THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI

The arts focus gave humanistic theories of creativity a particular ideological shading, for art was traditionally understood as the antidote to the ills of industrial society. The Romantic artist was putatively (if never really actually) outside the realm of capitalist production, and as such represented an exception to modern alienation.

Images were first made to conjure up the appearances of something that was absent. Gradually it became evident that an image could outlast what it represented; it then showed how something or somebody had once looked – and thus by implication how the subject had once been seen by other people. Later still the specific vision of the image-maker was

the Bauhaus, the German school and social experiment started in 1919 and disbanded in 1933. The Bauhaus took as its founding mission the connection of the creative and commercial arts.