Half-remembered art theory

August 18, 2006 7:53 AM

I'm trying to remember a theory about the arts in which the progression of a genre moves through various well-defined stages...

I half-remember a theory about the arts in which the progression of a genre moves through various well-defined stages from experimental to popular and finally overblown baroque before descending into kitsch or self-parody, and how this applied to all arts. I think there are seven stages, if I remember rightly. Does this ring a bell with anyone? I maybe read a page on the Internet or studied it in University. I really would like to track it down and read it again. Much appreciated.

posted by dydecker to media & arts (4 comments total)

Northrop Frye has argued for five stages of literature in a culture, from the epic/mythic to the ironic.
posted by kimota at 8:23 AM on August 18, 2006

kimota, it's not that. I distinctly remember learning about this, specifically in relation to Renaissance art. Damned if I can remember it, though.
posted by mkultra at 8:49 AM on August 18, 2006

There are Hegel's three stages of symbolic, classical and romantic art.

There's this: The seven stages of art in Australasia, by Collingwood. Dredged from here.

But my sense is it's probably the organizing mechanism of an 18c historian like Winckelmann or Vasari.
posted by xod at 9:52 AM on August 18, 2006

I wonder if the piece you read was built on ideas from Clement Greenberg's "Avant-Garde and Kitsch". Unlike xod, I would have thought it's more likely to be the work of a Marxist art historian.
posted by boudicca at 2:56 AM on August 21, 2006