European Doctoral Seminar > About CCC

About CCC

Contemporary art challenges the traditional boundaries between forms, genres, and media. In the individual arts, ancient distinctions are being questioned: between painting, photography, plastic arts and installation, between epic, essay, drama and lyric, between musical performance, sampling and site-specific sound production, between cinema, video and documentary, between design, architecture and landscape planning, and so on. At the same time, new relations are emerging between the different arts: between theatre and visual arts, between architecture and literature, between film and installation, examples of cross-fertilisation and hybridisation are legion.

In addition to this, art practices are becoming increasingly intermingled with other social practices, creating new interfaces to the spheres of politics, entrepreneurship, journalism, everyday life, &c.

In this situation, the inherited institutional divide between research in literature, art, music, architecture and design is not able to fully accommodate the development of new and hybrid art practices. And similarly, the traditional methodologies and conceptual frameworks are not adapted to the actual strategies of creation in the contemporary arts.

The European Doctoral Seminar in Culture, Criticism, & Creativity is dedicated to the investigation of new artistic forms and cross-generic as well as cross-sectorial constellations, and to the development of new theoretical, methodological and interpretive tools to gauge and conceptualise such artistic expressions. Through interdisciplinary exchange and development of new research designs, and through sharing experiences and competencies between doctoral students and faculty from different places, the seminar will provide a platform for new art studies and cultural studies in Europe.