Les paradigmes du regard. La perception de l'art à l'ère globale

Abstract

This article demonstrates how art history investigates the perception of art at a moment when a main axiom of effect and understanding of an object turn out to be variable; the question of the “where?”Today the old hermeneutical problem of historical distance is replaced by a geographical challenge, namely geographical distance. Not only the beholder is traveling more widely than ever, but also the artwork itself, the object of interpretation, is shifting from one context to another. Thus, the beholder often does not belong to the original context in which the work was produced and is constantly looking at “the other”.The author discusses contemporary art and new models of understandings that have become more complex in forming expectations about the art work as reference system, relating the beholder’s own position to places far away. Models that presume a universal language of art again (this time referring to neuroscience) have to be weighed against the desire for the specific, the different.