Thinking Art. Figurations of Aesthetic Knowledge Event

Thinking Art. Figurations of Aesthetic Knowledge

Current debates about forms and cultures of knowledge often center on the term “epistemology,” which examines transmissible, theoretical knowledge in distinction from “practical” knowledge. For discussions of knowledge in the visual arts it is important to recognize that such a division fails to take into account precisely that interface that emerges as a specifically aesthetic form of knowledge between production and reception, artists and recipients. By exploring “figurations” of aesthetic knowledge, the conference thus seeks to underline the processual and dynamic nature of aesthetic experience and to counterbalance a dichotomy between theory and practice, thought and anti-thought, in search of terms to describe the specific “poetics” of aesthetic knowledge.
The conference will pursue these questions by bringing together scholars of art history and cultural studies from universities, art academies and art criticism who have investigated forms of aesthetic knowledge its transmission and theorization.

CONCEPTION: Eva Kernbauer (Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Universität Bern) und Julia Gelshorn (Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Universität Wien)
PARTICIPANTS: Tom Holert (Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien), Irit Rogoff (Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths College, University of London), Richard Shiff (Department of Art and Art History, University of Texas at Austin), Barbara Wittmann (Max Planck Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Berlin)

13.15
Address of Welcome
Helmut Lethen

13.30
Introduction
Julia Gelshorn, Eva Kernbauer

Chair: Julia Gelshorn, Eva Kernbauer

14.00
Tom Holert
A New Productivism? Art, Epistemic Agency and Cognitive Capitalism

15.00
Irit Rogoff
Micro-Politics

16.00
Coffee Break

16.30
Barbara Wittmann
Tacit Knowing: Practical Knowledge in Art and Science

17.30
Richard Shiff
Sense Divides

18.30 End