Crisis and Form. Politicizations of Art 

Today, on theoretical and practical economic levels, the question of the emancipatory potential of art seems to be exhausted before it is even posed. Adorno’s idea of aesthetic autonomy, Rancière’s distribution of the sensible, Bürger’s critique of institutions – all of these central concepts of critical art theory have long since merged with institutional routines, or have themselves become part of the global art market and its capitalist logics. And yet, the expectation of emancipatory art is historically relatively recent and by no means a given. For centuries, art served as a representation of authority, propaganda, religious edification, or simply as adornment – this was no betrayal of its true purpose, but rather a determination of its societal function. If art, as Thomas Brash asserted, was never a means of changing the world but a way to survive it, what are the consequences for the politicization of art under present conditions?

Today, on theoretical and practical economic levels, the question of the emancipatory potential of art seems to be exhausted before it is even posed. Adorno’s idea of aesthetic autonomy, Rancière’s distribution of the sensible, Bürger’s critique of institutions – all of these central concepts of critical art theory have long since merged with institutional routines, or have themselves become part of the global art market and its capitalist logics. And yet, the expectation of emancipatory art is historically relatively recent and by no means a given. For centuries, art served as a representation of authority, propaganda, religious edification, or simply as adornment – this was no betrayal of its true purpose, but rather a determination of its societal function. If art, as Thomas Brash asserted, was never a means of changing the world but a way to survive it, what are the consequences for the politicization of art under present conditions?

This question becomes all the more urgent as we are currently engaged in new entanglements of perception, experience, and technology – albeit in different form, if no less profound than in Benjamin’s time – to which traditional art theory no longer offers any response. Our conference takes this crisis as an opportunity to explore what the politicization of art can mean today. In recent years, the concept of form has been brought back into play. Form encompasses forms of artistic presentation as well as its medial constellations and the forms of its institutionalization; unlike in classical formalism, it cannot be conceived in contrast to content. Instead of seeking lifelines for the autonomy of art, we will investigate concrete aesthetic ways of functioning: How can institutions curate relevance? Which affects are mobilized by the aesthetics of crisis? What does »protocol art« do in network states? How does AI transform aesthetic judgment? Are art and its theory ready to acknowledge that they can shape and curate crises, but not remedy them?

The conference is a cooperation between:
the Media Philosophy Working Group in the German Society for Media Studies (Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft, GfM)
the German Society for Aesthetics (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Ästhetik, DGÄ)
the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut, KWI) in Essen. The proceedings will be published in an open access publication.