Georg Kargl

Clegg & Guttmann

13 Nov 2009 - 06 Mar 2010

© Exhibition view
CLEGG & GUTTMANN

13/11/2009-06/03/2010

In the aesthetic domain, individualism and collectivism stand for competing heories of artistic reception. The former view emphasizes the primacy of the xperience of the single viewers, confronted with a work of art, whereas the latter, he manner in which they are constituted by it as parts of an aesthetic collective. For the aesthetic ollectivist, you always experience art together with others; for the individualist, the rt viewer is essentially alone.

Individualism is, of course, the more common sense view; all experience resides, fter all, in the heads of single human beings. Collectivism points to the fact that an mportant aspect of the issue is ignored - that the sense of togetherness enerated by common aesthetic experience is not an incidental phenomenon but art and parcel of the aims of all art, whether one experiences it in a concert hall, a inema or a museum. Genuine art, as Kant reminded us, is not concerned with ere subjective gratification; art must always appeal to the viewer’s sensus ommunis and the development of sensus communis requires the experience of art.
 

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