akademia 2007+

against academicism, where the author presents current models of artistic
education as a consequence of epistemological changes connecting art
and teaching in the wider frame of social context in a triadic form: from
talent-métier-imitation in the classical understanding, through creativitymedium-innovation
in Bauhaus, to attitude-practice-deconstruction in the
1980s. As a result, art emerges as one of the signification practices, and
one highly mediated. On the dangers that spring from the victory of functionalism,
leading everywhere to the total unification of reality comments
Zbigniew Gorlak in his essay Legoism – the uniform of civilized world. He
refers to the omnipresent tendency for design standardization under the
guise of economy and minimum effort. Unfortunately this directive employed
without consideration leads to a world that is everywhere the same,
one-dimensional. It is a civilization of Legoism, a world deprived of diversity
at its own request. Antoni Porczak in Classified writes on the hidden
mechanisms that guide all decisions and choices, including those made at
the Academy, showing that those mechanisms are not subject to any control,
exactly due to their discrete nature, but the results of their functioning
have a very tangible character. In the practice of the Academy these
are the bureaucratic norms, also in the field of transmitting attitudes towards
art and its understanding as a distinctive and peculiar practice. In
turn, the two texts that follow, Cultural capital as a field of communication
and artistic creation by Adam Bartoszek and The cultural capital of students
at the AFA in Katowice by Krzysztof Stadler, focus on a different sort
of problem than the previous texts. They are classic sociological analyses,
the first showing the analytical character of the notion of social and cultural
capital, above all in their classic application to the analysis of artistic
community, with respect to the Academy of Fine Arts, and the second by
employing this theoretical frame tries to formulate foundations for empirical
research in this field in terms of both quantity and quality according
to the FGI standards (such research was in fact conducted at the AFA
in Katowice in 2008).
Finally, part four, On the problems of art, is a collection of comments
on general topics, but with relation to concrete artistic manifestations
and achievements. It opens with a text by Beata Wąsowska I think
therefore I create. A redefinition of art terms, with an attempt at the seemingly
hopeless task of defining a work of art today. This interesting endeavour,
without hesitation revealing its methodological, legal, epistemological,
anthropological contexts and difficulties, and in the end its proper
grounding in facts leads to the formulation of the author’s own proposed
definition. Maria Korusiewicz, starting with the hermeneutic tradition
and post-Heideggerian anthropology, with the use of metaphor poetic in
origin, attempts a similar task: delineating the actual boundaries of art,
a work of art, being an artist. In his analysis, an artist is the one who conquers,
shares, fights the Shadow (in the Jungian sense), and as a consequence
can receive the gift of meaning. Next, the problem of copy and original
resurfaces again in the text by Anna Manicka «The best days are those
when I make ten thousand dollars for a print before breakfast». The graphic
art of Salvador Dali in the context of the noble art of reproduction, analysing
with detailed precision the delineated problem, which has never caused
so much controversy as today and which reveals its intentional core. The
subsequent text by Tomasz Gryglewicz, The matrix of violence, is a voice
of an art historian, who from his perspective discusses two important artistic
expressions (Ksawery Kaliski and Andrzej Bednarczyk) at the 26 th
International Biennial of Graphic Art in Ljubljana. Aside from the discussion
there is also a significant theoretical conception of graphic art –
matrix understood as the matrix of re-pression with all its consequences.
The question posed in the title of the essay by Wiesław Gdowicz Is there
sign without meaning? directs the attention to the singularity of the sign’s
existence, namely its existential dependence and its irremovably mediated
cognitive nature. The author uses Gadamer’s hermeneutics on an example
from the Bible (the story of Samuel’s calling from the First Book
of Samuel) and reaches the conclusion that there can be no sign without
meaning. Somewhat different contexts are revealed in the text Tradition
and memory as the basis of creative thinking by Janusz Karbowniczek. It is
another confrontation with the problem of the relation between tradition
and modernity, in this case with relation to artistic creation. Most likely
this problem can never be considered as solved, and it is likely that each
generation will try to define it anew. According to the author, dismissive
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