Art in the Age of Visual Culture and the Image

The present issue of «Leitmotiv» publishes the proceedings of a workshop entitled Art in the Age of Visual Culture and the Image, which took place in Palazzo Feltrinelli, Gargnano del Garda (Università degli Studi di Milano), in April 2005. Such workshop, funded by the European Science Foundation and supported by the Dipartimento di Filosofia, Università degli Studi di Milano and by the SIE (Società Italiana d’Estetica) is one of six workshops organised by the ESF network Discourses of the Visible. National and International Perspectives (DVNIP) during the period January 2004-December 2006. At the Gargnano-meeting participants were asked to respond to the following call for paper: Anthropology and ethnology remind us that art was once concerned with the future for a wide field of pre-artistic visual experiences, such as the production and fruition of magic and symbolic images. In contrast, Hegel stated that at last art is for us a past. Since then, many attempts have been made to theorize the post-artistic era and the death of art, which have often proved, paradoxically, its extreme vitality. More recently, the so-called age of the image and, correlatively, its science (‘théorie de l’image’, ‘visual culture’, or ‘Bildwissenschaft’) has deepened the radicality of the question, opening the horizons beyond the artistic image into the sphere of the visual (photography, cinema, television, digital image, video). This has led not only to a reiteration of the proclamation of the end of art (Arthur Danto) but also to an identification of the end of art theory (Victor Burgin).In the meantime, artists have been producing works of ‘art’, critics have been writing about them, aestheticians have been philosophizing around them, and the public has been enjoying them. What does it mean to speak of art today? In what sense have discourses of visual culture replaced traditional art criticism, theory and history? Should they? And kind of impact have debates originating within North America and Britain had an impact on practices in other parts of Europe and beyond? What is the relation, for example, between Anglo-American Visual Studies and Bildwissenschaft in Germany, or Image Theory in France or practices elsewhere in Europe? What is the future of an anthropology of the image, for example, as proposed by Hans Belting? The workshop aims at discussing these questions, and welcomes papers that address any of the questions above.