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Art as a Social System by Niklas Luhmann is a nonfiction available to read on EtoBox.

What is Art as a Social System about?

This is the definitive analysis of art as a social and perceptual system by Germany's leading social theorist of the late twentieth century. It not only represents an important intellectual step in discussions of art--in its rigor and in its having refreshingly set itself the task of creating a set of distinctions for determining what counts as art that could be valid for those creating as well as those receiving art works--but it also represents an important advance in systems theory. Returning to the eighteenth-century notion of aesthetics as pertaining to the "knowledge of the senses," Luhmann begins with the idea that all art, including literature, is rooted in perception. He insists on the radical incommensurability between psychic systems (perception) and social systems (communication). Art is a special kind of communication that uses perceptions instead of language. It operates at the boundary between the social system and consciousness in ways that profoundly irritate communication while remaining strictly internal to the social. In seven densely argued chapters, Luhmann develops this basic premise in great historical and empirical detail. Framed by the general problem of a

Who reads Art as a Social System?

Author

Niklas Luhmann

Publisher

Stanford University Press

Published

2000

Language

EN

ISBN

9781503618763

Category

nonfiction

Rating

3.95 / 5 (37 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-13