Umetnicko - Eticko/Art and Ethics [antikvár]

ART AND ETHICSEvery artistic act, if it is truly artistic, is undoubtedly ethical to a greater or lesser degree. Every such act represents, first and foremost, the genuine establish-ment of a relationship between the creative artist and the world by piacing the elements of reality in mutual relationships so as to reflect the artist's personal vision. The fact alone that artistic creation is a highly personal act where the humán individual faces him/herself, brings the artist into a position in which his behaviour is viewed in terms of categories which include the ethical.Sometimes less, sometimes more, art has always been involved and connected with ethical questions, among others. However, from a historical perspective, ethics has more often than not been only an impulse for artistic creativity, or only its peripheral context, and only rarely the main constitutent of the work of art.With the advent of the twentieth century the situa-tion changed radically. While the visual arts experien-ced a period of turbulent ferment in terms of visual and aesthetic categories, in a rangé from impressionism, through constructivism, all the way to abstract art, there appeared from the very first years of this century trends in the arts which transferred the centre of gravity of the creative act from the aesthetic level to the ethical. The most striking example is to be found in the works of Marcel Duchamp, a Dadaist whose readymades permit-ted the artist to decide, by virtue of his attitűdé and decision as the artist in that particular case, what is and what is not artistic, i.e. the artist's attitűdé becama the creative act itself. Thus Duchamp abolished the work of art as an artefact, moving it into the sphere of manifes-tations of the personality of the creative artist himself, of his behaviour and his way of thinking.After Duchamp art could never again be the same; we can see this truth confirmed in specimens of the works of such creative artists as John Cage, Andy War-hol, Joseph Beuys, George Maciunas and other revolu-