The Transcendental Sublime in Contemporary Art

Essay from the year 2013 in the subject Art - Miscellaneous, grade: A, , course: BA (Hons) Fine Arts, language: English, abstract: In Robert Rosenblum¿s book "Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko", Rosenblum traces a continuing tradition in art from the 18th century to the 1960s, which centres upon the term ¿sublime¿. In the past many artists (amongst them Caspar David Friedrich, Turner, Wassily Kandinsky, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman) and theorists (amongst them Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, Jean-Francois Lyotard) have explored the transcendental nature of the sublime in art.

Today we live in an age that prides itself on the loss of illusion. Ideas of transcendence in art are often seen as sentimental and viewed with skepticism. The word sublime seems to be stripped down to ¿the shock of the new¿ (often centered on horror).

This essay explores how the transcendental sublime is situated in contemporary art. The ¿transcendental sublime¿ will here refer to how looking at a work of art can enable one to be transported, going beyond the given limits to a place of accessing one¿s spiritual side. Art that has used shock and terror to achieve a sense of the sublime will be excluded from this discussion.