Knowledge of art versus artistic knowledge. I. The GAKhN “Encyclopedia of Artistic Terminology” in the context of European intellectual history

Abstract

In this first of two articles, I look at the project for the “Encyclopedia of Artistic Terminology” in connection with the idea of a synthesis of the “artistic sciences” as the principal task of the State Academy of Artistic Sciences (GAKhN, 1921–1930) in Moscow. The most important feature of the Academy was the unity of its epistemological conception (the system of artistic sciences) and the institutional structure of the Academy (its “departments,” “sections,” and “laboratories”), which embodied the interdisciplinary intention of uniting the philosophy of art, the artistic sciences, and artistic experimentation. I analyze the connection of the project with the task of “concept formation” in the artistic sciences, which was recognized in European philosophy at the beginning of the twentieth century as the main criterion for scientificity in the human sciences. I also investigate how the Encyclopedia project, developed by Gustav Shpet, took into account previous attempts to systematize aesthetic terminology (in nineteenth-century dictionaries). I show that the project of the “Encyclopedia of Artistic Terminology” was not the sole attempt to create a new dictionary of aesthetic concepts and of the cultural sciences. Similar projects were being developed in the 1920s and 30s in Germany (Erich Rothacker planned to produce Handwörterbuch der gesamten gemeingeisteswissenschaftlichen und kulturphilosophischen Grundbegriffe) and in France (Étienne Souriau published Vocabulaire d’esthétique; see Souriau 2010).