This second topic area asks how the new comes into the world—and how it passes away again. It seeks to trace key stations in a cultural history of creativity and destruction, of origins and endings. Genesis and endgame, creation and apocalypse explore historical and contemporary artistic and literary models of the beginning and end of the world. The closed and the open artwork: thresholds between art and world addresses the conception of the artwork as an organism—opening up a long genealogy of nature/culture hybrids in art, art theory, poetics, and the life sciences. The question of beginning and ending also arises in a more concrete sense: how does a work of art begin, and how can it end—textually or visually? Inspiration and contagion approaches transition as the animation, gifting, or vitalisation of the inanimate—whether through breath and inspiration, or by means of numinous, erotic, natural, or technical forces. Afterlives, rebirth, reenactment considers life after death in art. The paradoxical idea of survival through the work gestures toward a shadowy continuation of existence—an imagined overcoming of one’s own mortality. The Renaissances—the ‘rebirth’ of genres, period styles, or entire epochs—pursue robust new purposes under a historical mask (as seen, for instance, in the neo-baroque revival of baroque literature and architecture, which formed part of the founding aesthetic of the Salzburg Festival).

Image credit: Marcel Broodthaers, Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard, 1969, artist’s book, Wide White Space Gallery, Antwerp; Galerie Michael Werner, Cologne.