What do artists teach us? Aesthetic experience and the multi-paradigm nature of contemporary art

Abstract

The article analyzes and discusses selected problems and challenges that the multi-pa­radigmatic nature of contemporary art generates for aesthetic experience and discourse. It is not about the diversity of individual practices and artistic transfigurations, but about ontic reorganiza­tions of art, determining the indicators of functioning "paradigmatic sets" (classical, conceptual, processual, interactive). Art paradigms are defined in the paper as optional domains, which are expressions of fundamental transformations in the ontology of the artwork and artistic practice, respectively. Thus, they determine the leading contexts redefining not only the traditional ontology of art, the identity and autonomy of the work of art, but also the competence of the author and the viewer, and finally the profile of thinking and aesthetic experience. Currently reorienting from con­templative-analytical attitudes towards processuality and various forms of activity, engagement and causality (especially in performative practices and characteristics of participatory and interactive art events). The approach proposed in the article also opts not to associate these artistic redefinitions and transgressions only with Theodor Adorno's diagnosis of "non-obviousness" but with the productivity of art that stimulates our sensibility and communal imagination.