Is Cosmopolitanism a Feasible Paradigm for Understanding Modern Art? A Methodological Proposal

Abstract

The study focuses on two major points. The first seeks to address the issue of “cosmopolitanism” in the context of 19-th century European history, with a short survey of the major theoretical and ideological features that have forged “cosmopolitanism” as a major political idea for the 19-th and 20-th century. The first point will also try to put an emphasis on the new theories that have revived the “cosmopolitan” thinking at the end of the millennium (with a special focus on Ulrich Beck's theory of “cosmopolitanization”). The second point seeks to apply a new theoretical paradigm, following Beck's analysis concerning cosmopolitanism, to the history of modern art. Our major thesis is that cosmopolitanism seems to offer a new way of interpreting the peculiar transformations inside the history of modern art in relation to the general, social, historical, economic development of Western societies throughout the 19-th and 20-th centuries.