The World of Arts and the University

Abstract

The relationship between the world of arts and the world of the university has for an urban sociologist surprisingly many modalities. They comprise semiotic, morphological, consumption and production aspects, and they of course reflect also the historically changing nature of this relationship: a The university buildings or complexes themselves not only express the historically and regionally conditioned concepts of high school education but also testify what role various societies or cities ascribe to education. Moreover, the architecture of university buildings and their location in the urban texture or outside the city were and are an expression of the social, artistic and often also politic values and aspirations of a given period. b University buildings and their complexes influence by their shape and by their architecture (and in a wider sense by their functioning as well as by the life styles of their members), the architecture of their surroundings and the life styles of the community in which they were located; universities play an active role in the social and cultural ecology of cities. c Universities as institutions always were and are in a very broad and diversified sense, consumers of various elements of art and literature, e.g. by the fact that they equipped their outer and inner spaces with objects of art from modest art products inside the buildings to more assertive forms, as documented, for example, by the building of the Mexico University Library. Also their members are consumers of art and form an important and specific part of concert and theatre audience as well as visitors of exhibitions, museums, etc. as proved already by many empirical studies. d Universities—and this fact should be considered as very important—are directly or indirectly the institutions which by means of the critique and theory of art, as well as by the general cultivation of knowledge, have influenced the trends in art, the formation of artistic styles; already in the remote past, universities were an important element in the evolution of the form and content of artistic expressions. In our times the relativistic theory of time and space—a product of university— considerably influenced the modern art at the beginning of the twentieth century. e Some universities—mainly those which include also architecture, urban environmental design (urbanism, Städtebau) or plastic arts—are institutionally also direct producers of art and niches of specific art schools; of course there are big differences between the individual regions of university cultures in this respect. KeywordsUrban RenewalRemote PastCultural EcologyCultural ExclusivenessModem SocietyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.