'Disegno' and the Signs of Artistic Creativity

Some Cultural–Historical Reflections on the Education of Artists in Europe

Abstract

The modern conception of art has radicalised the dispositif that originally initiated the contemporary understanding of the liberal arts, but has not substantially changed it. Unlike the pictorial and stylistic forms of painting, one finds that over the past 500 years there has been a high degree of continuityin the meta-theoretical conception of the ‘signs’ of art: the signs of art canonly be adequately defined and evaluated as iconography, but not with regard to any internal requirements for a creative work. Thus the question remains as to how the signs of art and the qualification as art are constituted. In the light of 20th century experience, the following reflections on an art history of creativity shaped by institutions explore core relationships and links flagged by the keywords ambivalence, dogma, destroying, and unlearning.