Конфликтът на естетическите ценности в съвременното изкуство
The Conflict of Aesthetic Values in Contemporary Art

Summary/Abstract: Beauty was considered a fundamental category in classical European art ever since the time of Ancient Greece. However, during the 19th century, artists began to reconsider this aesthetic value. Baudelaire expressed his preference for the “bizarre, dynamic and everyday beauty” (Baudelaire 1992: 261), rather than heroic and mythological beauty as treated in classical art. Many of Baudelaire’s ideas were further developed in the 20th century, especially by artists of the avant-garde. Today, performance art, conceptualism or digital art seem to plead in favour of new aesthetic values such as action, direct experience (or immediacy), artistic rational thinking, which excludes the aesthetic dimension, or even the contribution of new media. In this situation, we may ask ourselves whether there is still any place left for aesthetic beauty, or has it rather become a chimera of the past. This is the question the author of the article attempts to answer.

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