The Art of Civilization

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xii

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Didier Maleuvre

   Pages 1-12

3. Birth of the Aesthetic

   • Didier Maleuvre

   Pages 13-38

4. The Time of Images

   • Didier Maleuvre

   Pages 39-55

5. Into the Time of Art

   • Didier Maleuvre

   Pages 57-81

6. The Time of Makers

   • Didier Maleuvre

   Pages 83-104

7. The Time of Work

   • Didier Maleuvre

   Pages 105-127

8. The Time of Knowledge

   • Didier Maleuvre

   Pages 129-149

9. The Time of Taste

   • Didier Maleuvre

   Pages 151-173

10. The Time of Ideologies

    • Didier Maleuvre

    Pages 175-199

11. The Time of Production

    • Didier Maleuvre

    Pages 201-232

12. Triumph of the Aesthetic

    • Didier Maleuvre

    Pages 233-288

13. Back Matter

    Pages 289-316

    PDF

Didier Maleuvre argues that works of art in Western societies from Ancient Greece to the interconnected worlds of the Digital Age have served to rationalize and normalize an engagement with bourgeois civilization and the city. Maleuvre details that the history of art itself is the history civilization, giving rise to the particular aesthetics and critical attitudes of respective moments and movements in changing civilizations in a dialogical mode. Building a visual cultural account of shifting forms of culture, power, and subjectivity, Maleuvre illustrates how art gave a pattern and a language to the model of social authority rather than simply functioning as a reflective one. Through a broad cultural study of the relationship between humanity, art, and the culture of civilization, Maleuvre introduces a new set of paradigms that critique and affirm the relationship between humanity and art, arguing for it as an engine of social reproduction that transforms how culture is inhabited.

• Bourgeoisie
• Art and Culture
• Civilization
• Western Society
• Art and the City
• Aesthetics

• Department of French and Italian, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA

  Didier Maleuvre

Didier Maleuvre is Professor of Comparative Literature and French Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA. He is the author of Museum Memories: History, Technology, Art (1999), The Religion of Reality: Inquiry into the Self, Art, and Transcendence (2006), and The Horizon: A History of our Infinite Longing (2011).

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