Hans-Georg Gadamer Art Quotations

The primordial experiences that are transmitted through art and history are not to be grasped from the points of view of these forms of consciousness.

It is one of the primary motives of modern art that it wants to abolish the distance which the viewer, the consumer, the audience maintain vis-a-vis a work of art. There is no doubt that the leaders of the creative artists of the last 50 years concentrated their efforts mainly on eliminating that distance.

A cultured society that has fallen away from its religious traditions expects more from art than the aesthetic consciousness and the 'standpoint of art' can deliver. The Romantic desire for a new mythology... gives the artist and his task in the world the consciousness of a new consecration. He is something like a 'secular saviour' for his creations are expected to achieve on a small scale the propitiation of disaster for which an unsaved world hopes.

For both art and the historical sciences are modes of experiencing in which our own understanding of existence comes directly into play.

There is no doubt that the leaders of the creative artists of the last 50 years concentrated their efforts mainly on eliminating that distance.