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The Elite in the Arts

Visual Arts, Music, Literature, Dance & Theatre

What power drives art to change? What causes new forms of expression and new styles? How does the new come into the world?

On this website, American and German theoreticians show how the arts continue to develop in sudden leaps and bounds from the tension between popular and elite tendencies. Here historical events, technological inventions and economic changes all play an important role. We invite you to explore playfully the developmental history of the arts in an extremely compressed form by way of examples and with the help of graphics, pictures and short texts. Discussion and criticism are very welcome.

Alfred Döblin, Fischer 2013, S. 329.
Man wünscht von der Literatur überhaupt […] nicht bloß ästhetische und psychologische, sondern auch, nein, vor allem politische und gesellschaftliche Werte.
Walter Gropius
Stil ist nichts Endgültiges, sondern beständiger Wandel.
Mark Morris
If nobody comes to your shows, then it's modern dance. If everybody comes to your shows and no one likes it, is that ballet? I don't know.
Keith Richards
If you don't know the blues... there's no point in picking up the guitar and playing rock and roll or any other form of popular music.

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The Elite in the Arts | An Essay by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht
Resistors and the Special Case of Cultural Elites

Educational elites, business elites, scientific elites, political elites – the elite always seems to be a topic of conversation. But what does "the elite" – and the cultural elite in particular – actually look like? In trying to find a definition, literary scholar Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht encounters informal processes and privileges, exclusive rights, psychological power games – and the boundaries of social equality.

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