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September 25, 2024 9:14 PM

André Malraux's Theory of Art - Challenges to Traditional Aesthetics A brief essay on André Malraux's answers to the 20th century transformation of aesthetics and what qualifies as art.

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posted by klangklangston (2 comments total)

Thanks for posting, I can't do the article justice but it's right up my alley. I've been doing a lot of thinking on New Zealand landscape architecture's* overweening focus on aesthetics recently and Derek Allan's approach will help me a lot I think.

An interesting idea of when did art begin. What is missed (or elided) though is art for whom?, it seems Allen is focussed on the gallery and academia, but ordinary people have surely made art for millennia.

His chapter: Andre Malraux, Art and Time: The Renaissance in a New Perspective - looks well worth tracking down. (in, Renaissance Perspectives (1st ed.). Australian Scholarly Publishing Pty Ltd). [.au National Uni link].

Something about the psoted article brings Kevin Lynch's What Time is This Place [MIT Press link] to mind - a wonderful book on thinking about self, society and spatial design.

*In a nutshell NZ land planning law as it relates to landscape assessment has been driven to enshrine visual landscape as comprising all of landscape and ignoring (writing out of the legal picture) the social, much of the spatial, and phenomenological and kinaesthetic aspects. Professionals outside landscape have taken up the baton for some of these but only partly as entrenched lobbying drives the law.
posted by unearthed at 1:38 AM on September 26 [2 favorites]

What is missed (or elided) though is art for whom?

Malraux's stint as De Gaulle's Minister of Culture [apollo] offers an easy answer: censored works
posted by HearHere at 4:02 AM on September 26