Anxiety, Wonder and Astonishment: The Communion of Art and Design

摘要

These remarks originally were presented as a keynote address at the Third International Conference of the Centre for Learning and Teaching in Art and Design (CLTAD) held in Lisbon, Portugal in April 2006. The proceedings of this conference, edited by Felix Lam, are available from the Centre, located in London. In 1966, well-known American art critic Harold Rosenberg published a small collection of essays in The Anxious Object. In the foreword, "Toward an Unanxious Profession," he argued that a new form of anxiety had entered the art community. It was no longer an anxiety of alienation-the psychological state of anxiety that often characterizes the outsider, struggling with loneliness, in a society and a culture that does not appreciate his or her contribution to human experience. That form of anxiety, he argued, had been overcome by the professionalism that settled over American artists in the 1960s, and by the apparent acceptance of art as a regular part of the daily lives of many people. Instead, the new anxiety was a philosophical anxiety, born of the "lightning speed" with which art is appropriated by commercial media and popular communications. "The anxiety of art," he argued, "arises not as a reflex to the condition of artists, but from their reflection upon the role of art among other human activities."