“Happy are those ages”, said Georg Lukács, “when the starry sky is the map of all possible paths—ages whose paths are illuminated by the light of the stars. Everything in such ages is new and yet familiar, full of adventure and yet their own.” Modernity, on the other hand, is an age of separations. Separations and alienations that make the world appear abstracted from human subjectivity, a parade of fragments whose ties with the whole are unreadable. For Lukács, modernity signalled this historical loss of totality, a severance between the individual and the universal that art could/should attempt to (re)mediate. In this wishful reconciliation, modern art would become “the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God.”
- Professor: Bárbara Maçães Costa
