New Release

Beauty Again

In his meditations on the arts of Ancient Greece Friedrich Nietzsche touches upon the essence of what makes art what it is. Since the author feels that speaking about the essence of things became a possibility again — the post-modern relativism is less fashionable now, while at the same time it has opened new hitherto unthinkable possibilities of thought and expression — she takes as the starting point some key moments of Nietzsche’s thinking on art, in order to get — in the context of modern and contemporary art — an understanding of what makes art still so fundamental to our lives today.

Beauty again. Second Revised Edition

Beauty again emerges as the main motive in art. In Nietzsche’s conception of art beauty is not just an aesthetic category but plays a much more fundamental role – it is the main and the only criterion of truth.While beauty has in the last several decades been denied, rejected, and forbidden in our cultural society, it nonetheless re-appears now as the constitutive value in contemporary art – although quietly and not as an end in itself (as is indeed inherent to beauty).Rediscovering beauty is crucial also (and perhaps primarily) in the context of the possible (political) manipulation that art can be easily subjected to – as Plato forewarned us right at the birth of the mimetic arts – which can result in spiritual, political, and ethical corruption that today as much as ever poisons the cultural and public life of our society – and where beauty alone stands as the measure distinguishing truth from falsity.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Karolina Dolanská

Karolina Dolanská, Ph.D, was awarded her doctorate in Art History from the Charles University in Prague in 2013 having been taught and supervised by Prof. PhDr. Petr Wittlich, CSc. She earned an M.A. in Art History at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University in New York City, U.S. In addition, she received an M.A. in Sociology and an M.A. in Liberal Studies at the New School University in New York City. Karolina Dolanská taught art history at the Parsons School of Design and at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. In the years 2005-2012 she held the position of the Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the National Gallery in Prague. Currently she teaches art history and serves as the Chair and the Guarantor of the Visual Art Studies Program at the Anglo-American University in Prague.