Anna Pawlak

What is art? What does art do? Why does art move us? And why are aesthetic questions particularly relevant again today? These are the questions that the Tübingen Collaborative Research Centre 1391 Other Aesthetics, established by the DFG in 2019, is investigating. In doing so, it wants to work through the historical depths of a change in perspective that is directed towards not situating art and the arts in autonomous special spaces. To this end, the research project reappraises 2000 years of European art and cultural history before the 18th century. The volume explains what is gained by concentrating on the pre-modern period, what readjustment of the analytical instruments this entails and what fundamental consequences for questions of aesthetics result from this. The articles, which range from the philologies to art history, archaeology and musicology to history, theology and the digital humanities, offer concrete examples of this. The aim is to gain impulses from the aesthetic reflections of the pre-modern era, also and especially for the discussions in the present.

The volume

• focuses on questions of aesthetics in a new way, starting from the pre-modern era.

• offers a fundamental alternative to autonomy-aesthetically oriented heuristic approaches

• profiles a change of perspective with interdisciplinary gain.