Space, time, and the arts: rewriting the Laocoon

Abstract

The article investigates the role of concepts of space and time in development of aesthetic autonomy and the emergence of the system of the fine arts. Tracing this theme from the paragone debates in the Italian Renaissance, through Dubos and Lessing up to Hegel, it argues that the connection between the arts in terms of a general ‘‘aesthetic’’ theory required the emergence of the subject that unified them in terms of reception, and that this dimension of subjectivity also made possible a fundamental difference between the spatial and the temporal arts. Time as subjectivity and interiority, as opposed to space as objectivity and exteriority, would for a long time define a certain modernity of the arts, and when this entanglement gradually comes to be undone, in a process which is far from finished today, we are perhaps witnessing a new mode of the sensible and a different capacity of the aesthetic to reconfigure subjectivity.

Keywords: Jean-Baptiste Dubos; Gotthold EphraimLessing; GeorgWilhelm FriedrichHegel; aesthetics; space; time

(Published: 28 January 2010)

Citation: Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, Vol. 2, 2010 DOI: 10.3402/jac.v2i0.2155