Simon Vagts has been a research associate (postdoc) in the field of art sciences at the University of Fine Arts Münster since 2022. He studied art history and theatre, film and media studies at the University of Vienna, graduating in 2013 with a master’s thesis on “Metaphorologie der Rezeptionsästhetik” (metaphorology of reception aesthetics. 

In 2014, he was employed as an assistant diplômé at the Université de Fribourg in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art History.

From 2014 to 2021, he completed his doctorate in art history at the University of Basel (Prof. Dr. Markus Klammer; Prof. Dr Julia Gelshorn, Université de Fribourg). First he was a member of the graduate school at the Centre for the Theory and History of the Image (eikones), then a research associate for the Schaulager Professor for Art Theory at the Department of Art History. In his dissertation, he examines the conditions of the image in Jean-Luc Godard’s films, on the basis of which – according to the thesis – the idea of a cinema of radical inclusion can be formulated.

Since 2013, Vagts has taught at universities in Fribourg, Zurich and Vienna in addition to his teaching in Basel.

His current research focuses on contemporary painting and its resistance to digital economies, the media environments they produce and social consequences. The attempt to bring together social history and formal aesthetic analyses is fundamental to the project. 

• Art theory and sociology of the 20th and 21st centuries
• Media archaeology and history
• Postcolonial theory
• Contemporary painting
• Art and its economies
• Functions of metaphor in the visual arts

• 2024 Kino radikaler Inklusion. Die Bedingungen des Bildes bei Jean-Luc Godard, Zürich 2024
• 2021 Medien der Kartographie: Rauschen und Spuren in Baltimores ‘The Wire’, in: Fürst, Saskia M. / Poole, Ralph J. (Hg.), Contemporary Quality TV. The Auteur, the Fans, and Constructions of Gender, Wien 2021, S. 29–44.
• 2020 Bodies, Factories, and Islands. Roberto Rossellini Mapping Catastrophe, in: Lange, Barbara / Hildebrandt, Dirk / Pietrasik, Agata (Hg.), Rethinking Postwar Europe. Artistic Production and Discourses on Art in the late 1940s and 1950s, Köln 2020, S. 51–74.
• 2019 Material, Metaphor, and Location of the Color Line / Material, Metapher und Orte der Color Line, in: Lack #10: off-color, Präsens Editionen, sic! Raum Für Kunst, Breitschmid, Laura / Knüsel, Eva-Maria / Bitzi, Remo / Schwegler, Marc [Hg.], S. 13–23.
• 2018 Über die Taktilität im Digitalen: Jean-Luc Godard nach Marshall McLuhan, in: Haupt, Sabine / Ruf, Oliver (Hg.), Projektion und Reflexion. Das Medium Film in Kunst und Literatur, Bielefeld 2018, S. 219–238.
• 2015 ALL CAPS -- Basquiat -- The Unknown Notebooks, Brooklyn Museum, in: all-over. Magazin für Kunst und Ästhetik.