Dessein, dessin, design… Les tribulations d’Idea en régime de haut modernisme américain
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the survival, in post-World War II American abstract painting and especially in the formalist critique interpreting and legitimizing it, of age-old debates concerning the primacy of thought over the mimetic representation of the world that have characterized occidental art theory since Plato. The history of these debates, which the Renaissance took up again and channeled in more aesthetic than metaphysical directions, has been masterfully summarized by Erwin Panofsky in his celebrated essay of 1924 dedicated to idea. One of the pivotal points of that theory as a whole is the relationship established between the plan or intention of the work (dessein) and the drawing or sketch (dessin) which gives it form. This article argues that modernist painting, although radically abstract and apparently devoted to the triumph of the colour field alone, paradoxically fails to reflect upon itself without recourse to a principle of internal articulation wherein subsist avatars of the old alliance between dessein and dessin. The radical transformation of art’s context of production and reception, brought about by the instauration of modernity, introduces however a third term into the equation, design (de-sign), which expresses the fear of a definitive loss: that of the capacity of art to reflect upon the world and provide meaning.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".