The Beautiful And The Sublime Today? Dialogues Between Kant’s Aesthetics And Contemporary Art
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Abstract
The text is structured as a tour through a fictional exhibition based on
Kantian categories of the beautiful and the sublime. In the first room, herman de
vries presents a mixed-media installation, recreating a winter visual diary through
natural fragments and chromatic arrangements. His work clearly embodies the
beautiful—order, harmony, and cosmic connection via natural microcosms,
aligning with Kant’s analogy between art and nature. The second room features
a Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s wrapped monument, where a white shroud
transforms the beauty into the sublime by disrupting daily life and evoking “negative
pleasure.” The final room showcases Robert Smithson’s spiral of earth and salt
that challenges human perception: its fluctuating scale and cosmic symbolism
represent the mathematical and dynamic sublime, overwhelming the senses and
transcending earthly limits. The exhibition concludes by reaffirming the relevance
of these categories to reinterpret art and human existence.
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