The phenomenon of art

Abstract

In the article “The phenomenon of art”, Yuri Lotman elaborates on the relation between art and freedom, especially on the impacts the latter exerts on the representation of reality. In this regard, the semiotician argues that art may reproduce something which already exists or create an entirely new universe, with its own rules and internal logic, as in the example of fantastic narratives. According to Lotman, such plurality stems from the impossibility of exhausting the human experience, something that is expressed by the notion of unpredictability, also explored in the text. The compositional center of a narrative would be precisely this “explosive” moment, which marks its unexpected development. However, in retrospect and already armed with the full context, one sees the story in its entirety and understands the unpredictable fact as the only possible outcome. After developing these ideas, Lotman puts them in dialogue with historiography by connecting such logical procedure to the practices of historians, which consists in searching for the causes behind a certain event from its outcomes.