9.18.09

Professor Van Schepen presents paper at University of London conference honoring Friedrich Schiller

Can art change lives? Can aesthetic experience transform society? Randall Van Schepen, Associate Professor of Art and Architectural History, presented a paper in September at conference that dealt with these questions at the University of London. The conference was held in honor of the 250th anniversary of Friedrich Schiller's birth and was entitled "Aesthetics and Modernity from Schiller to Marcuse." The conference was organized by the University of Nottingham and held at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Languages at the University of London. Van Schepen’s paper, “200 years of Schiller’s Aesthetic Modernism: Criticism, Abstraction and Revolution,” compared the aesthetic theory of the 18th century German philosopher/playwright Schiller to the modern art critic Clement Greenberg.

Schiller was a significant philosopher of aesthetics because he was the first to believe that the aesthetic experience of the beautiful or of art will transform the individual and thereby lead to positive changes in society. Instead of proposing that society should undergo political or social revolution first and that only then art could follow, Schiller argued that artistic experience shapes us and educates us on how to think and live freely. For Schiller, beauty = freedom. Such ideas were formative in shaping the definition of modern art, the avant-garde and to the theories of philosophers from Hegel to the Frankfurt School. Schiller believed that aesthetic education was primary. Clement Greenberg was arguably the most important art critic of the 20th century. Greenberg was originally a Marxist in the late 1930s. Soon after, he left Marxism to become very like Schiller in his belief in the primacy of the aesthetic. Van Schepen’s paper suggested that, even though he only mentions Schiller a few times in his writing, Greenberg’s criticism relies heavily on ideas first developed by Schiller to define the significance of aesthetic experience. It further asked if such a revolutionary hope in the aesthetic experience is well-founded.

The conference was interdisciplinary and international. Literary scholars, German studies scholars and philosophers from Brazil, Croatia, Spain, Germany, Ireland, the US, and of course the UK participated.