Like a human person, each artwork is
singular and only makes sense within its historical context, so that aesthetics
requires detailed knowledge not just of the history of art, but of the history
of art history and criticism; “far from writing about art as an abstract
metaphysician, Hegel had a number of distinguished examples of German
scholarship before him when he was working on the historical framework of the Aesthetics.”[1] Hegel remarks in the introduction to his Lectures on Fine Art that real knowledge
of art requires “a precise acquaintance with the immeasurable realm of
individual works of art, ancient and modern…Further, every work of art belongs
to its own time, its own people, its own environment, and depends on particular
historical and other ideas and purposes; consequently, scholarship in the field
of art demands a vast wealth of historical, and indeed very detailed, facts”
(Hegel, 1998:14). So this approach to art
is evidence-laden than many efforts in philosophical aesthetics
today. It’s simply that to study an
artwork is to study a communication from a person or group of persons who embody
a particular form of life. Again, the
development of an explanation for the artwork drives the historian
simultaneously into the tiniest details of the marble or canvas and into the
vast history of an entire period.
[1]. Michael Moran, “On the Continuing Significance of
Hegel’s Aesthetics” in The British
Journal of Aesthetics Vol 21, No. 3 Summer, 1981 p. 219
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