INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION

Summary/Abstract: The arts always were and still remain a key object or target both for public policy and politics, as well as an important subject-matter for the philosophical reflection. This dossier gathers the contributions of some members of the Group for Analysis of Cultural Practices and Policies (GAPPC): Dan Eugen Raţiu, Ştefan Sebastian Maftei, Dan Octavian Breaz, and Mara Raţiu, within the project PNII–IDEI code 2469/2008 Culture and creativity in the age of globalization: A study on the interactions between the cultural policy and artistic creativity, supported by CNCS-UEFISCDI, and an American collaborator, Constance DeVereaux, present at the Babes-Bolyai University within the Fulbright Senior Specialist Program (May-June 2011). The investigations focus on topics such as the definitions of art, the social function or value of art, the role of artists in the social change, the relationships between artistic critique and creativity, aesthetic and politic utopias, avant-garde’s ethos and Socialist Realism’s ideology, artistic practices and art institutions. As discussed in this dossier, conceptions and practices of art are closely linked to epistemological, ontological and political views, and controversies arising in connection with art may be seen as fundamental challenges to individual, group and societal conceptions of (social) reality and existence within that reality, of ideas (and ideals) of self and others.

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