230127 VO Art and Revolution (2014W)

In connection with the social function of art Heidegger claimed that truth becomes "present" through the very creative process of the artist. This was an elaboration of Hegel´s notion that art performs the function of religion.
We will be studying under what social condition such a great discrepancy can arise in the history and development of art as that which arose between the art of the East and the art of the West, as represented by the Great Schism of 1041. In the East we have the Icon, set against "Originality" as an end in itself in the West, culminating in the "birth" of abstract painting in Kandinsky. We will discuss also the broader social relevance of theatre, for theatre in the prelude to the Revolution of 1789 in the same way that art according to Hegel, had to compensate religion after the Revolution was spent: from now on it was the Religion of Art that would provide society with its creeds, and the opera house became the cathedral of bourgeois society. But even then, art was not finished. Around this time the world of art revealed to us that man has a "nature" that shows itself in "genius" visible in the case of a great artist like Mozart, which has become a theme in sociology since the study on the Religion of Genius by Edgar Zilsel, the associate of Lazersfeld. Soon after, art moved on to the stage of "technical reproducibility" as described by Walter Benjamin.
These considerations only set the scene and are merely an overture for the primary focus of our study, which will explain the revolutionary character that art has taken on in the last 100 years, an eminently important question for sociology when pursued, in the classical manner, as a Geisteswissenschaft.