Cultural Memory in the Context of the Art Episteme of Ukrainian Cordocentrism

Abstract

The article attempts to comprehend the influence of cultural memory on the episteme of cordocentrism in the nation-building process in nowadays Ukraine, as well as to analyze the spontaneous activation and prove the effectiveness of the re-actualization of the gestalt of indigenous national consciousness, which manifests Ukrainian cordocentrism through the aesthetics of aísthēsis, and which, in the conditions of the Russian-Ukrainian hybrid war, becomes a reliable protection of cultural memory while preserving the sovereign existential unity of the nation. The activation of the updated art episteme in the domestic space coincides with the international search for alternatives to art forms that are derived from consumer capitalism, one of those alternatives being the paradigm conventionally named "New sincerity". This latter, stimulates cultural oscillation between the concepts of outdated, as of today, patterns of postmodernism and modernism. It is hypothesized that such transformations might allow the commodified society of consumerism to get rid of the limitations of the collective memory imposed onto it and cultivated by the market ideology of "paradigm wars" and the de-skilling of the art business in particular. These transformations might also allow the society to overcome the overwhelming civilizational crisis that has been much discussed in the recent decades in publications dedicated to art history and contemporaneity, as well as those dedicated to cultural and civilizational changes and strategies.