Abstract
Traditionally, the distinction of autonomous art and popular culture referred to the dichotomy of artistic and non-artistic motives of production. In a context where culture is supplied for the sake of salable attraction services, such a distinction loses its discriminatory power. The broadest and, at the same time, most pointed reaction of art discourse to the no longer sustainable banishment of non-artistic motives from autonomous art was a nouvelle vague of criticism heralded as deconstruction. Deconstruction, instead of exacerbating certain lines of cultural criticism, set out to shake the very idea of certainty itself. This nouvelle vague, though flooding the postmodern discourse of art across disciplines, was most directly translated into artistic practice in the field of architecture, where it became emblematic of postmodernism. Deconstruction in architecture denotes the theoretically relined design strategy of demonstratively subverting allegedly unshakable certainties. Its striking success, the chapter argues, is due to the demonstration of how autonomous art can catch up with the media’s professionalism of attraction without having to descend to the lowlands of mass attraction.
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Notes
- 1.
The sale generated £111,576,800-10 times that of the previous record for an auction dedicated to a single artist: the £11.3 million raised when 88 works by Pablo Picasso were sold by Sotheby’s in New York in 1993. (The Telegraph, 16.9.2008).
- 2.
For pictures see:
Alteka Office Building, Tokyo 1991: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/1030.
Max Reinhardt Building , Berlin, 1992: https://eisenmanarchitects.com/The-Max-Reinhardt-Haus-1992.
- 3.
The epitome of aesthetic perception is eroticism . Eroticism is the aesthetic surplus over sex.
- 4.
Loos even refused to call architecture an art . See Loos (2009).
References
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de Saussure, Ferdinand. 1916. Course in general linguistics. Translated from French by Roy Harris, La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1983.
Eisenman, Peter. 1995. Aura und Exzess: Zur Überwindung der Metaphysik der Architektur. Essays und Gespräche 1976–1994. Vienna: Passagen Architektur.
Loos, Adolf. 2009. Warum die Architektur keine Kunst ist. Reprint Vienna: Metroverlag.
Popper, Karl. 1934/1959. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. London, New York: Routledge. Original published in German in 1934; first English translation in 1959.
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Franck, G. (2020). V Deconstruction and the Fusion of Culture and Commerce. In: Vanity Fairs. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41532-7_6
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