Return to Saussure

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...