September 15, 2007
The neo-baroque era in which we are living is neither the result of a refusal of the classic, nor the outcome of a degenerative process. Neo-baroque’s "chaos" is not the contrary of classicism’s "order"; the first is, on the contrary, to be analyzed as a complexification of the latter.
In Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment Angela Ndalianis, who accepts the use of baroque and classic as transhistorical categories, refuses to oppose in an absolute way classic and baroque, and so she reestablish the fundamental historicity of each form taken by both tendencies
In this review in Leonardo Online Jan Baetens says that:
makes an important contribution to the field of cultural semiotics as well as to the theory of contemporary culture as visual culture. In this sense, it is not exaggerated to claim that the stances defended by the author deserve to complete the theoretical attempts to define "visual culture" in the wake of WJT Mitchell’s famous visual turn (Mitchell 1994). Taking here as a starting point the cultural semiotics of Lotman (1990), Ndalianis tries to give a more concrete interpretation of his very abstract boundary theory of culture. Culture, for Lotman, is based on a double mechanism of inclusion and exclusion (before anything else, the semiotic mind shapes a universe by tracing a limit between an inside and an outside) that Ndalianis interprets in terms of culture as "spatial formation" (one may hear correctly an echo of Foucault’s discursive formations) and finds illustrated in the tension between classic and baroque, the latter being fundamentally a culture oriented towards the lack or the break of limits (for instance the limits between inside/outside, real/fictitious, spectacle/spectator, etc.).
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