The Art Three Idea: A Third Way to Study Art

The Art3 Idea: A Third Way to Study Art by Donald Kunze, Professor of Architecture and Integrative Arts at PennState University (USA), is eleven chapters-worth of essays about the various ways the arts are received, comprehended, and preserved by audiences of all cultures and time periods. It includes analogies drawn from classical sources, psychology, cinema, anthropology, architecture, and many other arts. The idea is that, while the various arts and various audiences are distinctive and in some sense unique, the "contract" that binds artists to audiences is written in a universal language. We cannot read or write this language directly, but we can study it through a variety of models and analogies. Through these, we come to understand the conditions that guarantee that art can survive changes in fashion, able to meet new audiences and new public requirements.

Donald Kunze has taught at Penn State University since 1984. He studied architecture at North Carolina State University and received his Ph.D. in geography from Penn State University in 1983. His research has engaged a range of topics dealing with the dimensionality of experience. His book on Giambattista Vico studied the metaphoric imagination. As a Shogren Fellow (NCSU, 1997-98) he developed notation systems for exploring intransitive boundary conditions. As the 2003 Reyner Banham Fellow at the University at Buffalo, NY, he extended this work to problems of the boundary in art, architecture, film, and geographical imagination.