NATAŠA LAH / HOW STYLE BECAME FAMOUS AND IRRELEVANT AT THE SAME TIME 215 Nataša Lah How Style Became Famous and Irrelevant at the Same Time Keywords: historical style, stylistic codiication, objectual style in Modernism, stylistic classiication, stylistic appearance, stylistic expressivity, erasing the style borders DOI: 10.4312/ars.9.2.215-230 What is style? What are the recognizable characteristics of style in the history of visual arts? hese questions instigated many theoretical debates which, until this day, failed to yield the uniied and generally accepted deinition of style. Such an unstable position of style in visuality can become intelligible if we consider the signiicance of historical turns that caused the irreversible demarcations between the theoretical status and the social role of style within art history, in a period ater 1764. hat was the year when Johann Joachim Winckelmann detached stylistics from rhetoric. Consequently, he expanded the sphere of style's jurisdiction into the history of art, anchoring style within a temporal dimension in order to enable the stylistic analysis of historical periods in art. In this respect, it is entirely neglected that style acquired its disciplinary autonomy almost simultaneously with the start of schism within that very autonomy. Speciically, this was the start of a huge historical theoretical debate concerning a deinition of what we consider to be “the recognizable characteristics” of artwork and therefore of style as well. On one side, this conlict was led by “classicists”, undoubtedly including Winckelmann as well. On the other side there were romanticists, amongst whom we ind encyclopaedist (what an irony) Denis Diderot. While writing his Salons from 1759 to 1781, Diderot subordinated a previous paradigm of “the norm of form” – that was attuned with the paradigm of epoch – to the idea of individual artist's norm. Hitherto, form mirrored the given systems, whether notional (èidos) as in Middle Ages, or visible and obvious (morfé) as in Antiquity and Renaissance. Intellectuals belonging to the then new tendency advocated the form that evaded a centuries-old task of description, all to the advantage of individual unrepeatableness. From this point on, the idea of individual expression as prevailing against the creation's extrinsic value became irrevocably rooted, announcing the Modernism. AH_IX-2_prelom_FINAL.indd 215 30.11.2015 9:21:28