Art and technology

The question that guides the work of the Section is how art relates to the fourfold human organization on the one hand and to technology on the other.

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At the end of 2019 the Section team began to study, as an inner foundation, the first lectures in Rudolf Steiner’s Art as Seen in the Light of Mystery Wisdom (GA 275) and the mantras of the eleventh Class Lesson. They informed our planning of the Ascension conference that we wanted to devote to the field of tension between technology and art on the one hand and the connection between the fourfold human organization and the genres in art on the other. But then the conference was cancelled due to the Coronavirus lockdown regulations which did not consider the arts to be ‘essential’.

Instead, we had the idea in May to call on artists to send us the work they created during Corona for an exhibition entitled “Breaking into the Unknown”, of which Barbara Schnetzler was the curator (Das Goetheanum 35/2020). Consequently, 82 works of art, contributed by fifty-two artists from Europe and beyond, were exhibited at the Goetheanum from 4 July to 8 November (the exhibition was documented in the journal Stil. Goetheanismus in Kunst und Wissenschaft [Style. Goetheanism in art and science], Michaelmas 2020).

Due to Coronavirus regulations, the conference planned for November on the topic of ‘The arts: their origin and their task in inner development’ had to be cancelled, too. We hope to be able to hold the conference in January or May 2021. It is clear that we – that is, every artist and, in fact, every human being – are asked to look more closely into the question: what is the significance of art and culture for our humanity and for human life?

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