Hegel and the Origins of Art

Considerable critical attention has been devoted over the past several decades to Hegel's pronouncement of the end of art. But Hegel was equally interested in the problem of its beginning: How did art first come about, both historically and conceptually? What significance does this origin have for debates over its future? Although today we are accustomed to thinking of cave paintings when we think of the earliest instantiations of art, in the eighteenth century many writers and intellectuals thought instead of architecture. In his lectures Hegel provides an account of the origin of architecture (and art) that can best be understood in contrast to conventional Enlightenment accounts of this origin in the state of nature.