This book offers an overview and critique of the conventions surrounding artistic creativity and intellectual endeavor which began with the decline of feudalism in the church.

Ambitious in scope and innovative in concept, this book offers an overview and critique of the conventions surrounding artistic creativity and intellectual endeavor since the outset of the broader modernity, which the author sees as beginning with the decline of feudalism and the Church. As a work of intellectual history, it suggests that art and the conventions associated with the artistic constitute a secular institution that has supplanted pre-Reformation theology. From the perspective of the subject, modernity has entailed a heightened sense of individuation, moral conflict, and pervasive loss and disaster. Yet the pitfalls that have earmarked personal experience have taken on positive value in an artistic enterprise that aspires to be a salutary replacement for externally imposed theological dogmas.

Introduction: criticism and cartography
Part I. The Emergence of the Artist as Priest in a Secular Art Religion: 1. Portraits of modernity
2. Framing modernity: Protestant and critical reformations
3. The knowledge of modernity: tragedy and empiricism
4. Melancholic borders: from Trauerspiel to 'Michael Kohlhaas'
5. Kant and the anointment of the modern artist
Part II. Untimely Propositions on the Contracting of Art in Modernity: 6. Corollaries to the aesthetic contract
7. Maxima moralia: millennial fragments on the public and private dimensions of language
Part III. The World at Large: Systematic Expansionism on the Threshold of Modernity's Realization: 8. From social to aesthetic contract
9. Between sublimities: Melville, Whaling, and the melodrama of incest
Conclusion: parting shots: final portraits
Notes
Index.