This handsomely produced volume contains 22 contributions from international scholars, which were originally presented at the 2000 Conference of the International Society for Phenomenology, Fine Arts, & Aesthetics. The papers center around the theme of gardens and include a wide range of topics of interest to phenomenologists but also, perhaps, to gardeners with a philosophical bent. A sampling of topics: Leonardo's Annunciation Hortus Conclusus and its reflexive intent; hatha yoga--a phenomenological experience of nature; the Chinese attempt to miniaturize the (...) world in gardens; conflating and compressing time in commodified space and architecture; constructing the deconstructive landscape (the ruin aesthetic); and a phenomenological-anthropological aproach to Zen gardens. The volume is lightly indexed by name (mostly philosophers). Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com). (shrink)

Is aesthetics a product of evolution? Are human aesthetic behaviors in fact evolutionary adaptations? The creation of artistic objects and experiences is an important aesthetic behavior. But so is the perception of aesthetic phenomena qua aesthetic. The question of evolutionary aesthetics is whether humans have evolved the capacity not only to make beautiful things but also to appreciate the aesthetic qualities in things. Are our near-universal love of music and cute baby animals essential to our species’ evolutionary development, (...) which took place over thousands of years? In other words, do aesthetic practice and appreciation help people to survive or reproduce? Do aesthetic behaviors help to propel natural selection? If so, what does that tell us about ourselves as human beings? What does it tell us about art, our other aesthetic practices, and aesthetic experience? (shrink)

In this special issue on animals and aesthetics, contributors explore encounters with animals in art and thought.

In this issue, our contributors demonstrate how art in the city, art “about” the city, art compared to the city, can bring to attention the insidious forces underlying every city’s gleaming, wide-awake veneer.

The author reviews two symposia: 'The Video Arts: Demonstration and Discussion', The American Society for Aesthetics, New York City, 28 Oct. 1978, and 'The Aestheticians Look at Television', National Association of Education Broadcasters, Washington, D.C., 30 Oct. 1978. He also presents an evaluation of the current state of video art in terms of philosophical aesthetics. Furthermore, he attempts to make a clear distinction between television and video art. The differences cited include corporate studio efforts vs efforts of individual (...) artists, commercial vs artistic purpose and the substantial differences between production methods. Other issues considered are style, intimacy and narcissism. (shrink)

Hegel's Aesthetics is the first comprehensive interpretation of Hegel's philosophy of art in English in thirty years. It gives a new analysis of his notorious "end of art" thesis, shows the indispensability of his aesthetics to his philosophy generally, and argues for his theory's relevance today.

The role and influence of Modernism is the focus of this article. Modernism’s lasting and unforeseeable influence is due to its key importance to the development of the general conditions of art within modernity. Along with Modernism, the implications of the modern system of art became visible for real. Modernism produced the necessity of rethinking the distinction between “art” and “the aesthetic,” based on their original foundations in the 18th century, respectively – a call for a “divorce” after the long-lived (...) marriage between the two, installed by Romanticism. Furthermore so-called postmodernism and today’s contemporary art have in fact not, as often assumed, really broken with high Modernism. What we see is rather a transformation of a time-based modus into a more spatially defined approach. The interpretations of Modernism itself are thus being altered, when regarded with a postmodern awareness of its surrounding enunciative space. The interrelationship between the modernisms, and what followed, is therefore achieving the character of an entanglement rather than that of a straight and clear development. Modernism’s influence, it is finally asserted, is seemingly not at its conclusion, but rather at its reoccurring beginning. (shrink)

«What does art mean in a world where urgency predominates, a world that now exhausts its annual quota of renewable resources in July?» (Bourriaud [2021]: 7; my translation). The climate crisis (which began in the last century, but whose consequences have become increasingly worrying in recent years), the Covid 19 pandemic that struck the planet in 2020 and the recent conflict between Russia and Ukraine in the heart of Europe are epoch-making phenomena that are inevitably reshaping the present and future (...) of human societies. With respect to this situation, is art being called into question or, on the contrary, is it an essential tool for rethinking the world of tomorrow? More specifically, is public art today a lost cause or an opportunity? In this article, I will try to place these questions within the framework of what we might call eco-aesthetics, which has an essential connection to the category of “relations”. (shrink)

There is an aesthetic undercurrent traversing Deleuze's philosophy along confluent trajectories of Baruch Spinoza and Friedrich Nietzsche, which harbours untapped potentials and far-reaching consequences for contemporary discussions of art and architecture. According to this subterranean stream, aesthetic experience is generated, neither in ready-made mental faculties of a subject, nor in essential qualities of an object, but through affective interactions of a relational field. A cartographic inquiry of affective aesthetics constitutes the subject matter of this paper, beginning with a philosophical (...) elaboration that connects aesthetic theories of Spinoza, Nietzsche and Deleuze, evolving via a comparative analysis of aesthetic processes specific to Francis Bacon's artistic assemblages and Vogelkop bowerbirds' architectural constructs, and concluding with the possibility of a non-anthropocentric aesthetics. (shrink)

What if the work of a nurse, physio or homecare worker was designated an art, so that the qualities of the experiences they create became understood as aesthetic qualities? What if the interactions and physical connections created by artists, directors, dancers, or workshop facilitators was understood as a work of care? Care Aesthetics is the first full length book to explore these questions and examine the work of carer artists and artist carers to make the case for the importance (...) of valuing and supporting aesthetically caring relations across multiple aspects of our lives. Theoretically and practically the book outlines the implications of care aesthetics for the socially engaged arts field and health and social care, and for acts of aesthetic care in the everyday. Part One of the book outlines the approaches to aesthetics and to care theory that are necessary to make and defend the concept of care aesthetics. Part Two then tests this through practice, examining socially engaged arts and health and social care through its lens. It makes the case for careful art exploring the implications of care aesthetics for participatory or applied arts. Then it argues for artful care and how an aesthetic orientation to care practices might challenge some of the inadequacies of contemporary care. This is a vital, paradigm-shifting book for anyone engaged with socially engaged arts or social and health care practices, on an academic or professional level. (shrink)

We thus propose to criticize the subjective-anthropological conception of beauty and to define the meaning of an ontological conception of the beautiful while at the same time inquiring into an aesthetic conception of ontology from the standpoint of speculative realism. We discuss first the general character of Kantian aesthetics, considered as the founding moment of modern aesthetic subjectivism. The first section reviews Gadamer’s criticisms of Kantianism before exposing, in the second section, the reinterpretation made by some neorealist thinkers (Shaviro, (...) Harman) of the Kantian conception of art and beauty and, more generally, of the meaning of aesthetics at large. Through this line of inquiry the third section exposes an aesthetic interpretation of the ‘principle of unreason’ introduced by Quentin Meillassoux. By way of conclusion, the fourth section examines the philosophical meaning of art and the general aims of an ontological aesthetic. (shrink)

Published under the auspices of The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning, 19 essays document the April 1998 international congress held at Harvard University. They ponder on such topics as the phenomenology of the experience of enchantment, Leonardo's enchantress, the ambiguous meaning of musical enchantment in Kant's Third Critique, art and the reenchantment of sensuous human activity, the creative voice, the allure of the Naza, Henri Matisse's early critical reception in New York, Zizek's sublimicist aesthetic of enchanted fantasy, (...) and enchantment in Baroque festive court performance in France. There is no subject index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

Enriching Arts Education through Aesthetics examines the use of aesthetic theory as the foundation to design and implement arts activities suitable for integration in school curricula in pre-school and primary school education. This book suggests teaching practices based on the connection between aesthetics and arts education and shows that this kind of integration promotes enriched learning experiences. -/- The book explores how the core ideas of four main aesthetic approaches – the representationalist, the expressionist, the formalist, and the (...) postmodernist – translate into respective ways of designing and implementing experiential aesthetics-based activities. Containing relevant examples of interventions used in classes, it analyzes the ways in which the combination of different aesthetic approaches can support varied, multifaceted, multimodal and balanced teaching situations in school. (shrink)

This paper formulates a Deweyan theory of performing arts practice that relies for its support on two main things: The unity Dewey ascribed to all intelligent practices (including artistic practice) and The observation that many aspects of the work of performing artists of Dewey’s time include features (“dramatic rehearsal,” action, interaction and habit development) that are part of Dewey’s characterization of the moral life. This does not deny the deep import that Dewey ascribed to aesthetic experience (both in art and (...) in life), but it does suggest that we might use his theory of ethical practice in conjunction with his theory of art as experience in order to create a more robust and unified Deweyan theory of what the performing artist does. (shrink)

This book introduces the idea of sustainability and its aesthetic dimension, suggesting that the role of the aesthetic is an active one in developing an ecologically, economically and culturally healthy society. With an introduction by Christopher Crouch and an afterword by John Thackara, the book gathers together a range of essays that address the issue of the aesthetics of sustainability from a multitude of disciplinary and cultural perspectives.

Through a series of provocative conversations, Frederick Luis Aldama and Herbert Lindenberger, who have written widely on literature, film, music, and art, locate a place for the discomforting and the often painfully unpleasant within aesthetics. The conversational format allows them to travel informally across many centuries and many art forms. They have much to tell one another about the arts since the advent of modernism soon after 1900—the nontonal music, for example, of the Second Vienna School, the chance-directed music (...) and dance of John Cage and Merce Cunningham, the in-your-faceness of such diverse visual artists as Francis Bacon, Pablo Picasso, Willem de Kooning, Egon Schiele, Otto Dix, and Damien Hirst. They demonstrate as well a long tradition of discomforting art stretching back many centuries, for example, in the Last Judgments of innumerable Renaissance painters, in Goya’s so-called “black” paintings, in Wagner’s Tristan chord, and in the subtexts of Shakespearean works such as King Lear and Othello. This book is addressed at once to scholars of literature, art history, musicology, and cinema. Although its conversational format eschews the standard conventions of scholarly argument, it provides original insights both into particular art forms and into individual works within these forms. Among other matters, it demonstrates how recent work in neuroscience may provide insights in the ways that consumers process difficult and discomforting works of art. The book also contributes to current aesthetic theory by charting the dialogue that goes on—especially in aesthetically challenging works—between creator, artifact, and consumer. (shrink)

Stephen Davies presents a fascinating exploration of the idea that art, and our aesthetic sensibilities more generally, should be understood as an element in human evolution. He asks: Do animals have aesthetics? Do our aesthetic preferences have prehistoric roots? Is art universal? What is the biological role of aesthetic and artistic behaviour?

By reconstructing the connections between different artistic forms, such as Art Sociologique, cybernetic, media and digital art, the paper addresses of how the concept of interactivity has evolved in relation to the development of aesthetic paradigms. Firstly, the paper problematizes the concept of interactive art, by discussing connections and differences with media and digital art. Secondly, the paper shows how Flussers’ concept of participatory media, influenced by the artistic work of Fred Forest, together with the theoretical perspective developed by members (...) of the “Group for an Aesthetics of Communication”, contributed to the development of new perspectives in interactive art. Thirdly, the paper shows how theoretical perspectives such as “Relational aesthetics” and the “Aesthetics of Communication” constituted the basis for the successive reflection on the potentialities of virtuality and immateriality from an artistic perspective. By drawing on such premises, the paper addresses the issue of the meta-operational processes involved in the use of Text-to-Image technologies (TTI), discussing the level of interactivity and the creative processes involved in its use. Finally, the paper problematizes the features of interactivity that characterize emerging forms of art made possible by virtual devices. (shrink)

Competitive courtship and aesthetic judgment/choice : Darwin's model of the arts -- The arts as promoters of social cooperation and cohesion -- Engagement in the arts as ontogenetic self-(trans-)formation -- A cooptation model of the evolution of the human arts : the special role of play behavior -- Technology, and symbolic cognition.

Why are art and the aesthetic so vitally important to our liberty, and to the re-creation of liberty in our living? How do they evoke the Ultimate in us? And why is that so important to our modern living? These are the vital questions that moved this author to a three-month personal exploration of aesthetic, artistic and ultimate meaning in its relation to liberty. The article is written pedagogically to lead the reader along the chain of ideas, thoughts and further (...) questions that the author explores in response to her questions. (shrink)

All too often, we think of our minds and bodies separately. The reality couldn’t be more different: the fundamental fact about our mind is that it is embodied. We have a deep visceral, emotional, and qualitative relationship to the world—and any scientifically and philosophically satisfactory view of the mind must take into account the ways that cognition, meaning, language, action, and values are grounded in and shaped by that embodiment. This book gathers the best of philosopher Mark Johnson’s essays addressing (...) questions of our embodiment as they deal with aesthetics—which, he argues, we need to rethink so that it takes into account the central role of body-based meaning. Viewed that way, the arts can give us profound insights into the processes of meaning making that underlie our conceptual systems and cultural practices. Johnson shows how our embodiment shapes our philosophy, science, morality, and art; what emerges is a view of humans as aesthetic, meaning-making creatures who draw on their deepest physical processes to make sense of the world around them. (shrink)

Aesthetic definitions of art face difficulties in dealing with art that is nonaesthetic. This has led some to suggest that if aesthetic theories of art are to apply to all art, then they must be disjunctive. In such a case, something would be art if and only if it either satisfied certain aesthetic criteria, or satisfied other, nonaesthetic, criteria.Nick Zangwill offers the Aesthetic Creation Theory. He considers ways that his theory could account for nonaesthetic art, and ultimately adopts a disjunctive (...) theory that makes use of the notion of second-order art—art that gains art status by referring to first-order art that satisfies the Aesthetic Creation Theory’s conditions.I will examine Zangwill’s theory and his response to the problem of nonaesthetic art with the aim of showing that the idea of second-order art may be unnecessary. There is hope for a non-disjunctive account of the nature of art, I claim, if we reconsider the attempts to deal with nonaesthetic art that Zangwill himself rejects. (shrink)

This essay reviews one of the most recent books in a trend of new publications proffering evolutionary theorising about aesthetics and the arts—themes within an increasing literature on aspects of human life and human nature in terms of evolutionary theory. Stephen Davies’ The Artful Species links some of our aesthetic sensibilities with our evolved human nature and critically surveys the interdisciplinary debate regarding the evolutionary status of the arts. Davies’ engaging and accessible writing succeeds in demonstrating the maturity and (...) scope of the field and his critique is timely and unparalleled. A laudable effort, however it may have benefited from espousing a co-evolutionary model more explicitly. Moreover there may be reason to question the usefulness of the standard set of distinctions (‘adaptation’, ‘spandrel’, ‘technology’) that Davies appeals to. (shrink)

Murray Smith presents an original approach to understanding film. He brings the arts, humanities, and sciences together to illuminate artistic creation and aesthetic experience. His 'third culture' approach roots itself in an appreciation of scientific innovation and how this has shaped the moving media.

Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art is an essential introduction to some of the central topics and approaches being debated in contemporary aesthetics and philosophy of art. By taking a stand on each of the issues addressed and arguing for certain resolutions and against others, the text does not simply present a controversy in its current state of play, but instead helps to advance it toward a solution.

Modern medical research shows that art aesthetic plays a positive role in healing and relieving people’s stress, improving mental health and improving social adaptability. Based on the aesthetic experience of visitors, this article conducts an empirical study on the aesthetic experience of the Long March Memorial Museum in Ninghua County, Fujian province, by means of survey data questionnaire (SD) and in-depth interview. Firstly, to conduct a questionnaire survey to understand the psychological characteristics of visitors’ aesthetic experience. Secondly, the combination of (...) in-depth interviews and the aesthetic differences of public art psychological analysis. Thirdly, to clarify the relationship between public art aesthetics and psychological healing. By constructing a model of the relationship between public art aesthetics and psychological healing, it puts forward five ways of psychological healing, such as enhancing aesthetic experience, arousing life interest, enriching cultural and artistic knowledge, shaping individual psychology and relieving emotional pressure. Contribution: Public art aesthetics is not only influenced by the politics, culture, customs and lifestyles of society but also has a close relationship with religious beliefs. This article attempts to explain the relationship between public art aesthetics and psychological healing from the dimension of cognitive psychology and proposes a path for public art aesthetics to promote psychological healing, so as to enrich and expand the connotation of traditional aesthetic thought and further deepen the study of religious art in psychological healing, aiming to provide useful ideas and references for promoting the all-round development of human beings. (shrink)

Designed for readers with no or little prior knowledge of the subject, this concise anthology brings together key texts in aesthetics and the philosophy of art. Designed for readers with no or little prior knowledge of the subject. Presents two contrasting pieces on each of six topics. Texts range from Plato’s famous critique of art in the ‘Republic’ through Nietzsche’s ‘The Birth of Tragedy’ to Barthes’ ‘The Death of the Author’ 'and pieces in recent philosophical aesthetics from a (...) number of traditions. Interactive editorial commentary helps readers to engage with the philosophical train of thought. Explains the argumentative and historical context in which each piece was written. Includes questions for debate and suggestions for further reading. (shrink)

Aesthetic debates within contemporary art have been tangential to the debates in environmental aesthetics since the 1960s. I argue that these disciplines, having evolved separately in response to the limitations of traditional aesthetics, may now usefully inform each other. Firstly, the dematerialisation of art as the focus of aesthetic experience may have environmentally useful consequences. Secondly, Gablik's 'connective aesthetics ', like Berleant's ' aesthetics of engagement', folds aesthetic experience into the social as a kind of environmental (...) aesthetics. Thirdly, contemporary art's flexible readings of ' framing ' can respond to 'frameless' natural environments, and finally, Kester's 'dialogical aesthetics ' may be enriched by Berleant's systematic account of ' contextual aesthetics '. (shrink)

Feminist aesthetics is the evolving study of both the explicit and the implicit role of gender and sexuality in the activities of creativity, the aesthetic experience of art and nature, and resulting value judgments. The perception, interpretation, and evaluation of occasions of aesthetic appreciation are infused with cognitive preconceptions, implicit biases, emotions, skills, and knowledge based on past lived experiences. In practice, feminist aestheticians have paid close attention to the role of race, class, age, ability, and other social factors (...) in the creation and evaluation of artworks. Whereas modern western European aesthetics deemed an artwork’s contextual factors peripheral to the essence of a viewer’s purely aesthetic, noncontextual, disinterested, or “distanced” experience, 20th-century feminists pioneered a radical break with norms of “good” art by invoking the familiar adage, “The personal is the political.”. (shrink)

Many voices today call for a profound rethinking of European identity. If we wish to answer their call, however, it is necessary to start with a reconsideration of the notion of boundaries, particularly as they are at work in the Mediterranean region. The knowledge and cultural values of the Mediterranean may be the driving force able to overcome the impasse from which Europe seems unable to free itself. This volume focuses on the opportunity to employ Mediterranean knowledge and cultural values (...) as a stimulus for the review of European policies, in the interest of creating a solid bridge between different cultural legacies and over the daunting challenges of our shared future. This means being able to stay simul outside and inside the borders, within and beyond the un-limit; looking for an image of Europe which finally stops thinking about the Mediterranean as its internal vulnus, as its lesion and contamination. (shrink)

This essay shows that a sharp distinction between ethics and aesthetics is unfruitful for thinking about how to live well with technologies, and in particular for understanding and evaluating how we cope with human existential vulnerability, which is crucially mediated by the development and use of technologies such as electronic ICTs. It is argued that vulnerability coping is a matter of ethics and art: it requires developing a kind of art and techne in the sense that it always involves (...) technologies and specific styles of experiencing and dealing with vulnerability, which depend on social and cultural context. It is suggested that we try to find better, perhaps less modern styles of coping with our vulnerability, recognize limits to our attempts to “design” our new forms, and explore what kinds of technologies we need for this project. (shrink)

In his Aesthetics Hegel gives full expression to his seminal theory of art. He surveys the history of art from ancient India, Egypt, and Greece through to the Romantic movement of his own time, criticizes major works, and probes their meaning and significance; his rich array of examples gives broad scope for his judgement and makes vivid his exposition of his theory. The substantial Introduction is Hegel's best exposition of his general philosophy of art, and provides the ideal way (...) into his Aesthetics. In Part I he considers the general nature of art: he distinguishes art, as a spiritual experience, from religion and philosophy; he discusses the beauty of art and differentiates it from the beauty of nature; and he examines artistic genius and originality. Part II provides a sort of history of art, divded into three periods called Symbolic, Classical, and Romantic. Part III deals individually with architecture, scuplture, painting, music, and literature. (shrink)

Deals with the question of the genesis of the concept of the aesthetic: where does it originate? In partial response to this question, Sibley attempts to show just how widespread the aesthetic interests of ordinary people are, especially if juxtaposed to the fairly restricted, minority interest in the highly developed arts, and emphasises the natural basis of our primitive aesthetic responses. Sibley concludes that, while the project of determining the logical priority of either the artistic or the aesthetic may be (...) confused, investigations in aesthetics should focus at least as much on the nature and origins of primitive aesthetic satisfactions as on the more recherché questions about arts. (shrink)

How is art both distinct and different from the rest of human life, while also mattering in and for it? This central yet overlooked question in contemporary philosophy of art is at the heart of Georg Bertram's new aesthetic. Drawing on the resources of diverse philosophical traditions – analytic philosophy, French philosophy, and German post-Kantian philosophy – his book offers a systematic account of art as a human practice. One that remains connected to the whole of life.

In his earliest philosophical work, Moritz Schlick developed a proposal for rendering aesthetics into a field of empirical science. His 1908 book Lebensweisheit developed an evolutionary account of the emergence of both scientific knowledge and aesthetic feelings from play. This constitutes the framework of Schlick’s evolutionary psychological methodology for examining the origins of the aesthetic feeling of the beautiful he proposed in 1909. He defends his methodology by objecting to both experimental psychological and Darwinian reductionist accounts of aesthetics. (...) Having countered these approaches, Schlick applies Külpe’s psychological distinction between stimulus-feelings and idea-feelings to collapse the traditional philosophical opposition between the agreeable and the beautiful. Both types of feeling, Schlick argues, result from humans’ adaptation to their environment. Because of this adaptation, feelings that were once only stimuli for action can come to be enjoyed for their own sake. This thesis underlies Schlick’s 1908 argument that art, qua mimesis, is necessarily inferior to aesthetic feelings directed towards the environment. Part of Schlick’s justification for this view is that humans are, through a long evolutionary process, better adapted to their environment than to artworks. Schlick nevertheless concedes that mimetic art can involve ways of abstracting from the objects it copies to produce idealised regularities that are not found in the original. Schlick thus concludes that art teaches its audience how to perceive the world in this abstract and idealised manner. This type of environmental aesthetics constitutes a means for reaching Schlick’s utopian ecological vision of a future in which culture will become harmonised with nature. (shrink)

Resumen: En nuestros días el término arte ha ampliado su horizonte hasta incluir prácticas y objetos que tradicionalmente habían sido negados. Este cambio de perspectiva se introduce a partir del siglo XX cuando la noción de arte comienza a ser cuestionada desde diferentes vertientes teóricas y prácticas. En este artículo se analiza la definición que el filósofo estadounidense John Dewey propuso en los años treinta, la cual trataba de devolver el arte al contexto cultural en el que se originó. Para (...) ello, en primer lugar se examinará la dimensión cultural del arte: tanto el contexto sociocultural de la obra, como el propio papel del arte para transmitir los significados de una cultura. En segundo lugar, serán consideradas las posibilidades que ofrece esta noción de arte como vía para establecer un diálogo intercultural entre iguales. A través de un estudio sobre su fundamentación teórica, así como su alcance y limitaciones, el objetivo de este artículo es mostrar, pese a sus dificultades, que la definición deweyana de arte alberga un gran potencial para la estética contemporánea.: In present days, the term art has broadened its horizon to include practices and objects that traditionally had been rejected. This change of view was introduced in the twentieth century when this notion begins to be questioned from different theoretical and practical approaches. This article analyzes the definition proposed in the thirties by the American philosopher John Dewey, which tried to return art to the cultural context in which it was created. For this purpose, first, the text examines the cultural dimension of art: the sociocultural context of the work of art; and the role of art in transmitting the meanings of a culture. Second, the text considers the possibilities offered by this notion of art to establish an intercultural dialogue between equals. Through a study of its theoretical fundamentals, its scope and limitations, the aim of this article is to show that, despite its difficulties, the Deweyan definition of art harbors great potential for contemporary aesthetics. (shrink)

Francis Sparshott introduced the term ‘remote art’ in his 1982 presidential address to the American Society for Aesthetics. The concept has not drawn much notice since—although individual remote arts, such as palaeolithic art and the artistic practices of subaltern cultures, have enjoyed their fair share of attention from aestheticians. This paper explores what unites some artistic practices under the banner of remote art, arguing that remoteness is primarily a matter of some audience’s epistemic distance from a work’s context of (...) creation. I introduce palaeoart—the depiction of extinct prehistoric fauna and flora, especially from the Mesozoic—as a paradigmatic case of remote art, showing that its remoteness is secured both by the deceptively rich cognitive load required for its creation and appreciation, and by its existence at the margins of the institutional artworld, which ensures that this cognitive loading is largely obscured. Too often, remote art is not just inscrutable, it is invisible to us. (shrink)

This book examines the complexities of the hipster through the lens of art history and cultural theory, from Charles Baudelaire's flan̂eur to the contemporary 'creative' borne from creative industries policies. It claims that the recent ubiquity of hipster culture has led many artists to confront their own significance, responding to the mass artification of contemporary life by de-emphasising the formal and textual deconstructions so central to the legacies of modern and postmodern art. In the era of creative digital technologies, long (...) held characteristics of art such as individual expression, innovation, and alternative lifestyle are now features of a flooded and fast-paced global marketplace. Against the idea that artists, like hipsters, are the 'foot soldiers of capitalism', the institutionalized networks that make up the contemporary art world are working to portray a view of art that is less a discerning exercise in innovative form-making than a social platform--a forum for populist aesthetic pleasures or socio-political causes. It is in this sense that the concept of the hipster is caught up in age-old debates about the relation between ethics and aesthetics, examined here in terms of the dynamics of global contemporary art."--Publisher's website. (shrink)

The twenty-first century has witnessed a pervasive militarization of aesthetics with Western military institutions co-opting the creative worldmaking of art and merging it with the destructive forces of warfare. In Martial Aesthetics, Anders Engberg-Pedersen examines the origins of this unlikely merger, showing that today's creative warfare is merely the extension of a historical development that began long ago. Indeed, the emergence of martial aesthetics harkens back to a series of inventions, ideas, and debates in the eighteenth and (...) early nineteenth century. Already then, military thinkers and inventors adopted ideas from the field of aesthetics about the nature, purpose, and force of art and retooled them into innovative military technologies and a new theory that conceptualized war not merely as a practical art, but as an aesthetic art form. This book shows how military discourses and early war media such as star charts, horoscopes, and the Prussian wargame were entangled with ideas of creativity, genius, and possible worlds in philosophy and aesthetic theory (by thinkers such as Leibniz, Baumgarten, Kant, and Schiller) in order to trace the emergence of martial aesthetics. Adopting an approach that is simultaneously historical and theoretical, Engberg-Pedersen presents a new frame for understanding war in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

The book is a reflection over how art functions in late modernity. It emphasizes processes of fictionalizing reality and exposes, how phenomenology can be used to extract this problem on a foundation of aesthetics. It is a panoramic outlook over existing views, but also a self-sufficient theoretical proposal.

Initially conceived as an interview with the hybrid media artist Brian Goeltzenleuchter, this text gradually took the form of a conversation on various issues regarding olfactory art and the aesthetic significance of smell. Framing the artistic uses of odours in the context of contemporary art, the paper discloses some of its foundational traits, variations, and underlying impulses. By commenting on Goeltzenleuchter’s olfactory artworks through a philosophical perspective, this contribution covers a number of subjects including the notion of atmosphere, the socio-cultural (...) values and narratives conveyed by scents, the suggestive relationship between spaces and aromas, and the phenomenology of smells as compared to the experience of sounds. Consistent with how smell perception unfolds, the dialogue flows in a form that is not rigidly structured but airy, ephemeral, and fluid, developing a sequence of insights whose aim is, rather than scrutinising a specific topic, to evoke the essence of olfactory poetics as a whole. (shrink)

‘Uncanny’ works by a number of contemporary artists are analysed in relation to the themes and insights of both cybernetics and existentialist philosophy. This reveals that central ideas from these largely neglected fields remain current and potent within innovative art practices. Artists employ cybernetic systems to provoke aesthetic sensations of the uncanny, while simultaneously encapsulating existentialist concerns. Pierre Huyghe’s mysterious installation responds to the life-breath of visitors to mutate human cancer cells. Susan Collins and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer construct cybernetic worlds-within-worlds to (...) render us beings-for-others during intimate encounters with strangers. Urich Lau and TC&A involve and implicate the audience in eerie expressions of what existentialist term being-towards-death. These artworks prompt feelings of separation, alienation and existential angst; and emphasize human estrangement within a mysterious, incomprehensible or absurd world. But a cybernetic-existentialist reading also reveals that their evocation of human disquiet and isolation is tempered by an equal emphasis on positive notions of feedback loops, ‘separation with communion’, existential freedom and authentic interactions with the world and with Others. The artworks articulate cybernetics’ and existentialism’s shared interest in collapsing boundaries and erasing distinctions: between agents within a system; between the self and the Other; and between perceiving, feeling and acting. (shrink)

This article aims to contribute to a (post)extractivist aesthetics at a time of ontological shifts, meaning an aesthetics that focuses on the role of art in struggles for (post)extractivist worlds. First, it argues for a contextualized approach to the use of the extractivism framework and proposes that this framework is particularly productive for approaching the socio-environmental crisis due to the way it allows us to engage with the ontological basis of this crisis. The article then builds on empirical (...) research conducted in Argentina to develop the concept of prefigurative ontological design, one of the key functions, it is proposed, of artistic practice in anti- and post-extractivist movements. In this way, the article aims to expand our understanding of the potential of extractivism as a framework of analysis and contributes to the theorization of the relationship between art and extractivism through the lens of political ontology, offering new concepts for developing a (post)extractivist aesthetics. (shrink)

The thesis that aesthetic testimony cannot provide aesthetic justification or knowledge is widely accepted--even by realists about aesthetic properties and values. This Kantian position is mistaken. Some testimony about beauty and artistic value can provide a degree of aesthetic justification and, perhaps, even knowledge. That is, there are cases in which one can be justified in making an aesthetic judgment purely on the basis of someone else's testimony. But widespread aesthetic unreliability creates a problem for much aesthetic testimony. Hence, most (...) testimony about art does not have much epistemic value. The situation is somewhat different with respect to aesthetic testimony about nature, proofs, and theories. (shrink)

In the strong or radical sense, the creation of a work of art succeeds, as Kant said, in exhibiting originality that is exemplary and unteachable. The creative artist generates new and valuable outcomes. He or she accomplishes this in a way that is neither predictable before it ..

It Studies The Historical Progression Of Aesthetics Both Indian And Western Since Ancient Times, Focussing On The Landmarks In The Course Of Its Development And Theories On Art, Beauty And Related Concepts.