Species specificity of the art of the age of metamodernism: features of transformational processes

Abstract

The material of the article focuses on the problems of metamodernism, which today is becoming an active form of artistic practice. As the last stage in the more than one-century history of the modernist art movement, metamodernism tries to initiate a new model of artistic development, and this - in the theoretical aspect - leads to a revision of established aesthetic and art-scientific problems, in particular, the problem of species specificity of art, the origins of which go back to Antiquity. Based on the systematization of historical experience and new ideas developed in the space of modern humanism, in the article we define those outlines of the problem of species specificity of art, which are more or less clearly presented in the artistic productions of metamodernists. It is emphasized that during the last two decades it was they who managed to transform cultural and artistic processes in such genres as literature, painting and cinematography into the plane of new artistic and emotional expressiveness. The first attempts at transformative processes in music, which are known in the context of a "new interpretation" of sound stimuli, are also traced, which will allow later to consider multi-genre musical art as an example of a metamodern experiment. The reconstruction of the species structure of the art of the age of metamodernism actualizes a number of tangential aesthetic and art-scientific problems.This, first of all, concerns the problem of the structural elements of the work of art, which metamodernists try not only to revise, but also in some places to remove from the context of the work: the consequence of this is the "imagelessness" of art, the absolutization of "polystylism", a hypertrophied, even compared to postmodernism, defeat " of mimesis — reflection" for the sake of "simulacrum". The space of such "theoretical foundations" also includes "form", experiments with which can "blur" the boundaries of any kind of art, bringing it to the level of "artistic activity". In the logic of such an approach, it is also about denying the stable foundations of artistic creativity, which leads to an arbitrary or spontaneous creative process, the consequence of which is "permissiveness", which, in particular, is manifested in modern cinema. Deformation of the fundamental principles of the theory of artistic creativity prompts a revision of the phenomenon of "creative personality", and the artist loses his or her historically developed significance, falling into the trap of "template", "conjuncture" or "fashion". The article argues that it is precisely the problem of the specific nature of art that allows us to reproduce the process of fundamental changes that marked the transition from "postmodernism" to "metamodernism". At the same time, attention is focused on updating both the conceptual and categorical apparatus, which "ensures" the study of transformational processes, and on the correlation of the existing system of concepts and categories with those of an innovative nature.