by Jon Lackman | 9 January 2009 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Contemporary
In an interview with the Frankfurter Rundschau, art historian Horst Bredekamp discusses Abu Ghraib, Bush, Sept. 11, the case of the Bulgarian art historian Martina Baleva, Darwin, Abraham Bosse, The Matrix, and more:
Le Brun’s contemporary Abraham Bosse taught perspective at the Paris Academy. He was let go because he took it too literally. In his view, not even the king was above perspective. The king was subjected to a higher power, the constructive power of space and that of the artist who represents space. For an absolute ruler that was not the usual. In addition, the gaze reached into the long invisible worlds of outer space and the microscopic. In the 17th-century, pictures began assuming their dominant position …
The 1990s lived the philosophically vulgar delusion that there’s no more reality; everything rather played out in a symbiosis of floating image-worlds abstracted from reality. The simulation theory generated a culture of the Neobaroque. The film version of the theory, The Matrix, won four Oscars in 2000. That’s less than ten years ago, but it appears to us today like another epoch.
Also see, in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, a profile of art historian / museum director Uwe M. Schneede.
