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Paul A Kottman, Hegel and the Present of Art’s Past Character, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 82, Issue 2, Spring 2024, Pages 238–242, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaac/kpae025
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Alberto Siani’s first English-language book, Hegel and the Present of Art’s Past Character, is a short but dense book which brings together some recent essays of his: primarily explications of the historical and philosophical background (in Kant and Schiller) of Hegel’s famous declaration about art’s highest vocation persisting as a thing of the past. In addition to this, Siani offers chapters that engage the uptake of Hegel’s thesis in Arthur Danto and Robert Pippin, Martin Heidegger and Paul Celan, Benedetto Croce and Antonio Gramsci—as well as chapters on Antigone and the rock band Pearl Jam’s 1996 album No Code, presented as exemplifying the task of criticism in the wake of Hegel, as Siani sees it. One wishes that Routledge had more carefully ‘cleaned up’ Siani’s very fluent but non-native English. This is the fault of the publisher, not of the author. Still, anyone interested in Hegel’s philosophy of art will want to engage Siani’s book.
