Dr. Hanno Rauterberg has a doctorate in art history, is an author and a journalist. He attended the renowned Henri Nannen School of Journalism in Hamburg and has worked for “Spiegel”, “Spiegel Online” and ZDF, among others. He is deputy head of the arts section of the weekly newspaper DIE ZEIT and his texts critically examine debates on art and architecture.
Special Lecture „Abschied vom Ich"
Relationship /
field of work /
interests
In what context do you work on questions of aesthetics/art?
Hanno Rauterberg: … as a person who writes and thinks about art (which hopefully is mostly the same thing).
What interests you most?
HR: I am particularly interested in how our present is illuminated in the forms of art.
Do you have a ‘favourite work’? And why that work in particular?
HR: My current favourite work: always the one that I am currently particularly interested in.
Art /
concept of art /
understanding of art
What defines art?
HR: Art does not want nothing. It wants to shape something in the world, it wants to transcend what exists. And so, in its own way, it tells how people can freely engage with the world, how they can experience it as tangible and mobile and changeable.
How does art ‘work’?
HR: It works by escaping pure functionality and letting us feel that we are not alone with ourselves, our logic, demands and ideals. There are still always logic, demands and ideals of art.
What does art achieve?
HR: Art is free so that people can recognise themselves in this freedom: free for their own sake, free to shape their freedom.
Society /
Relevance /
Scholarship
What role does aesthetics/art play in our society?
HR: ... a role that is viewed with growing scepticism. In times of many crises, aesthetics is quickly understood as decadent, as a luxury game of the elite at the moment of doom.
What role should aesthetics/art play in our society?
HR: With art, people do not enrich themselves through possessions (even if the art market suggests otherwise), they enrich themselves through the aesthetic experience of their own freedom. The role of art would therefore be: a protagonist of freedom.
What role should scholarship play in this context?
HR: Scholarship should follow the games of art with curiosity and define them so that as many people as possible can talk and argue about them.