UNIFORMITY AND DIFFERENTIATION IN FASHION

Uniformity and Differentiation in Fashion

Abstract

It is to such an historicization that I would like to contribute here by looking at the way the concept of style did double duty in Germany: it served not only as a category by which the past was understood, but also one through which a particularly modern problem was represented and analyzed. That problem was the rise of a mass culture. My argument is that the categories of art history have always been central to thinking about mass culture in Germany, from the rise of Kulturkritik to the Frankfurt School; and that the crisis of culture accompanying the development of a modern consumer market was, in turn, inscribed within the analytic tools of the academic history of art.

 

 

Table of Contents

ABSTRACT2

INTRODUCTION1

Background1

Problem1

Significance2

Theoretical Framework2

LITERATURE REVIEW4

METHODOLOGY20

DISCUSSION21

CONCLUSION23

REFERENCES24

REFLECTION OF THE PAPER27

INTRODUCTION

Background

The history of art is no longer the history of styles. The notion of style, which once seemed to define the discipline, has loosened its grasp on our thoughts about art; many of the most powerful minds of the field have subjected it to critique; it is not adequate to our thinking about visual form and representation today. Style has obviously been a terminal case for some time, so much so, in fact, that the rethinking of the discipline over the last few decades did not submit the category to the full force of its critical wrath.(n1) Yet the death of this concept seems so strangely slow and bloodless, so nearly invisible, that one hesitates to write its obituary and lay it to rest: it has not been adequately historicized, its discursive contours have not been drawn with any precision, and its eclipse has yet to be charted.

Problem

The problems were twofold. First, cultural history did not recognize artistic form as the object of a discrete area of inquiry. For cultural history, art tended to serve as mere evidence of the nature of another, more encompassing spirit; the irreducible qualities of the visual were ignored:

There is a conception of art-history which sees nothing more in art than a `translation of Life' (Taine) into pictorial terms, and which attempts to interpret every style as an expression of the prevailing mood of the age. Who would wish to deny that this is a fruitful way of looking at the matter? Yet it takes us only so far -- as far, one might say, as the point at which art begins.

The second problem was the mechanism by which form and spirit could be related: "[W]e still have to find the path that leads from the cell of the scholar to the mason's yard." For the Wolfflin of Renaissance and Baroque and the dissertation on the psychology of architecture, the path leads through the body; the problem is solved by recourse to empathy theory. We feel forms by analogy to our bodies, and forms are created as the unconscious expression of the corporeal feeling of an age: "the psychic is directly transformed into bodily ...