Editors’ Introduction

In 2016, when we first began planning this special issue, eighty years had passed since Heidegger’s 1935–36 lectures on “The Origin of the Work of Art” momentously turned the philosophical attention from the beauty of art to its truth—to the process of truth “setting itself to work” in the work of art, now understood as the exposition of the conflictual interaction or “strife” between the meaningful configuration of a historical “world” and its material seat in the “earth.” In the course of those decades, the Western art world has undergone profound transformations. Very generally speaking, the visual arts have witnessed a passage from the peak of modernism in the interwar period, through post-war late modernist movements such as abstract expressionism and postmodernist tendencies such as pop art and conceptual art, to the polyvocal world of today described by labels such as post-postmodernism, metamodernism, contemporaneity, and post-contemporaneity. General trends such as the progressive experimentalism of modernism, the postmodern disillusionment with modernist utopias and the associated playful eclecticism and blurring of distinctions between “high” and “popular” cultural forms, as well as the various more recent reactions against the ironical nihilism of postmodernism, have also been reflected in literature and classical music. Traditional boundaries between different art forms and between art and non-art have become increasingly fluid as the arts interact ever more intensely with one another and with other modes of human culture, such as the media, popular culture, science, and technology. New artistic genres, practices, and theories—from bio art to Internet art, from virtual realities to posthumanism—pop up faster than one can keep track. These developments within the art scene echo wider cultural and societal transformations of the late twentieth century brought about by the postindustrial changes and globalization of developed consumer economies, digital technologies, and new mass and social media. Even if the physical and mental distances between people across the globe have shrunk with the emergence of unforeseen possibilities and intensities of communication, the accelerating flow of information, images, ideas, opinions, and innovations also contributes to an increasing fragmentation of the contemporary context, at least in Western and Westernized societies. The loss of credibility of grand metanarratives proclaimed by Jean-François Lyotard in his 1979 The Postmodern Condition and the proliferation of competing micronarratives appear to take us farther and farther from the kind of relatively stable cultural unities and historical continuities Heidegger still seems to presuppose in the mid-1930s as he reflects—without being immune to the nationalist fervor and totalitarian