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From Kouros to Contrapposto. AI image Thesis This article argues that what art history frequently describes as artistic progress is often the retrospective projection of modern aesthetic values onto radically different visual systems. Egyptian wall paintings, archaic Greek sculpture, and Renaissance perspective do not necessarily belong to a single evolutionary sequence leading toward realism. Rather, they represent distinct symbolic regimes that modernity reorganizes into a narrative culminating in its own ideals of representation. From Baudrillard's Ape to Art History's Renaissance One of Jean Baudrillard's most penetrating criticisms of historical materialism concerns a famous passage from Marx's Grundrisse . Marx writes that "human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape" (Marx, 1973, p. 105). The idea is straightforward: the most developed form allows us to understand earlier forms. For Baudrillard, however, this logic introduces a subtle...

Thesis In Nietzsche’s account, the capacity to promise does not rest on a stable, self-identical subject, but on a constitutive tension between forgetting and memory. The sovereign individual ( das souveräne Individuum ) emerges precisely from this instability: a subject produced through practices that regulate discontinuity rather than eliminate it. Read in this way, Nietzsche’s genealogy anticipates later critiques of the Cartesian subject in Freud, Foucault, and Derrida. The freedom of the sovereign individual is therefore neither original nor self-grounding, but the outcome of a long historical process that transforms instability into responsibility. Introduction: The Paradox of the Promising Animal “To breed an animal with the prerogative to promise—is that not precisely the paradoxical task which nature has set herself with regard to humankind? Is it not the real problem of humankind?” (Nietzsche, 2006, p. 35). The opening of the second essay of On the Genealogy of Morali...

The Invention of Art. AI image Thesis This article argues that art history retrospectively projects the modern category of “art” onto symbolic systems that may never have understood images aesthetically in the modern sense. Through examples such as the cave paintings of Altamira and Egyptian wall paintings, it explores how Western culture transforms radically different symbolic practices into early stages of a universal narrative of artistic development. Drawing on Jean Baudrillard’s critique of alterity and Ferdinand de Saussure’s conception of historically bounded systems of meaning, the article questions whether “art” can legitimately function as a transhistorical category at all. The Origins of Art or the Origins of a Narrative? In museums and art history textbooks, the cave paintings of Altamira and the wall paintings of ancient Egypt are frequently presented as the earliest stages of artistic development. Prehistoric animals painted on cave walls appear as the “birth of pai...