In this article I chart an indirect if not oblique path through my own theoretical formation as a social and feminist art historian, informed by Marxist cultural studies but deeply engaged with issues of difference and gender, to the response Zygmunt Bauman made to a book I gave him that I had reason to believe would resonate with his work. It did not. Indeed, my kind of theoretically informed visual and cultural analysis was indecipherable despite the influence of his writing (...) after 1989 on my work. Gender was not a topic for Bauman. Feminist theory remained an impenetrable territory. Art (as opposed to culture) was not to be theorized. Yet, in his later work on liquid modernity, Bauman incorporated the idea that we are all now artists of life. Here I recognized an oblique and unjustified if not misdirected dismissal of the working-class British artist Tracey Emin. My article concludes with my reading of her video work, Why I Never Became a Dancer, which poignantly and defiantly exposes the social violence and violations of class, race and gender in British society which she experienced. I seek to demonstrate how Bauman’s acute, but often academically devalued, attentiveness to the vernacular and quotidian forms of cultural experience and its ability to register and reveal changing social forms and forces should have enabled him to see Emin’s work as equally acute and culturally significant. (shrink)

But while the literature of art is, in publishers' terms, booming, it has in one respect suffered a loss. During the past two hundred years there has usually been some important figure who acted as a censor and an apologist of the contemporary scene, a Diderot, a Baudelaire, a Ruskin or a Roger Frye. Who amongst our living authors plays this important role? What name springs to mind? I would suggest that no name actually springs; the last of our grandly (...) influential critics was Sir Herbert Read and since his death, whatever else modern art may or may not possess, it has no prophet. This is not to say that aesthetic prophets are necessarily desirable nor that there are not some very conscientious and extremely perceptive critics at work today; in view of the fact that I am within a fortnight exhibiting my work in a London dealer's gallery , it would be folly to deny it. But it is I believe true that for better or for worse we have no grand pundit of living art and I believe that this lack may be concerned with what I see as a certain diminution in the role of the art critic, a certain decay in this department of literature. It is a tendency which I regret and the causes of which I want to try to discuss. It arises I believe from a misunderstanding concerning the proper functions of the critic and this confusion of purpose will be my theme. First, however, I think that I should glance at two important circumstances which make the work of an art critic particularly difficult today. Quentin Bell, professor of the history and theory of art at Sussex University, has written Virginia Woolf: A Biography, Of Human Finery, Ruskin, Victorian Artists, and, Bloomsbury. His article, "Art and the Elite," appeared in the first issue of Critical Inquiry. "The Art Critic and the Art Historian" was originally delivered as the Leslie Stephen lecture at the University of Cambridge on November 26, 1973. Other contributions are "CRITICAL RESPONSE: Notes and Exchanges" , and "Bloomsbury and 'the Vulgar Passions'". (shrink)

Art historians and philosophers often talk about the interpretive significance of titles, but few have bothered with their historical origins. This omission has led to the assumption that an artwork's title is its proper name, since names and titles share the essential function of facilitating reference to their bearers. But a closer look at the development of our titling practices shows a significant point of divergence from standard analyses of proper names: the semantic content of a title is often (...) crucial to the identification, individuation, and interpretation of its associated artwork. This paper represents a first step towards an empirically centred study of our titling practices. I argue that, in order to accept titles as proper names, we must first recognize the social, rather than the referential, function of naming. (shrink)

Art historians have long viewed southern Italy, especially the Salento region in Apulia, as a Byzantine artistic province even centuries after Byzantine rule ended there in c. 1070. The Orthodox monastery of Santa Maria di Cerrate, near Lecce, is widely considered to possess some of the region’s “most Byzantine” paintings (twelfth to fourteenth centuries). Yet a close examination of these frescoes reveals significant iconographic and stylistic differences from alleged Byzantine norms. A historiographic synopsis and review of problematic definitions of (...) “Byzantine” art are followed in this article by a critique of reductionist labels. Embracing the concept of vagueness offers an alternative way to think about Cerrate and similar borderline cases—not in terms of fixed categories (“Byzantine” or “Western”), but as points on an art-historical continuum that is enriched by acknowledging complexity. (shrink)

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Original Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Table of Contents -- INTRODUCTION -- VOLTAIRE -- HUME -- ROBERTSON -- GIBBON -- INDEX.

From the modern period until the present day, artworks have exhibited a well-known paradox: they promise a rich aesthetic experience and revolutionary qualities of innovation while simultaneously serving as a luxury commodity whose sale is directed toward a global class of oligarchs. Art's Properties proposes a new way of understanding this paradox, relating art's qualities-its properties-to its status as commercial property. In Art's Properties, esteemed art historian and theorist David Joselit argues that art's fundamental ontological property is its capacity to (...) give access to experiences of alterity--the state of being other, or different. These experiences may appear as the image of a god, or the utopian dimensions of a black square on a white ground. Joselit goes on to explore artwork's relation to infinitude. As he explains, every work of art, in its material and visual qualities, can be host to an unlimited number of events and encounters with spectators, which persist through and over time. This infinitude is curtailed as art becomes property and is made to serve as a representation. In the modern period, white artists have been presumed to manifest an unmarked, supposedly neutral national character in Europe and the United States, while artists of color are often made to stand in for the identity attributed to them. In place of this dynamic of representation, Art's Properties will advocate for privileging narration over representation. While representation is finite-one thing is put in the place of another-narration has no end; it can be multiplied to encompass the many stories an artwork might enable. In focusing on the forms of narration that an artwork can contain, this book explores art's infinite aesthetic and material alterity. (shrink)

In her excellent "Feminist Art History and De Facto Significance," for example, aesthetician Susan L. Feagin explains how her initial skepticism about Continental approaches-especially those drawing on Foucault, Marx, Levi-Strauss, Lacan, and "even Derrida and poststructuralist literary theory" - gave way to an appreciation of how these approaches encourage, in a way analytic aesthetics does not, "the trenchant analyses and acute observations that have emerged from feminist art historians" (305). And, indeed, although she goes on to suggest how traditional (...) aesthetics might accommodate feminist and other politically informed analyses, she cautions that "it is too easy to miss the most innovative aspects of another's view if one tries to understand it only in terms of one's own theoretical perspective" (305). (from review by Sally Markowitz, Hypatia Vol. 11, No. 3 (Summer, 1996), pp. 169-172). (shrink)

A two year artistic project "Cuerpos-Manos en la Vida Cotidiana" is documented in this catalogue of art and art theory in relation to the body and to daily life. A collective of 11 artists and art historians reflect on their contribution to the project, from the proposition, action, result and media. Many contributions deal with women, gender.

This essay attempts a restatement of the relationship between art and science in terms of “making” and “knowing.” It first surveys the various ways art and science were related in the early modern period, arguing that one result of the new naturalistic representation was the emergence of a new visual culture that reinforced appeals to eyewitness and firsthand experience and in some cases fostered a new examination of European culture. At the same time, art, understood as the work of the (...) human hand in imitating nature, came to be viewed as one of the central characteristics that distinguished European society from the past. Moreover, artist/artisans helped constitute the aims and methods of the study of nature during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, articulating a new kind of authority for nature and providing the artworks that engendered a culture of nature study and collection. Thus art and artisans were fundamental motors of the Scientific Revolution. More attention to the visual culture of early modern Europe, including religious and devotional imagery, and seeking out intersections between making and knowing, as some art historians studying techniques have begun to do, will add to our understanding of the relationship between art and science in the early modern period. (shrink)

Debates over the 'end of art' have tended to obscure Hegel's work on the arts themselves. Benjamin Rutter opens this study with a defence of art's indispensability to Hegel's conception of modernity; he then seeks to reorient discussion toward the distinctive values of painting, poetry, and the novel. Working carefully through Hegel's four lecture series on aesthetics, he identifies the expressive possibilities particular to each medium. Thus, Dutch genre scenes animate the everyday with an appearance of vitality; metaphor frees language (...) from prose; and Goethe's lyrics revive the banal routines of love with imagination and wit. Rutter's important study reconstructs Hegel's view not only of modern art but of modern life and will appeal to philosophers, literary theorists, and art historians alike. (shrink)

How to engage the public in a reflection on the most pressing ethical issues of our time? What if part of the solution lies in adopting an interdisciplinary and collaborative strategy to shed light on critical issues in bioethics? An example is Art + Bioéthique, an innovative project that brought together bioethicists, art historians and artists with the aim of expressing bioethics through arts in order to convey the “sensitive” aspect of many health ethics issues. The aim of this (...) project was threefold: 1) to identify and characterize mechanisms for the meeting of arts and bioethics; 2) to experiment with and co-construct a dialogue between arts and bioethics; and 3) to initiate a public discussion on bioethical issues through the blending of arts and bioethics. In connection with an exhibition held in March 2016 at the Espace Projet, a non-profit art space in Montréal, the project developed a platform that combined artworks, essays and cultural & scientific mediation activities related to the work of six duos of young bioethics researchers and emerging artists. Each duo worked on a variety of issues, such as the social inclusion of disabled people, the challenges of practical applications of nanomedicine and regenerative medicine, and a holistic approach to contemporary diseases. This project, which succeeded in stimulating an interdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration between bioethics and arts, is an example of an innovative approach to knowledge transfer that can move bioethics reflection into the public space. (shrink)

This reader, a companion to The Open University's four-volume Art of the Twentieth Century series, offers a variety of writings by art historians and art theorists. The writings were originally published as freestanding essays or chapters in books, and they reflect the diversity of art historical interpretations and theoretical approaches to twentieth-century art. Accessible to the general reader, this book may be read independently or to supplement the materials explored in the four course texts. The volume includes a general (...) introduction as well as a brief introduction to each piece, outlining its origin and relevance. (shrink)

1. I want to discuss a new area of scientific research called neuro-aesthetics, which is the study of art by neuroscientists. The most prominent champions of neuroaesthetics are V.S. Ramachandran and Semir Zeki, both of whom have both made ambitious claims about their work. Ramachandran says boldly that he has discovered “the key to understanding what art really is”, and that his theory of art can be tested by brain imaging experiments, although he does not describe these experiments, or explain (...) what results the theory predicts (Ramachandran and Hirstein 1999, 17). Zeki, who originally coined the term “neuro-aesthetics”, claims to have laid the foundations for understanding “the biological basis of aesthetic experience”, and to have formulated a “neurobiological definition of art” (Zeki 1999, 2, 22). If these claims are true, we are at the dawn of a new age in the study of art. Up to now, most of the people studying art have been historians, some of whom can read Latin, but hardly any of whom have mastered even the rudiments of brain science. And aesthetics has been in the hands of philosophers, who still disagree among themselves about ideas that were stated in the fourth century BC. Neuroaesthetics is different. As Ramachandran (2000, 19) says: “These ideas have the advantage that, unlike the vague notions of philosophers and art historians, they can be tested experimentally”. So, is neuro-aesthetics the next big thing? I want to assess its prospects, starting with Ramachandran. (shrink)

To write a history “from antiquity to the present” of classical art or literature (or, worst of all, classicism) is the ultimate nightmare aspiration for a scholar whose colleagues are attentive methodologists. The product, when there is one (which I add because the aspiration can yield paralysis), is always in part an apologetic treatise on historical method. Professor Vout—of Christ's College, Cambridge—apologizes with the first word of her subtitle, A, which stresses that many differing histories may be as valid as (...) her own. The next two words, Life History, imply that her study is unauthorized, conjectural, a bit personal or informal, and reliant to an extent on unconfirmable stories. Her book, she tells readers, is of necessity an arrangement of “fragments” and “a mapping not of facts, but of ways in which Greek and Roman artifacts experience history.” She sets down, moreover, as a rule that “classical” is not “a self-standing category: it is always relational” (which historians of the novel have been telling us for many decades about “realism”).We might expect the result of Vout's axioms to be evenhanded diffidence when treating definitions of the classical, and indeed she entertains even the idea of Jeff Koons—maker of Balloon Venus (Orange) and Gazing Ball (Barberini Faun)—as a classical sculptor. There is, however, one approach that she dismisses out of hand: the obsession of classical humanism with authenticity and its renascence. She objects especially to research into the original conditions of objects and to the application of increasingly intrusive methods of restoring them. As she writes, “ ‘Real knowledge’ comes not from antiquities that have been ripped from their original context, cleaned and reconstituted for display in galleries and glass cabinets. ‘Real knowledge’ comes from antiquities that carry their dirt with them.”What Vout, as a critic of humanism, means by dirt is patina—the residue, interesting and sometimes beautiful in itself, of the use and misuse of objects. Dirt is a word that would occur to a humanist art historian when examining the patina of a Greek or Roman object. Vout's use of the word is a parodic expression of reverse snobbery. When studying changes, whether mistakes or enhancements, in a Greek or Roman document, a humanist literary historian would speak of corruption and edit the corrupt text by means of processes that humanist editors invented and perfected. Despite the humanists’ devotion to the recovery of classical learning, however, once a Renaissance edition of a manuscript was in print, the original, however rare, was often destroyed or lost. In effect, the work was reborn, better than new. Rebirth is not the same as preservation: though both are perhaps conservative (or better, in Ulysses's words, “rere regardant”), a renascence or a resurrection is cataclysmic.The humanist approach to the past can appear unlovable and is certainly arrogant, but it can also inspire awe and gratitude. The work of Michelangelo depended on it, and so (more to the point) did Martin Luther's. Vout's attitude toward dirt (patina, corruption, misprision, insertions, recontextualizations, bowdlerizations, misappropriations, translocations) resembles that of Catholic theologians to the depositum fidei. Restoring the original conditions of the Christian church involved methods of research learned from Renaissance humanists and the removal, often destructive, of the “deposit” or residue or patina that adhered to, distorted, discolored, and obscured the conditions of the “primitive church.” A Roman Catholic may well dislike the processes that Luther set in motion, but imagine a scholarly history of Christianity that mentioned Protestantism only to regret its existence.Still, Vout's reasoning, it seems to me, is more sophisticated in its defense of dirt and in its criticism of restoration than any offered against the Protestants’ reasoning during the Counter-Reformation. Consider, for instance, this inspiring passage: “When the curators at the Munich Glyptothek removed Thorwaldsen's restorations from the Aegina pediments, they did not so much take them back to a pristine state as out of the feedback loop, rendering them damaged goods. It was not a restriction of avenues or a change of direction that was being enacted here, but a refusal to speak the language, or rather an insistence that the only language worth speaking was an academic [humanist, restorationist] one.... In 2011, the Glyptothek marked the two hundredth year of the pediments’ discovery by putting new versions of Thorvaldsen's restored figures on display. They had relearned the lingo. For art to be ‘classical,’ it has to know its place in the discourse.” May lingo and feedback loop have successful careers in the lexicon of classical scholarship. “Far from producing a nostalgic narrative,” as Vout informs us, “the lessons learned from looking back ensure that we keep traveling.”. (shrink)

_Art and Mourning_ explores the relationship between creativity and the work of self-mourning in the lives of 20th century artists and thinkers. The role of artistic and creative endeavours is well-known within psychoanalytic circles in helping to heal in the face of personal loss, trauma, and mourning. In this book, Esther Dreifuss-Kattan, a psychoanalyst, art therapist and artist - analyses the work of major modernist and contemporary artists and thinkers through a psychoanalytic lens. In coming to terms with their own (...) mortality, figures like Albert Einstein, Louise Bourgeois, Paul Klee, Eva Hesse and others were able to access previously unknown reserves of creative energy in their late works, as well as a new healing experience of time outside of the continuous temporality of everyday life. Dreifuss-Kattan explores what we can learn about using the creative process to face and work through traumatic and painful experiences of loss._Art and Mourning _will inspire psychoanalysts and psychotherapists to understand the power of artistic expression in transforming loss and traumas into perseverance, survival and gain. Art and Mourning offers a new perspective on trauma and will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, psychologists, clinical social workers and mental health workers, as well as artists and art historians. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 40.2 (2006) 105-117 [Access article in PDF] Art and Failure Daniel A. Siedell Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden The Genius Decision: The Extraordinary and the Postmodern Condition, by Klaus Ottmann. Putnam, CT: Spring Publications, 2004, 181 pp., $18.50 paperback. Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde, by Branden Joseph. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003, 450 pp., $34.95 hardcover. The most optimistic ethics (...) have all begun by emphasizing the element of failure involved in the condition of man; without failure, no ethics. Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity1Failure is an inescapable part of the human condition. It is also an inescapable part of extraordinary human achievement. In fact, it is because failure is woven so deeply into their fabric that makes certain endeavors, like the arts, philosophy, science, and even sports, so extraordinary, so compelling, and ultimately so meaningful. There is therefore a close—but often underexamined—connection between extraordinary achievement and failure in the history of the arts and culture in the West. Two very different books, one a work of philosophy and the other a work of art history, converge on the presence of failure in extraordinary human achievement. New York-based art critic and independent curator Klaus Ottmann offers a philosophical study of genius from a postmodern perspective entitled The Genius Decision: The Extraordinary and the Postmodern Condition. Art historian Branden Joseph, who is assistant professor at the University of California-Irvine, offers a revisionist interpretation of Robert Rauschenberg's aesthetic project in Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde. The Genius Decision offers an illuminating philosophical framework within which to read Random Order.Ottmann begins his study with the following question: "How does one account for those extraordinary and exceptional works of art and literature that set one artist apart from the others; works that most artists, however skilled, would never be able to produce; that exert great influence on others" (13). Ottmann answers this question by interpreting the work of Franz Kafka, [End Page 105] Spinoza, Søren Kierkegaard, Friederich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Martin Heidegger through a postmodernist lens provided in part by Jean-François Lyotard, Julia Kristeva, and other theorists. For example, he reads Kafka through Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari; Spinoza's Ethics through Deleuze; Kierkegaard through Adorno; Nietzsche through Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Heidegger; and Wittgenstein through P. M. S. Hacker. Foundational for Ottmann's thesis is theorist Julia Kristeva's concept of the Abject and its relationship to Jouissance—meaning "enjoyment," often connoting a sensual, even sexual pleasure—which has entered philosophical discourse via literary theorist Roland Barthes and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. For Kristeva, the Abject is the pressing of the "Unrepresentable" that requires a "sacrifice" of Jouissance; that is, a leap toward or a response to the inability to represent or give adequate form to this primordial ground of pure experiential bliss. For Ottmann, extraordinary achievement in art and philosophy consists of intentional and absolute leaps into certain failure in giving representation to what cannot be represented—despite its impossibility. This is what Ottmann calls the "Genius Decision." In contrast to passive explanations of extraordinary achievement, such as "accidental genius" and "physical genius," in which the individual can claim fortuitous circumstances or innate talent, the Genius Decision involves intentionality; it is a "decision" of some kind. But what kind of decision is it? Ottmann argues that it is an "active-passive" one. He then analyzes each of these influential thinkers as offering unique manifestations of the Genius Decision in their attempt to represent the Unrepresentable.Key to the Abject-Jouissance relationship is Ottmann's understanding of postmodernism. Rather than viewing it as a historical movement, Ottmann, following Jean-François Lyotard, regards it as a "condition," that is, as a nascent state within modernism. Ottmann characterizes the modern as recognizing and dwelling in the Abject, while the postmodern leaves the ambiguity of the Abject behind for the "certainty of failure" (49). The Genius Decision, then, comes out of a postmodern awareness of the impossibility of its... (shrink)

In this acclaimed work, first published in 1986, world-renowned scholar Arthur C. Danto explored the inextricably linked but often misunderstood relationship between art and philosophy. In light of the book's impact -- especially the essay "The End of Art," which dramatically announced that art ended in the 1960s -- this enhanced edition includes a foreword by Jonathan Gilmore that discusses how scholarship has changed in response to it. Complete with a new bibliography of work on and influenced by Danto's ideas, (...) _The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art_ continues to be of interest to anyone who thinks seriously about art, as well as to philosophers, aestheticians, and art historians. (shrink)

Artists, art critics, art historians, and cognitive psychologists have asserted that visual artists perceive the world differently than nonartists and that these perceptual abilities are the product of knowledge of techniques for working in an artistic medium. In support of these claims, Kozbelt (2001) found that artists outperform nonartists in visual analysis tasks and that these perceptual advantages are statistically correlated with drawing skill. We propose a model to explain these results that is derived from a diagnostic framework for (...) object recognition and recent research in cognitive neuroscience on selective visual attention. This research demonstrates that endogenous shifts of visual attention enhance the encoding of expected features in the visual field and inhibit the perception of potential distracters. Moreover, it demonstrates complementary roles for spatial schemata and motor plans in visual attention. We argue that artists develop novel spatial schemata, which enable them to recognize and reproduce stimulus features sufficient for adequate artistic production in a medium, and that these schemata become encoded as motor plans as artists develop technical proficiency in a medium. We hypothesize that artists' perceptual advantages can therefore, be explained by the role spatial schemata and motor plans play in selective attention. (shrink)

The paper examines Danto's ideas about the “birth of art” from three perspectives: his concept of a natural aesthetic instinct; his concept of the birth of art “in a narrow sense,” in the transfiguration of substitutes (an event or possibility that he dates and places in various ways); and his concept of the constant birth of art, “in a larger sense,” among “artists‐outside‐the artworld.” The paper comments on these notions, some of their sources, and some of their interest and implications, (...) from an art historian's perspective. (shrink)

_The Arts and the Definition of the Human_ introduces a novel theory that our selves—our thoughts, perceptions, creativity, and other qualities that make us human—are determined by our place in history, and more particularly by our culture and language. Margolis rejects the idea that any concepts or truths remain fixed and objective through the flow of history and reveals that this theory of the human being as culturally determined and changing is necessary to make sense of art. He shows that (...) a painting, sculpture, or poem cannot have a single correct interpretation because our creation and perception of art will always be mitigated by our historical and cultural contexts. Calling upon philosophers ranging from Parmenides and Plato to Kant, Hegel, and Wittgenstein, art historians from Damisch to Elkins, artists from Van Eyck to Michelangelo to Wordsworth to Duchamp, Margolis creates a philosophy of art interwoven with his philosophical anthropology which pointedly challenges prevailing views of the fine arts and the nature of personhood. (shrink)

The paper argues that something is art only if (i) it belongs to a special kind of internal history and (ii) needs to be understood and appreciated in the light of such history. This goes against both the traditional view that art has a timeless, ahistorical essence and the historicist view that there can be no ahistorical perspective for understanding art. The paper draws on Hegel’s view that art needs to be understood through its history, but rejects the idea that (...) the history of art has an end in the double sense of a goal and an end point. It also rejects Arthur Danto’s Hegel-inspired claim that the ahistorical essence of art is revealed at the end of its history and opens the door to a natural alliance between philosophers of art and art historians. (shrink)

WHAT is art? Classificatory disputes.. Classificatory disputes about what is art Art historians and philosophers of art have long had classificatory disputes about art regarding whether a particular cultural form or piece of work should be classified as art. Disputes about what does and does not count as art continue to occur today -/- Defining art is difficult if not impossible. Aestheticians and art philosophers often engage in disputes about how to define art. By its original and broadest definition, (...) art (from the Latin ars, meaning “skill” or “craft”) is the product or process of the effective application of a body of knowledge, most often using a set of skills; this meaning is preserved in such phrases as “liberal arts” and “martial arts”. However, in the modern use of the word, which rose to prominence after 1750, “art” is commonly understood to be skill used to produce an aesthetic result (Hatcher, 1999). (shrink)

The history of Australian art has been punctuated with survey exhibitions in London from the late 19th century to the present, just as our artists were drawn to Europe both to study and for the possibilities of wider recognition. This review article focuses on the post-war years from 1950 to 1965, a high point of Australian cultural expatriatism focused on London – now viewed as a significant episode in the history of Australian art. The two most influential figures supporting key (...) Australian artists were Kenneth Clark (promoting the work of Sidney Nolan and Russell Drysdale) and Bryan Robertson, director of the avant-gardist Whitechapel Gallery. Robertson was responsible for organizing the most significant of these exhibitions of Australian art: Australian Painting Today in 1961, focusing on the work of a younger generation of artists that included Charles Blackman, John Olsen, Fred Williams and Brett Whiteley. Australian’s most significant art historian, Bernard Smith, who had also sought to bring about comparable exhibitions, but without success, challenged the orientation and the cultural framing by Robertson and the young Australian art critic Robert Hughes in the catalogue of this key exhibition. (shrink)

British art historian Charles Harrison presumes the existence of a patriarchal world with power in the hands of men who dominate the representation of women and femininity. He applauds the ground-breaking work of feminist theorists who have questioned this imbalance of power since the 1970s. He stops short, however, of accepting their claims that all women have been represented by male artists as images of “utter passivity” (p. 4), routinely reduced by the male gaze to the status of exploited sexual (...) objects, or that women’s subjectivity is eroded by the visual treatment they receive at the hands of male artists such as Manet and Picasso. He wants to show that what is depicted in the picture plane by the (typically male) artist and enjoyed by the (typically male) spectator is more nuanced than just a simple privileged understanding between two men. He adds a third (and possibly fourth or more) party to the mix when he significantly redefines and expands our concept of the gaze: “A gaze may also be conceived of as a function of a painting’s represented content” (p. 9). In other words, a gaze may be “addressed outward by a represented figure,” and regardless of who and where, “the assumption conveyed by the term [‘gaze’] is that some differential and usually asymmetrical relation will be at stake in any exchange between one who directs the gaze and another at whom it is directed. In fact, it is just this difference—in age, in sex, in class, in interest, in power —that the operation of the gaze tends to mark” (p. 9). Referring to a woman depicted within the picture plane, he asks us to consider, “What does it feel like to look like this?” (p. 21) in order to entertain our many emotional responses and interpretations. When he adds, “What does it feel like to whom?” the sexual difference of the spectator also clearly comes into play. (shrink)

The question whether art is of any epistemic value is an old question in the philosophy of art. Whereas many contemporary artists, art-critics, and art-historians answer this question affirmatively, many contemporary philosophers remain skeptical. If art is of epistemic significance, they maintain, then it has to contribute to our quest of achieving our most basic epistemic aim, namely knowledge.Unfortunately, recent and widely accepted analyses of knowledge make it very hard to see how art might significantly contribute to the quest (...) of achieving this aim. Hence, by the lights of recent epistemology, it is questionable whether art is of any epistemic value. In order to hold on to the epistemic value of art, one has three options: (a) reject the recent analyses of knowledge that make the epistemic value of art questionable, (b) accept the recent analyses of knowledge but argue that they are compatible with the epistemic value of art, or (c) find another epistemic aim (besides knowledge) and show that art is of significant help in achieving this aim. In this paper I will argue that, at least with respect to pictorial art, option (c) seems promising. By reconsidering some basic insights and ideas from Nelson Goodman we can identify (objective) understanding as an epistemic aim to which pictorial art makes a significant contribution. (shrink)

University teachers, as is well known, commit acts of despotism. About three years ago I committed such an act. I told my students that I would not accept papers which included the words protagonist, basic , alienation, total , dichotomy, and a few others including elite and elitist. On consideration I decided to remove the ban on the last two for it seemed to me that there was no other term that could be used to discuss what is, after all, (...) an interesting idea.It is of course true that my students and I use the word incorrectly. An elite must surely be a chosen body. Congress, the police, the final heat of the Miss World contest, and the Bolshevik Party are elites, whereas an aristocracy or a plutocracy—unless one believes the rich and the nobility to be chosen by God—are not. Nevertheless, when we use the word elite in connection with the visual arts it is certainly related to, though not synonymous with, class. An elite is usually a group within a relatively prosperous class. The patrons of the Renaissance were, presumably, at the apex of the social system: on the other hand, the patrons of the Impressionists belonged to a comparatively humble section of the middle classes. But it will be found that an aesthetic elite does always enjoy certain advantages of wealth and leisure and education.Quentin Bell is professor of the history and theory of art, Sussex University. He has written Virginia Woolf: A Biography, Of Human Finery, Ruskin, Victorian Artists and Bloomsbury. Other contributions to Critical Inquiry are "The Art Critic and the Art Historian" , "CRITICAL RESPONSE: Notes and Exchanges" , and "Bloomsbury and 'the Vulgar Passions'". (shrink)

Eighteenth-century art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768) shared with Hegel a profound admiration for the art and culture of ancient Greece. Both viewed ancient Greece as, in some sense, an ideal to which the modern world might aspire—a pinnacle of spiritual perfection and originality that contemporary civilization might, through an understanding of ancient Greek culture, one day equal or surpass. This rather competitive form of nostalgia suggests a paradoxical demand to produce an original and higher state of culture through the (...) imitation of another. In Hegel’s writings, this paradox goes beyond the relation of the modern world to the ancient world—he exposes the same paradox in ancient Greece’s relation to its own predecessors. The solution to the latter paradox—the possibility of the realization of ancient Greece as an original and self-contained civilization despite its cultural debts—would also, then, be the key to repeating the success of the ancient world in the modern, the overcoming of modern Europe’s cultural debt to the ancient world. The present essay examines how this paradox is revealed and resolved in the writings of Winckelmann and Hegel, and shows how this strategy of culture production—as imputed to the ancient world and aspired to in the modern—simultaneously attempts to justify and conceal a self-deceptive practice of cultural and political conquest. My focus will be on the two writers’ interpretations of ancient Greek art since, as I will suggest, their solution to the paradox of culture production turns out to be modeled upon the role of ancient Greek art in the invention and actualization of a cultural ideal of beauty, unity, and self-containment. (shrink)

Art has the power to affect our thinking, changing not only the way we view and interact with the world but also how we create it. In Art in Mind , Ernst van Alphen probes this idea of art as a commanding force with the capacity to shape our intellect and intervene in our lives. Rather than interpreting art as merely a reflection of our social experience or a product of history, van Alphen here argues that art is a historical (...) agent, or a cultural creator, that propels thought and experience forward. Examining a broad range of works, van Alphen—a renowned art historian and cultural theorist—demonstrates how art serves a socially constructive function by actually experimenting with the parameters of thought. Employing work from artists as diverse as Picasso, Watteau, Francis Bacon, Marlene Dumas, and Matthew Barney, he shows how art confronts its viewers with the "pain points" of cultural experience-genocide, sexuality, diaspora, and transcultural identity-and thereby transforms the ways in which human existence is conceived. Van Alphen analyzes how art visually "thinks" about these difficult cultural issues, tapping into an understudied interpretation of art as the realm where ideas and values are actively created, given form, and mobilized. In this way, van Alphen's book is a work of art in itself as it educates us in a new mode of thought that will forge equally new approaches and responses to the world. (shrink)

That art historians have felt it necessary to emulate this effort to express personal input can be explained by our need to gain credibility in that aspect of our work that is indistinguishable in method from other historical research: the reconstruction, through documents and artifacts, of past events, conditions, and attitudes. Most of us simply ignore the ambivalence of our position; I cannot recall having heard or read discussions of it, but it is bound to creep out from under (...) the rug. If a student asks me why I think Rembrandt and Picasso are good artists—which most students are too well trained to do—and if I answer that judgments of value are not discussed by historians, I am within my rights, like a witness at a congressional hearing claiming the protection of the Fifth Amendment. But I ought to be found in contempt of the classroom. And if I try to answer seriously, I ought not begin by saying that I chose Rembrandt because he has been acknowledged by generations to have been a great artist but rather because I find more to think, feel, and speak about in his works than in those of, for example, Nicolaes Maes, and because I believe that the student stands to gain more by looking at them. I want the student to have the most rewarding experiences, and, as a result, perhaps to learn to make value discriminations of his own—even ones different from mine and from the so-called consensus of history—and ultimately to explain the grounds on which he makes them. This means having to know and to explain what I think is "rewarding." James S. Ackerman, professor of fine arts at Harvard University, is the author of, among other works, The Architecture of Michelangelo, Art and Archaeology, The Cortile del Belvedere, and Palladio. He is currently writing on Renaissance art, science, and naturalism and making a film on Andrea Palladio and his influence in America. "Transactions in Architectural Design," his previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, appeared in the Winter 1974 issue. (shrink)

What is art? The philosophers and historians contributing to this volume address the assertion that the term "art" no longer holds meaning.

Mary Devereaux has suggested, in an overview of feminist aesthetics[1], that feminist aesthetics constitutes a revolutionary approach to the field: "aesthetics cannot simply 'add on' feminist theories as it might add new works by [ Nelson ] Goodman, Arthur Danto or George Dickie. To take feminism seriously involves rethinking our basic concepts and recasting the history of the discipline." In particular, feminist theory involves a rejection of "deeply entrenched assumptions about the universal value of art and aesthetic experience." Overthrowing these (...) assumptions "constitutes what art historian, Linda Nochlin, describes as a Kuhnian paradigm shift."[2] Near the end of her essay, Devereaux returns to this theme: "If feminism constitutes a new paradigm, then we may wish to ponder how far the old model of aesthetics and the new are commensurable. Is traditional aesthetics contingently or necessarily associated with patriarchy? Can the 'gender-neutral' aesthetics of the traditional model be reformed or must it be rejected?". (shrink)

Why should a person, and in the context of this conference particularly an art historian, take seriously the notion of the aesthetic, its discovery and/or rediscovery? Aesthetics might after all be considered at best something of a distraction from bread and butter historical and sociological analysis, and at worst entirely incompatible with it. Pursuing the line further it might be urged that, since on the one hand aesthetics is about 'how things appear'—i.e. is subject to individual predilection, taste and feeling—and (...) on the other, historical analysis is about the careful and scholarly reconstruction of a past social reality, the two must be at loggerheads. What the art historian writes about on a weekday whilst wearing her hard hat at the office must not be confused with what she personally feels, wandering around a gallery in her woolly hat at the weekend. (shrink)

This paper, based on a talk given at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, is presented as an example of philosophy done in an art gallery. Its subject is Tom Roberts’ painting Holiday Sketch at Coogee (1888), and as well as responding directly to the painting in the environment of the gallery, it draws on the author's memories of seeing that painting in other times and places. It draws on these personal experiences to relate Roberts’ painting to a controversial (...) idea laid out by art historian Heinrich Wölfflin, and to more recent conventionalist and resemblance theories of pictorial representation. It finishes by affirming one of Roberts’ important achievements: his discarding of inherited European ways of picture‐making, and his place among the first generation of non‐indigenous artists to represent the real colours of the Australian landscape. (shrink)