Anna Pawlak

What is art? What does art accomplish? Why does art move us? And why do aesthetic questions hold particular relevance today? These questions are explored by the Tübingen Collaborative Research Center 1391 "Other Aesthetics," established by the DFG in 2019. The center aims to examine the historical depth of a shift in perspective that seeks to situate art and the arts not in autonomous special spaces. To this end, the research project re-evaluates the 2000-year European art and cultural history prior to the 18th century. The volume explains the benefits of focusing on the pre-modern era, the re-adjustment of analytical tools associated with it, and the fundamental consequences for questions of aesthetics that arise from this. Contributions range from philology to art history, archaeology, musicology, history, theology, and digital humanities, providing concrete examples. The goal is to derive impulses for contemporary discussions from the aesthetic reflections of the pre-modern era.

The volume

• brings aesthetic questions into focus in a new way from the pre-modern era
• offers a fundamental alternative to autonomy-aesthetic oriented heuristic approaches
• profiles a shift in perspective with interdisciplinary benefits.