Judith Siegmund
Biography
Judith Siegmund is an artist and philosopher. She is a professor of philosophical aesthetics at the Zurich University of the Arts. From 2018 to 2021, she held the professorship of Contemporary Aesthetics at the State University of Music and Performing Arts Stuttgart, where she worked with others to establish the »Campus present« and the Master's program »Theory and Practice of Experimental Performance«.
Previously, from 2011 to 2018, she was assistant professor for theory of design/aesthetic theory as well as gender theory at the Berlin University of the Arts. There she founded the three-year research project »Autonomy and Functionalization - An Aesthetic-Cultural Historical Analysis of Art Concepts in the Visual Arts in Berlin from the 1990s to the Present«. She was an associate member of the UdK's graduate program »The Knowledge of the Arts«.
Monographs:
Zweck und Zweckfreiheit – zum Funktionswandel der Künste im 21. Jahrhundert, Metzlerverlag, Stuttgart 2019
Die Evidenz der Kunst. Künstlerisches Handeln als ästhetische Kommunikation, Transcript-Verlag, Bielefeld 2007
On her book »Zweck und Zweckfreiheit«:
In the history of aesthetic theory, a reading of Kant's analytics of the beautiful has emerged in the 20th century that understands the purposelessness of the arts as a dogma of their functionlessness. In contrast, there are developments in the field of the arts that point in a different direction. The book project proceeds from the implicit assumption that aesthetic theory must prove adequate to its object. There is therefore a need to rethink the theoretical parameters of purposelessness, autonomy, and functionlessness. The strategy of this operation is to engage with the philosophical history of the concept of purpose and to place it in relation to current discourses and phenomenologies of art. The function/functionlessness of art in society is thus put to the test, as well as a recasting of its purposes.