ART AS A SOCIO-CULTURAL PHENOMENON: CONTENTUAL-FUNCTIONAL CHALLENGES OF TODAY

Abstract

The consideration of art as a concrete-historical and transhistorical phenomenon through a socio-cultural research prism is obvious, natural and even trivial, since art is practically impossible outside of social and cultural contexts and influences – it always significantly reflects socio-cultural trends, symptoms worldview challenges and meaningful life alternatives.However, the outlined obviousness will be incomplete if two aspects are left outside the scope of the substantive consideration. First, the substantive invariant of art needs to be expressed, which will allow for a convincing argumentative demarcation of phenomena and processes that can be correctly labeled with the nomination "art" and phenomena and processes that do not belong to the category of art.Secondly, it is necessary to systematize and hierarchize the content-functional specificity of art, inherent in our present. This is a double problem: on the one hand, the information society significantly diversifies and diversifys the semantic and semantic palette of art; on the other hand, an attributive feature of the postmodern era is the strengthening of relativization in the form of the dispersion of semantic demarcations and the blurring of semantic hierarchies, as a result of which semantic antipodes and antagonists begin to claim the status of art, which gives this situation not only an ironic, but also an absurd subtext.It should also be taken into account that each socio-cultural environment generates its own system of semantic, semantic and symbolic coordinates, extrapolating it to all spheres of existence and to art in particular. The problematic challenge is related to the fact that these systems function in the paradigm mode – that is, not only autonomous, but also largely closed environments, whose members, so to speak, communicate in a common language, but neither do they understand (do not recognize the semantic hierarchies) of other environments, nor are their language understood by representatives of other environments.