Beat Wyss

Karlsruhe University for Arts and Design

February–June 2013

Beat Wyss (Kress Fellow in the Literature of Art) is Professor of Art History and Media Theory at Karlsruhe University for Arts and Design, and member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences. He was spokesman of the Karlsruhe graduate college research project "Image – Medium – Body," concerned with image theory and cultural studies. Committed to building up a doctoral school at the Swiss Institute for Art Research (SIK) in Zürich, he initiated a research program on the history of La Biennale di Venezia, focussed on participating nations of East Central Europe. His research interests include the history of ideas and mentalities (Hegel’s Art History and the Critique of Modernity, 1985/1999); the orbit of Poststructuralism (Nach den grossen Erzählungen, 2009); the historical expansion of the art system (Vom Bild zum Kunstsystem, 2006); colonialism and globalization (DieWeltausstellung von Paris 1889, 2010). At the Clark, he will work on In the Cave of Imagination, tracing the Platonic legacy in occidental aesthetics.