This third topic area engages with the oppositions between art and life, individual and collective, finitude and infinity—and with attempts to overcome or traverse these very oppositions.

Art and the practice of life – the art of living: How can we think the zone of transition between art and life? Contemporary interpretations of the ancient teachings of ars vitae and ars bene vivendi et moriendi increasingly highlight the analogies between artistic creation and the conscious shaping of life relations, often integrating ethical and political dimensions into the notion of a “life as art”. Defictionalisation and authenticity: Artistic engagements with realism have long operated at the boundary between art and life, pursuing ideals of mimesis or the imitation of nature. Today, however, performance, embodiment, and materiality come to the fore; “realism” might now be understood less as a representational mode than as a form of praxis. An aesthetic praxeology finally asks how art may be understood as a practice with porous boundaries toward everyday life, in which the institutionalised arts appear as exceptional cases within a broader field of aesthetic activity. Might premodern understandings of the arts (such as the artes) offer productive models for new forms of pedagogy and the aesthetics of the everyday? Could such a framework also inform new concepts for research and research education—and enable a renewed relationship between art, humanities, and science?

Image credit: Iris Fraueneder, photographic study On Nature and Civilisation, International Summer Academy Salzburg, 2010.