오래된 미래로서의 현대 예술: 빙켈만론을 통해 본 페이터의『르네상스』와 랑씨에르의 『지각』

Abstract

In this paper I review the parallel structure of aesthetic ideas expounded in Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) and Jacques Rancière’s Aisthesis (2011). Significantly, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, German historian of art in classical antiquity of the 18th century, is a shared touchstone through which Pater and Rancière develop their aesthetics, a provisional end of the Renaissance for Pater and a distinct beginning of, for Rancière, what he has called the “aesthetic regime” of art. Both critical philosophers explain the importance of Winckelmann in a similar manner: Winckelmann, unlike usual classicists of his time, emphasized the dissociation of artworks from the historical contexts of their production and thus endowed art-perceivers with freedom in how to perceive them. I argue that, if read from the perspective of Rancière, Pater’s aestheticism reveals its political characteristics that defends radical democracy. If seen through the eyes of Pater, Rancière’s concept of the “aesthetic regime”, whose objective has been often misconstrued as constant innovation in the forms of art, can be clarified. My analysis will reveal that Pater and Rancière’s shared emphasis on the principle of perception and the structure of logics to endorse it results from the fact that both develop their defense of individual perception within Hegel’s historicist perspective of art. Both thinkers regard Winckelmann as a precursor to Hegel but with an emphasis upon the experience of individuals. In the Renaissance, Pater shows well that the ultimate value which the “aesthetic regime” defends in its denouncing any norm in creating and receiving art is a sense of freedom of individual being, confirmed with historical reflection.