AGEING, AURA, AND VANITAS IN ART: GREEK LAUGHTER AND DEATH

• Authors: Babich Babette
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Looking at artistic allegories for age and ageing, raising the question of aura for Walter Benjamin along with Ivan Illich and David Hume, this essay reflects on Heidegger on history together with reflections on the ‘death of art’ as well as Arakawa and Gins and Bazon Brock, both as artists ‘at your service,’ as Brock would say, contra death, and including a brief discussion of wabi sabi and kintsugi. The ‘ageing’ of art includes a review of the (ongoing) debate concerning Michelangelo’s forging of the Laocoon as well as ancient views of age together with contemporary philosophic reflections (Simone de Beauvoir and Michel de Certeau). The figure of Baubô in ancient Greek sculpture and cultic context can make it plain, as Nietzsche shows (as Sarah Kofman follows him on this), that laughter and death are connected (along with fertility cults in antiquity). Satire preserves the Greek tradition of laughing at death and the essay closes with Swinburne.

Keywords

EN

ALLEGORY; NATURE MORTE; AURA; SCULPTURE; GREEK; AGEING

• Publisher: Society for Aesthetics in Slovakia ad Institute of Aesthetics and Art Culture
• Journal: ESPES
• Year: 2023
• Volume: 12
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 56 – 86

Contributors

author

Babich Babette

• Fordham University, 113 West 60th Street, 925H NY, NY 10023 USAALLEGORY NATURE MORTE AURA SCULPTURE GREEK AGEING

Identifiers

DOI

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8114694