Co jeszcze moze byæ sztuka?
What can we still consider as art?

Summary/Abstract: Art has always been a part of our culture. We don’t know of any culture, which wasn’t associated with art. Therefore, art is an integral part of our life. It is eternal, but its forms are different in different historic periods. Karel Teige wrote that that the Avantgarde art destroyed old artistic forms. Russian Constructivists and Italian Futurists suggested that there were two ways leading beyond the existing artistic forms. Teige suggested that, although people can always feel, smell and enjoy music, they don’t always need to see easel paintings, listen to symphonic orchestra and read novels. What can we still consider as art? Dennis Dutton believes that there art can be characterized in the context of virtuosity, unselfish pleasure, style, concentration, imagination and criticism. Of course, it is a very broad context, and it can be associated with many areas of culture. Style, for example, can be associated with painting and fashion, music and the ways we behave at the table. if we adopted his definition of art, we had to understand that there is no clearcut border-line between artistic and non-artistic phenomena. There are several artistic aspects of sport, nevertheless, sport can hardly be considered as art. Wolfgang Welsch wrote that there were many counterarguments against artistic aspects of sports. Of course, we can agree that sport refers to symbols and theatrical effects. Sport is a drama without a scenario. Sport can, therefore, be considered as artistic happening. We can speak of a football game in the terms of condensed drama. Sport is incidental, just as is dadaist art. Sport is popular, though, and art is elitist. We can say, that sport is ‘the most social art form’, nevertheless, we cannot say that sport replaces art. Julian Young considers sport as ‘communal artwork’, which can be enjoyed by a crowd of people, and not by a person. Totalitarian and absolute artwork would contribute to extermination of other forms of artwork. It would form an aesthetic heresy. Marquard and Welsch try to find the source of modern aesthetics in the 18th and the 19th century art, and they forget that aesthetics has much longer tradition. There are many utilitarian aspects of contemporary aesthetics, and there is a machinery of aesthetisation. That machinery should be stopped and we should start asking ourselves what are the true sources of contemporary aesthetic trends.

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