Legacy

In all times and places, humans have been driven by the need of representation and expression to instill a poetic sense of life in their desires as beings. Art is intertwined with domineering or subversive ideas and practices, learning and experience, traditions and beliefs. It upholds freedoms and breaks taboos, echoes thoughts and impulses, carries particular aesthetic and practical functions for decorative style, mystic rituals, or symbolic realism or abstraction. It caters to commissions, responds to social orders and disorders, advances change, and entertains. Art also provides a welcome escape from the technicalities of everyday life: It opens up, broadens, and sharpens positive emotions in the natural quest for sense, exhilaration, and happiness.

Although art is necessarily linked to a context of time and place, it carries an enduring and universal value through cross-inspiration, interpretation, and appreciation by its onlookers. In art history, “knowing” is often “not knowing”, on the one hand because the potentials for being fulfilled by an artwork are ultimately personal; on the other hand, because art history is fractional: Not all art, let alone the artist’s intention, has lived through time. What is considered at any given point as decisive movements or masters can be the result of chance, later discovery and acknowledgement, or effective marketing. Many paths of exploration, across epochs or regions, remain untapped. Art history is therefore as much art as science.

An open view of art history, and especially of its innovative and disruptive features, is helpful, since all art is at its time contemporary. Rather than approaching art in a predictable chronology, its evolution across individual and societal interests and trends allows to better grasp the striking qualities underlying a work of art, and to create unique associations.