in 1940, the prominent German art historian Erwin Panofsky asked, "How, then, is it possible to build up art history as a respectable scholarly discipline, if its objects come into being by an irrational and subjective process?" In Chaos and Cosmos, Karen Lang addresses the power of art to resist the pressures of the transcendental vantage point-history. Uncovering the intellectual and cultural richness of the early years of academic art history in Germany--the period from the 1880s to 1940--she explores various attempts within art history to transform aesthetic phenomena--chaos--into the cosmos of a systematic, unified field of inquiry. Lang starts by examining Panofsky's approach to aesthetic phenomena in his early theoretical essays alongside Ernst Cassirer's contemporaneous publications on the substance and function of scientific concepts (and on Einstein's theory of relativity). She then turns to the subject of aesthetic judgment through a rereading of Kantian subjectivity and Kant's uneasy legacy in art history. From here, Lang considers the different organizing theories of symbolic form proposed by Aby Warburg and Cassirer, as well as Goethe's inspiration for both; Alois Riegl's notion of age value and Walter Benjamin's conceptions of the aura; concluding with an extended examination of objectivity and the figure of the art connoisseur. Extensively illustrated with works of art from the Enlightenment to the present day, this venturesome book illuminates an intellectual legacy that has profoundly shaped the study of the history of art in ways that have, until now, been largely unacknowledged. Addressing the interplay of chaos and cosmos in terms of history, art history, philosophy, and epistemology, Lang traces shifts in point of view in art history and the way these shifts change aesthetic objects into historical objects, and even objects of knowledge."--Publisher's website.

Resources:
Table of contents
Table of contents
Table of contents
Book review (H-Net)
Table of contents only

ISBN:

0801441668 (cloth ; alk. paper)
9780801441660 (cloth ; alk. paper)
0801488559 (pbk. ; alk. paper)
9780801488559 (pbk. ; alk. paper)
9780801441660
9780801488559

Subject:

Benjamin, Walter 1892-1940
Cassirer, Ernst 1874-1945
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 1749-1832
Kant, Immanuel 1724-1804
Panofsky, Erwin 1892-1968
Riegl, Alois 1858-1905
Warburg, Aby 1866-1929
BMBF-Statusseminar
Art criticism Germany History 19th century.
Art criticism Germany History 20th century.
Aesthetics, German 19th century.
Aesthetics, German 20th century.
Object (Aesthetics) History 19th century.
Object (Aesthetics) History 20th century.
Critique d'art Allemagne Histoire 19e siècle.
Critique d'art Allemagne Histoire 20e siècle.
Esthétique allemande 19e siècle.
Esthétique allemande 20e siècle.
Objet (Esthétique) Histoire 19e siècle.
Objet (Esthétique) Histoire 20e siècle.
20.01 history of the art sciences.
Aesthetics, German.
Art criticism.
Object (Aesthetics)
Kunstkritik
Kunstwissenschaft
Ästhetik
Kunstgeschiedenis (wetenschap)
Esthetica.
Chaos.
Critique d'art Allemagne 19e siècle.
Critique d'art Allemagne 20e siècle.
Objet (esthétique) 19e siècle.
Objet (esthétique) 20e siècle.
Germany.
Deutschland
Duitsland.
1880-1950

Form/genre:

History.

Holdings:

Location: Library main 248119
Call No.: BIB 177653
Status: Available