Return to Saussure

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...

The Ishtar Gate. AI image Introduction Museums seem immune to suspicion. Unlike airports or shopping malls, they announce themselves as spaces of culture, memory, and preservation. They promise history, meaning, depth, and yet, once you stop thinking about what a museum claims to be and pay attention to how it is actually experienced, a question quietly emerges: what kind of space is this, really? People enter, follow a path, pause briefly, and move on. They share a space without forming a group. They remain silent together. They are present, but only temporarily. In these basic features, the venue begins to resemble what the anthropologist Marc Augé famously called a non-place : spaces of transit such as airports, highways, and hotel chains, environments designed for circulation rather than dwelling. The comparison is tempting. But it doesn’t quite hold. A Space Built for Movement Walk through most museums and you’ll feel it immediately: the gentle pressure to keep moving....