ABSTRACT:
The International Centre for the Study of Aesthetics celebrated the centenary of Rudolf Arnheim’s birth and the 50th anniversary of the publication of his seminal work Art and Visul Perception by organizing an International Conference entitled “Rudolf Arnheim: Art and Visual Perception”, which took place in Palermo on November 19-20, 2004.
The present volume, edited by Lucia Pizzo Russo, collects the lectures and papers presented at that Conference, and more specifically: Gillo Dorfles’s “Remembering Arnheim”, Lucia Pizzo Russo’s “Media and Cognitive Processes”, Giovanni Matteucci’s “Media and sensibilia”, Riccardo Luccio’s “Arnheim and Prägnanz”, Ian Verstegen’s “Field, Singularity, Forces: Prospects for an Arnheimian Explanation of the Perceptual Order”, Carmelo Calì’s “Field Theories: Physics and Phenomenology in Gestaltpsychologie”, Maurizio Ferraris’s “Logocentrism: 3 or 4 Sizes”, Alberto Argenton’s “Black Is Mournful Even Before Being Black”, Giuseppe Galli’s “Structural Skeleton and Prägnanz in Rudolf Arnheim’s Analyses”, Elio Franzini’s “The Revelation of Reality: Expression and Symbol in Rudolf Arnheim”, Simonetta Lux’s “Art as Expression or as Act of Thought?”, Giovanni Bruno Vicario’s “A Psychologist of Perception Reads Arnheim”, Ingrid Scharmann’s “Order, Expression and Media in Rudolf Arnheim’s Aesthetic Theory”, Gabriella Bartoli’s “Ambiguities and Contradictions in Rudolf Arnheim”, Luciano Mecacci’s “Psychology and the Psychology of Art between Vygotskij, Gestaltpsychologie, and Arnheim”, Giuseppe Di Giacomo’s “Vision, Form, and Meaning
in Arnheim and Wittgenstein”, Silvia Ferretti’s “Illusion and Visual Perception in Gombrich and Arnheim”, Angelo Trimarco’s “Conceptual Art, Visual Thought”, and Roberto Diodato’s “Visual Thinking as Virtual Thinking”.
These essays examine some of the most relevant concerns of Arnheim’s thought, as well as their interaction and intersection with crucial aspects of 20th-century culture, emphasizing their relevance also for contemporary scholarship. The Appendix presents a reprint of the important Conversation with Rudolf Arnheim that was conducted by Lucia Pizzo Russo during Rudolf Arnheim’s visit to Palermo in 1983.
