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Madness: A reading of the artist

Summary/Abstract: This text is a record of workshop work carried out during a seminar on criticism in new media, conducted in the winter semester of the academic year 2024/2025 by Małgorzata Dancewicz-Pawlik. As part of it, students analyzed the exhibition "Madness. The Case of Marian Henel—a lecher from Branice" presented at the Ethnographic Museum in Wrocław. The authors of individual subsections are people from the first year of master's studies in the field of cultural art criticism. The primary task associated with work on the presented sketch was to familiarize students with methods of critical analysis of the way narrative is constructed in an exhibition presenting art closely interwoven with the artist's personal fate. The nature of the exhibition became a pretext for posing a series of questions related to the figure of the author and his enigmatic biography, and expressing doubts as to how far the method of aesthetic assessment of works is adequate in relation to their author. Students sought contexts for the exhibition, conducted interviews with people who knew the artist, and carried out a media search regarding how his art functioned on the internet and beyond the domestic publishing context. Each person participating in the project had their own interpretive concepts and their own ideas for uncovering this story. Consequently, the outcome of their efforts—a polyphonic, collaboratively written critical sketch—has particular significance, as it demonstrates that, under certain conditions, communicative activity conducted within a democratic debate can give rise to a coexistence of multiple intersubjective perspectives on a single issue.

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