Hello. You’ve found your way to a corner of the web known as Kunstwollen: a blog for the aesthetically minded citizen. Here, I aim to interpret popular visual culture through an art historical lens as well as comment on my own art historical pursuits. You’re welcome to join in as discourse is the basis of any really quality aesthetic movement.
The term Kunstwollen (according to Wikipedia) was coined by the fantastic art historian Alois Riegl. In translates roughly to “will to art” and Riegl used the term to describe the “historically contingent tendency of an age or a nation that drove stylistic development without respect to mimetic or technological concerns.”
I was trained not in the strict art historical fashion, but as an architectural historian. I first heard this term as applied to the Vienna secessionist movement in my History of Architecture, Survey III class. The term stuck with me and I began to wonder, do we have a Kunstwollen?
Another art historian, Erwin Panofsky, correlated Kunstwollen roughly with the study of the “history of styles.” While I’m not certain to what degree that works linguistically, I feel it is our duty as a society to write the history of our contemporary styles. So I will endeavor to do so in this dark corner of cyberspace. Or at least ramble about anything pertaining to visual culture. Whatever.
