Hegel's aesthetics and contemporary art: home, vagabondage and (w)hole

Delikta, Dylan (2020) Hegel's aesthetics and contemporary art: home, vagabondage and (w)hole. Masters thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

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Abstract

What is the condition that situates the ongoing transformations of contemporary art? What insights about the meaning of selfhood and our worlds might we find by exploring it? Through a close reading of Hegel’s Aesthetics, in which Hegel offers a phenomenological study of art’s development, my thesis posits an interpretation of contemporary art’s situation as the play between the human experiences of at-homeness and vagabondage in the world, which I name being-in-the-(w)hole. My reading of Hegel suggests that he points toward this experience of the (w)hole—art’s infinite determinability in expression and meaning—and how contemporary art can express this play as a site for the co-experiencing and co-defining of the meaning of self and world. By thematizing this play, I argue that the condition that situates contemporary art is that of dynamic equality, an equality in which all are recognized as able to interpret a shared object together.

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