In our times changes occur so rapidly that our modes of reading even more than our modes of analysis risk being inadequate, or in any case risk lagging behind. If we wish to analyze relations between the arts and the media, the danger is in fact that we will limit ourselves to established notions or even to stereotypes which are commonly accepted by the general public. Even for persons with some awareness, information remains lacunary. Moreover, like the experts, or those who pass for such, it seems that it is difficult for them to avoid a personal conception, implicit or avowed, which does not fail to influence their judgement. This is almost always the case when the matter of art is raised, even if we take the precaution of placing the term in the plural. Whether one wishes to or not, there is hardly an example where certain preferences do not make themselves known. If it is easy to reach agreement with regard to the facts, it is less easy to agree on their interpretation, especially when values are at stake. Hence the necessity to proceed by different steps and explanations to explain the relationships between arts and the media.

Tracing the broad outline of European art history means presenting the different methods considered essential to the formation of this discipline. Historiographical research arrives quite naturally at a criticism of the methods themselves and at a search for a broader horizon.

To the extent that the historian is involved with the thinking and the problems of his age, his methods reveal personal and conjunctural concepts and ideas which will guide the reflections of his successors ; these successors will modify and correct the concepts received in order to adapt them to new experiences and questions. Or they will add others which are more apt to supply the answers sought. The means of analysing art history today are the fruit of four centuries of discussion during which certain normative criteria, traditional theories and underlying concepts were called into question while at the same time, though being sometimes exported to other areas of the world, they have demonstrated a tenacious degree of longevity. But perhaps a brief recapitulation might be helpful here.

Since his beginnings, Man has produced art: gests and works in some way bound to the essence of man's existence, gests and works grafted onto the epidermis of the world, yet gests and works for transcending the immediate givens, for understanding veiled realities and future possibilities: gests and works of global apprehension, brought about and nourished through the ages by elementary needs, by visceral fears, by existential hopes.

Among all the possible choices of “objects” for collection, that of works of art is the richest in meaning. In this paper we propose to discover if this ages-old activity may be understood as a historical phenomenon or only interpreted as one of the expressions man may give of his relationship with the universe of artistic works.

Some of the relatively significant contributions to epistemology, in recent times, have been made by Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, and Hans Reichenbach. All these authors seem to make some radical departures from the inherited theories of knowledge. A common characteristic of their epistemologies is that they try to tackle the problem of growth of knowledge; that is to say, what is meant by saying that theories of science, as they get more and more refined, increasingly approach the truth and what the nature of relationship is between the earlier theory and the more refined. later, and present theory. Philosophy in the past hardly grappled with these issues, and therefore it would be of interest to critically examine these new dimensions in Epistemology, which is the concern of this paper.

The social sciences are again talking about time. They venture to do so, because the crisis of meaning in which modem society is involved shows the narrow limits of the solutions to this problem of being that phenomenology has reinvented. Since meaning only exists in duration of time, the crisis becomes a crisis of time and a crisis of the representation of man in time.

As Perelman suggests, rhetoric has always been concerned with understanding the basic nature of an audience. Considering this view, the perennial question posed by rhetoric might be: How does one discourse properly with an audience? Using the terminology supplied by Bitzer, this query might be rephrased to read: How does one “uncover and make available the public knowledge needed in our time and give body and voice to the universal public”. Of key importance is that the rhetorician must secure a base of knowledge that will allow communication to commence between a speaker and an audience. If discourse is to be successful a speaker must address an audience in a style that can be understood, and therefore must substantiate all social intercourse on knowledge that is “public” or held in common. At first this might sound quite pedestrian, yet throughout the history of rhetoric this assumption has proven to be quite problematic.