Before the Beginning, During the Middle, After the End: Cosmology, Art, and Other Stories

Krukowski, Lucian

ISBN 10: 1625645996 / ISBN 13: 9781625645999

Published by Pickwick Publications, 2014

About this Item

Seller Inventory # I-9781625645999

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Before the Beginning, During the Middle, After the End: Cosmology, Art, and Other Stories
• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Publication Date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1625645996
• ISBN 13: 9781625645999
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

The divisions that mark my subject are three. The first is that point where the world begins-where it appears from out of the mystery of non-being. The second lies somewhere between its progeny and its future-the times between beginnings and ends where we, the beneficiaries of our being-here, come together to sing a celebration of the wonder that it happened at all, and then intone the fear of its ending. The third division is a speculation on ends-our own and the ending of the world. I use these divisions to locate a something that comes from nothing onto a historical tradition that imposes a value on the progression of that something, and so requires a judgment on all that has passed. I first discuss these through religious attempts to invest life and history with purpose-for they form the major explanatory traditions of Western culture and are a thematic source of much of its greatest art. I continue with an art-critical approach where themes of process and purpose are located in artworks through their stylistic histories and ambitions. I indicate how present art, when open to reconstitute such themes, could change the nature of today's efforts to give art polemical purposes, and so provide new reasons for its making. I conclude with some stories, unevenly biographical, partly fictional, which I offer as parables for the developed themes and their transformations. This last aim is to elucidate a view of art as providing specific symbols for a cosmology of beginning, living, and ending.

About the Author

Lucian Krukowski is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Washington University in Saint Louis. He is the author of Ripe Musings (2011), Aesthetic Legacies (1992), and Art and Concept (1987). He is also a painter.