Seta Dadoyan: Artwork and the Dialectics of Truth Content on April 03, 2025 in New York, United States

The third in the series of “Counterpoints," this talk deals with Professor Seta B. Dadoyan’s aesthetic philosophy and artworks in terms of encounters and convergences in her experiences. Her theories focus on the autonomy of art, its cognitive importance, social-historical embeddedness, the “culture industry,” “truth-content,” and “concretization” as criteria for aesthetic judgments.

“Counterpoints: Philosophy, Historiography, Art” is the broad title of a “discursive” triangle of talks by Professor Dadoyan. It is intended to be a continuum of interconnected dialectical discourses in philosophy, historiography and aesthetics. The initiative was occasioned by her publication Encounters and Convergences. A Book of Ideas and Art (2023). The discussions are analyses of the perceptions, sensibilities, thoughts, contradictions, tensions, insights, also the formal and methodological elements and criteria that go into the making of a relevant, authentic, engaging, and compelling artifact. It may be a historical text, a painting/drawing, a film, a melody, or any other “object.” The “triangle” also serves as a ‘prologue’ to an exhibit of her artworks later in 2025.

Prof. Seta B. Dadoyan is a prominent Armenian scholar and academic. She holds a Doctor of Sciences degree in Philosophy and has over a dozen volumes in leading academic publications to her credit. She is also a prolific painter. In addition to her research and writings on Philosophy, History, and Western Armenian culture, Dadoyan’s groundbreaking research initiated the discipline of Islamic-Armenian interactive history in the Near East. She has been Professor of Cultural Studies, Philosophy, and Art History at AUB and later taught at Columbia University, the St. Nersess Seminary, University of Chicago, and Yerevan State University. Professor Dadoyan has received numerous awards including the Society of Armenian Studies’ “Lifetime Achievement Award,” the Catholicosate of Cilicia’s “St. Mesrop Mashtots Medal'' and the highest “Medal and Diploma of David Invictus/Anhaght'' from the National Academy of Sciences of Armenia.