The Fate of the Arts

Spring Colloquium 2004

For more than a century, the arts have undergone a strange and difficult evolution. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there were those who looked to the arts with the highest expectations, regarding them as a source of deep personal meaning and public cohesion. From Romanticism to humanistic Marxism, the hope was held that the arts would reflect the highest ideals of humanity in such a way that they would be, in effect, an alternative expression of transcendence in a secular society.

By the end of the twentieth century, it was clear that the arts had failed to achieve this promise. Today, not only have much of the arts turned in on themselves in a tangle of subjectivity, leaving many unsure just what the arts are, they have also been too easily co-opted by the dominant powers of market forces, technology, and politics.

What are the cultural conditions that have brought us to this point? In what way have the arts lost their ability to hold sway over the public imagination, and what does that say about the society we live in? What kind of influence can the arts exert within a society dominated by the forces of the free market, information technologies, and political power?

FEATURING:

Terry Eagleton, University of Manchester

Adam Zagajewski, poet

Krzysztof Ziarek, State University of New York, Buffalo

Nicholas Wolterstorff, Yale University

Bill Ivey, Vanderbilt University

Suzi Gablik, painter and art critic

Michael Levenson, University of Virginia

Papers from this colloquium are published in the Summer 2004 issue of The Hedgehog Review.