Innovation & repetition

Between modern & postmodern aesthetics

Bibliographic Data

ID9685857
AuthorsUmberto Eco (Umberto Eco, best known in America for his bestselling novel “The Name of the Rose,” wrote this essay for the Fall 1985 issue of “Dædalus.” For more than two decades, he has been a professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna., corresponding author)
Year2005
Volume134
Issue4
Pages191-207
Publication date2005-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueDaedalus (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0011-5266 • E-ISSN: 1548-6192
PublisherMIT Press - Journals (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1162/001152605774431527
OpenAlexW2176377086
LanguageEN
Citations received9

This is the reason why modern aesthetics was so severe apropos the industrial-like products of the mass media.A popular song, a tv commercial, a comic strip, a detective novel, a Western movie were seen as more or less successful tokens of a given model or type.As such they were judged as pleasurable but nonartistic.Furthermore, this excess of pleasurability, repetition, lack of innovation, was felt as a commercial trick (the product had to meet the expectations of its audience), not as the provocative proposal of a new (and dif1⁄2cult to accept) world vision.The products of mass media were equated with the products of industry insofar as they were produced in series, and the "serial" production was considered as alien to the artistic invention

Aesthetics · Economics · Epistemology · Neoclassical economics · Postmodernism · Repetition (rhetorical device · Sociology · Digital Media and Philosophy · Philosophy

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