New values of art and their affect on the society

Abstract

Purpose of the article is to formulate the concept of values consistent in the artworks, providing the possibility to consider new, often radically different from the former, values, to investigate the intentions of the creators of those new values and the variety of impressions of those values on public. Research is based on the comparative analysis of the concepts of aesthetic and artistic values dominant in the analytic, phenomenological and hermeneutical aesthetics, hereby several axiological trends are discerned; this discernment gives a ground for an analysis not only of the changes in the specific aesthetic and artistic values in proper sense but also enables us to consider the general (cognitive, moral, social, and political) values, exhibited, and often dominant in the new artworks. Reflecting the theories of the contemporary art and the most prominent modern and postmodern artworks the tendencies of the effect of the values on the public are distinguished. It is demonstrated that even the works of “autonomous” art doesn’t limit themselves within the realm of the proper artistic and aesthetic values; that in the art of avant-garde not the proper aesthetic and artistic values acquire the dominant position; and that starting with the second part of the twentieth century and until nowadays the artworks are being created affecting the public not so much by their immanent values, traditionally ascribed to the artworks, but by the intention to provoke critical thinking, rebuke stereotypes and open us up to the extraordinary experiences of the world and ourselves within it