Beat Wyss

Renaissance als Kulturtechnik (Renaissance as Cultural Technique)
VOLUME 204

“Every age gets the images it deserves.”

In this volume, Beat Wyss proves himself to be a knowledgeable flâneur through the histories of art and culture. His texts are essays in the classical sense of Montaigne and Baudelaire: experiments with open endings.

For Beat Wyss, reading and understanding history up to the present means critically engaging with current political and social issues. Here, his guides and role models are Franz Kafka, Theodor W. Adorno, Aby Warburg, Walter Benjamin, and Sigmund Freud.

The Renaissance as a cultural technique? This is the thesis Beat Wyss seeks to prove here. The result is a fascinating plea for the diversity and complexity of historical relationships that cannot be explained through images apart from their contexts and certainly not as a linear development of cultural history.

Beat Wyss (b. 1947 in Basel) is a professor emeritus of art history and intellectual history, living in Berlin and Venice. He held the Chair of Art History at the Ruhr University Bochum, was director of the Institute of Art History at the Technical University of Stuttgart and head of the Department of Art Research and Media Philosophy at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (HfG). Wyss is a member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.