This paper discusses Hans-Georg Gadamer’s account of what he sees as a major change in the approach to the Western philosophical and aesthetic traditions that began in the second half of the eighteenth century, and the results of this change today. According to Gadamer, these traditions ceased to be binding at this time and became objects of historical research. Instead of being seen even as potential sources of insight, traditional knowledge claims and works of art were subjected to historical and (...) aesthetic analysis. And Gadamer holds that these approaches have partially come to encompass the present as well. Thus, modern art has often downplayed cognitive and pedagogical tasks in proceeding in a purely aesthetic, playful way. And the study of history has been seen as providing insight into the contextually determined nature of presuppositions, those of the modern age included. According to Gadamer, this unduly limits the possibilities of both art and history to provide learning. (shrink)

From the late-fifteenth century onwards, scholars across Europe began to write books about how to read and evaluate histories. These pioneering works - which often take surprisingly modern-sounding positions - grew from complex early modern debates about law, religion, and classical scholarship. In this book, based on the Trevelyan Lectures of 2005, Anthony Grafton explains why so many of these works were written, why they attained so much insight - and why, in the centuries that followed, most scholars (...) gradually forgot that they had existed. Elegant and accessible, What Was History? is a deliberate evocation of E. H. Carr’s celebrated and icononclastic Trevelyan Lectures on What Is History?, and will appeal to a broad readership of students, scholars and historical enthusiasts. Anthony Grafton is one of the most celebrated historians writing in English today, and What Was History? is a powerful and imaginative exploration of some central themes in the history of European ideas. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This essay explores ways to “write together” the awkwardly jointed histories of “science” and “medicine”—but it also includes other “arts” (in the old sense) and technologies. It draws especially on the historiography of medicine, but I try to use terms that are applicable across all of science, technology, and medicine (STM). I stress the variety of knowledges and practices in play at any time and the ways in which the ensembles change. I focus on the various relations of “science” (...) and “medicine,” as they were understood for a succession of periods—from mainly agricultural societies, through industrial societies, to our biomedical present—trying to sketch a history that encompasses daily practices and understandings as well as major conceptual and technical innovations. The model is meant to facilitate inquiry across topics and across times, including those to come. (shrink)

Modern aesthetics is divided into two branches – the Anglo-American and the Continental. A major cause of this division is their divergent views about the place of history in aesthetics, the first tending to minimize historical considerations, while the second readily embraces them. This article explores the place of history in André Malraux's theory of art and argues that his thinking quickly resolves this long-standing disagreement. (This text is a translation of the published French version.).

Abstract…observations of skylfull pylotts is the onlye waye to bring it in rule; for it passeth the reach of naturall philosophy. – Michael Gabriel, 1576 (Collinson, 1867, p. 30)Abstract The tension between empirical data and formal theory pervades the entire history of geomagnetism, from the Middle Ages up to the present day. This paper explores its early-modern history (1500–1800), using a hybrid approach: it applies a methodological framework used in modern geophysics to interpret early-modern developments, exploring to (...) what extent formal conjectures shaped observation and vice versa. A range of pertinent case studies supports classification of this entire period as proto-scientific, characterised by the initial formation of theories being largely disconnected from observational constraints, and their subsequent evolution being advanced primarily by their empirical falsification, and not necessarily associated with the introduction of an alternative. The few exceptional instances of purely data-driven discovery were essentially due to an improved signal-to-noise ratio. (shrink)

A History of Modern Aesthetics narrates the history of philosophical aesthetics from the beginning of the eighteenth century through the twentieth century. Aesthetics began with Aristotle's defense of the cognitive value of tragedy in response to Plato's famous attack on the arts in The Republic, and cognitivist accounts of aesthetic experience have been central to the field ever since. But in the eighteenth century, two new ideas were introduced: that aesthetic experience is important because of emotional impact - precisely (...) what Plato criticized - and because it is a pleasurable free play of many or all of our mental powers. This three-volume set tells how these ideas have been synthesized or separated by both the best-known and lesser-known aestheticians of modern times, focusing on Britain, France and Germany in the eighteenth century; Germany and Britain in the nineteenth; and Germany, Britain and the United States in the twentieth. (shrink)

Kristeller's article ‘The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics’ is a classic statement of the view, now widely adopted but rarely examined, that aesthetics became possible only in the eighteenth-century with the emergence of the fine arts. I wish to contest this view, for three reasons. Firstly, Kristeller's historical account can be questioned; alternative and equally plausible accounts are available. Secondly, ‘the modern system of the arts’ appears to have been neither a (...) system nor an agreed upon entity, but only a historical construct of Kristeller's own making that matches up with no known historical reality. Thirdly, while the concept of the fine arts existed in the eighteenth century, the assumption that it had an impact on the rise of aesthetic theory remains unproven and unnecessary. A more satisfactory account of aesthetic thought in antiquity can be given, once the ‘fine-arts’ objection has been cleared away. (shrink)

A History of Modern Aesthetics narrates the history of philosophical aesthetics from the beginning of the eighteenth century through the twentieth century. Aesthetics began with Aristotle's defense of the cognitive value of tragedy in response to Plato's famous attack on the arts in The Republic, and cognitivist accounts of aesthetic experience have been central to the field ever since. But in the eighteenth century, two new ideas were introduced: that aesthetic experience is important because of emotional impact - precisely (...) what Plato criticized - and because it is a pleasurable free play of many or all of our mental powers. This three-volume set tells how these ideas have been synthesized or separated by both the best-known and lesser-known aestheticians of modern times, focusing on Britain, France and Germany in the eighteenth century; Germany and Britain in the nineteenth; and Germany, Britain and the United States in the twentieth. (shrink)

This book presents a new and radical interpretation of some of Martin Heidegger’s most influential texts. The unfamiliar interpretations all seek to question and unframe hasty assessments of the concepts and constellations of thoughts surrounding Heidegger’s notion of modern technology.

This e-book written in Hungarian seeks to reconstruct “the aesthetic” in the modern sense of the word, from the mid-17th century to the 1730s, through the texts of mainly British authors such as John Dennis, Lord Shaftesbury, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Francis Hutcheson, George Berkeley, sometimes using their Spanish and French predecessors for contextualization. It assumes that “the aesthetic” is an unprecedented type of experience that had to be discovered, or rather invented; it is therefore more than a discussion (...) of some old, always existing quality or sensibility in a new theoretical guise. If the words “(school) philosophy”, “art” and “criticism” can be associated with the mostly systematic theories of aesthetics that emerged in the wake of Alexander G. Baumgarten as a loose characterisation, then the words “(popular) theology”, “nature” and “exercise” are even more so with the earlier texts that are on the table here, which played a role in the formation of “the aesthetic”. It seems that in this period, “the aesthetic” is understood above all as a new and intimate link between the sensual and the supernatural or spiritual, in which the former is not just an apropos or disposable means to the latter, but an indispensable and ever-present component that provides a constitutive framework for experience. Its unprecedented modernity lies in its nisus to capture the divine in the sensual and to make it present as sensual. In this new experiential form, both the “nature” of the transcendence and the spiritual economics of the beholder are reconfigured. The new “aesthetic” is connected to and associated with the full experience of life, the joy of existence, the openness to the transcendent through the sensuality of the natural or everyday world, the interplay of external determination and internal spontaneity, the enchanted state of mind experienced in a waking dream, the reinterpretation of the relationship between reality and fiction, the intense existential experience of spiritual and emotional movement provided by walking, wandering, boating or cheerful imagination. (shrink)

The ‘model approach’ facilitates a quantitative-oriented study of conceptual changes in large corpora. This paper implements the ‘model approach’ to investigate the erosion of the traditional art-nature distinction in early modern natural philosophy. I argue that a condition for this transformation has to be located in the late scholastic conception of final causation. I design a conceptual model to capture the art-nature distinction and formulate a working hypothesis about its early modern fate. I test my hypothesis on a (...) selected corpus of 25 works published in the Dutch academic milieu between 1607 and 1748. I analyse the corpus through a procedure based on concordancing of keywords associated with the model. I argue that the results obtained constitute a successful pilot study for the implementation of the model approach on larger scale research. (shrink)

This contribution demonstrates the benefits of a transatlantic history of early modern mining that encompasses both a cross-pollination of approaches and a critical reexamination of the field’s underlying assumptions. It applies to Álvaro Alonso Barba’s 1640 El arte de los metales conceptual frameworks developed by historians of early modern European mining, by scholars of labor and science in the colonial Andes, and by theorists of reader reception and scholarly practice. This analysis offers a revised understanding of Pamela Long’s (...) model of the “trading zone” as a vision of knowledge production promoted by elite Europeans and shaped by the dialogic model of knowledge production taught at European universities. Parallels between Barba and the German humanist and metallurgical author Georg Agricola (1494–1555) underscore the applicability of these findings with respect to Barba for early modern mining more generally. (shrink)

In The Psychologizing of Modernity, Mark Jarzombek examines the impact of psychology on twentieth-century aesthetics. Analysing the interface between psychology, art history and avant-gardist practices, he also reflects on the longevity of the myth of aesthetic individuality as it infiltrated not only avant-garde art, but also history writing. The principal focus of this study is pre-World War II Germany, where theories of empathy and Entartung emerged; and post-war America, where artists, critics and historians gradually shifted from their reliance on psychology (...) to philosophy, and, most recently, to theory. Included are discussions of writers such as Heinrich Wölfflin, Ludwig Volkmann, John Dewey, Vincent Scully and Richard Arnheim, among others. The Psychologizing of Modernity is a broad and erudite study of the evolution of modern aesthetic thinking in the fields of art and architectural history. (shrink)

A History of Modern Aesthetics narrates the history of philosophical aesthetics from the beginning of the eighteenth century through the twentieth century. Aesthetics began with Aristotle's defense of the cognitive value of tragedy in response to Plato's famous attack on the arts in The Republic, and cognitivist accounts of aesthetic experience have been central to the field ever since. But in the eighteenth century, two new ideas were introduced: that aesthetic experience is important because of emotional impact - precisely (...) what Plato criticized - and because it is a pleasurable free play of many or all of our mental powers. This set tells how these ideas have been synthesized or separated by aestheticians of modern times. This second volume tells how over the course of the century philosophers in Germany, Britain, and eventually the United States struggled to return to a broader approach to the value of aesthetic experience by finding room for the emotional and playful aspects of art. (shrink)

Written in the American tradition, American Modern: The Path Not Taken describes how four major American thinkers practiced philosophy non-reductively by incorporating the arts and other human activities. Tejera provides a detailed analysis of Peirce, Dewey, Santayana, and Buchler, showing that the importance they placed on the human can cure what is missing in recent philosophy. American Modern will interest philosophers, historians of philosophy, and scholars of American intellectual history.

The first systematic study of Kant's reception of and influence on visual art and art history.

Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Early Modern Art Heinrich Wölfflingetty research institute. 2015. pp. 356. £20.00.

This essay focuses on the logic of the aesthetic argument used in the eighteenth century as a conceptual tool for formulating the modern concept of “(fine) art(s).” The essay also examines the main developments in the history of the art of modernity which were initiated from the way the “nature” of art was conceived in early modern aesthetics. The author claims that the formulation of the “aesthetic nature” of art led to the process of the gradual disappearance of (...) all of the formal elements that had previously characterized the visual arts; the result was “emptiness” or “nothingness” as art. The author refers to this process in terms of “vanishing acts” that allow for the formulation of an aesthetics of absence in connection to twentieth-century art (complementing the Ästhetik der Absenz, formulated in German art theory). The author also briefly addresses the consequences that these processes have for the way contemporary art, and art world operate. (shrink)

A History of Modern Aesthetics narrates the history of philosophical aesthetics from the beginning of the eighteenth century through the twentieth century. Aesthetics began with Aristotle's defense of the cognitive value of tragedy in response to Plato's famous attack on the arts in The Republic, and cognitivist accounts of aesthetic experience have been central to the field ever since. But in the eighteenth century, two new ideas were introduced: that aesthetic experience is important because of emotional impact - precisely (...) what Plato criticized - and because it is a pleasurable free play of many or all of our mental powers. This book tells how these ideas have been synthesized or separated by aestheticians of modern times. This first volume recounts how philosophers in Britain, France, and Germany developed these new approaches and searched for ways to combine them with the cognitivism of traditional aesthetics. (shrink)

A History of Modern Aesthetics narrates the history of philosophical aesthetics from the beginning of the eighteenth century through the twentieth century. Aesthetics began with Aristotle's defense of the cognitive value of tragedy in response to Plato's famous attack on the arts in The Republic, and cognitivist accounts of aesthetic experience have been central to the field ever since. But in the eighteenth century, two new ideas were introduced: that aesthetic experience is important because of emotional impact - precisely (...) what Plato criticized - and because it is a pleasurable free play of many or all of our mental powers. This set tells how these ideas have been synthesized or separated by aestheticians of modern times. This third volume shows how philosophers of art in Germany, Britain, and the United States continued the debate over cognitivist versus alternative approaches to aesthetic experience that was at the heart of the discipline in the previous two centuries, while responding to the intellectual challenges of their own times as well. (shrink)

Rylands English MS 60, compiled for the Spencer family in the eighteenth century, contains 130 printed portraits of early modern artists gathered from diverse sources and mounted in two albums: 76 portraits in the first volume, which is devoted to northern European artists, and 54 in the second volume, containing Italian and French painters. Both albums of this ‘Collection of Engravings of Portraits of Painters’ were initially planned to include a written biography of each artist copied from the few (...) sources available in English at the time, but that part of the project was abandoned. This article relates English MS 60 to shifting practices of picturing art history. It examines the rise of printed artists’ portraits, tracing the divergent histories of the genre south and north of the Alps, and explores how biographical approaches to the history of art were being replaced, in the eighteenth century, by the development of illustrated texts about art. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Histories of Science in Early Modern Europe:IntroductionRobert GouldingIn 1713, Pierre Rémond de Montmort wrote to the mathematician Nicolas Bernoulli:It would be desirable if someone wanted to take the trouble to instruct how and in what order the discoveries in mathematics have come about.... The histories of painting, of music, of medicine have been written. A good history of mathematics, especially of geometry, would be a much more interesting (...) and useful work.... Such a work, if done well, could be regarded to some extent as a history of the human mind, since it is in this science, more than in anything else, that man makes known that gift of intelligence that God has given him to rise above all other creatures.1Such a history of mathematics was attempted by Jean-Etienne Montucla in his Histoire des mathématiques (first printed in 1758, and reissued in a [End Page 33] greatly expanded form in 1799).2 Montucla's great work is generally acknowledged as the first genuine history of mathematics. According to some modern historians, previous attempts at such a history had amounted to little more than collections of anecdotes, biographies or exhaustive bibliographies: "jumbles of names, dates and titles," as one writer in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography characterized them.3 Montucla, on the other hand, was thoroughly animated by the Enlightenment project expressed in Rémond's letter, and his Histoire was a philosophical history of the "development of the human mind," as he himself described it.4 It was precisely Montucla's vision of what mathematics meant and his conviction that mathematics itself must change in order to reflect the historical elevation of the human intellect, that allowed him to transform the scattered dates and anecdotes of his predecessors into a genuine history. All subsequent histories of mathematics—until the most recent social histories5 —have been in a sense "footnotes to Montucla."The papers here argue that there were indeed histories of mathematics before Montucla which are worthy of scholarly attention, and that the dismissal of Renaissance histories of science as nothing more than a "cloud of fine adjectives and metaphors" is unfair (although it contains a germ of truth). Anthony Grafton has argued in an article on the historical writings of Cardano, Rheticus, and Kepler, that the purpose of such texts was not so much to trace what actually happened, as to justify the study of a subject often derided—by both humanist and scholastic writers—as obscure, useless and undignified.6 The following four papers go further in arguing that writings in this genre (or, at least, some writings in this genre) were not limited to this characteristically humanist objective. Authors did not just use their histories to persuade others. They themselves relied on historical narratives in order to think about their discipline, define its parts, distinguish among its acceptable and unacceptable forms and prescribe its content [End Page 34] and method of teaching. By placing their discipline into a historical context shared by other, more mainstream humanistic arts, moreover, they could draw upon the large, narrative structures which Renaissance humanists had adapted to understand human intellectual and cultural development, origins, progress and decline.James Byrne's article highlights a disparity of vision between those humanists who treated the origin of the arts as just another subject for humanistic display; and those (like Regiomontanus) who were invested in the arts and wrote their histories from an insider's perspective. Alongside Regiomontanus, one could include several other authors treated in this collection, such as Thomas Vaughan, Peter Ramus, and Henry Savile. In each case, history provided a means for working through problems of the legitimacy and nature of their disciplines. While their writings are not "histories of the human mind," their interests went beyond mere rehearsal of anecdotes. Ramus's histories, for instance, written 200 years before Montucla's Histoire, had the kind of unifying vision which de Montmort demanded, and shared Montucla's concern to find a meaning in the development of mathematics. Ramus, and the supporters and detractors he spawned, were convinced that constructing the history of this science was crucial to understanding how and why human beings have... (shrink)

In this 1999 study, Beat Wyss provides a critical analysis of Hegel's theories of art history. Analogous to his philosophy of history, Hegel viewed the history of art in dialectical terms: with its origins in the Ancient Near East, Western art culminated in Classical Greece, but began its decline already in the Hellenistic period. Yet, as Wyss posits, art refuses its programmed demise. He highlights the political dimension of this contradiction, showing the implication of theories which subordinate art to the (...) will of absolute rule. Wyss follows his analysis of Hegel's theories with a discussion of the work of four modern successors - Nordau, Spengler, Sedlmayr and Lukacs - all of whom adapted Hegel's dialectical model, in an effort to demonstrate the central contradictions of twentieth-century aesthetics. (shrink)

This collection of essays constitutes the first history of modern Japanese aesthetics in any language. It introduces readers through lucid and readable translations to works on the philosophy of art written by major Japanese thinkers from the late nineteenth century to the present. Selected from a variety of sources (monographs, journals, catalogues), the essays cover topics related to the study of beauty in art and nature. The translations are organized into four parts. The first, "The Introduction of Aesthetics," traces (...) the formation of notions of "beauty," "culture," and "art" in Japan. It includes discussion of the creation of the museum in Japan and the frenetic efforts of Nishi Amane, Okakura Tenshin, Ernest Fenollosa, and Mori Ogai to introduce German, British, and French aesthetic thought to the Japanese. This is followed by three sections that examine the transformation of the aesthetic field into an academic discipline that flourished at three major Japanese universities. "Aesthetics at Waseda University" begins with an essay on the spiritualism and idealism of Onishi Hajime and continues with essays on the impact of German Lebensphilosophie ("philosophy of life") on Shimamura Hogetsu and Takayama Chogyu, and work by the major Waseda aesthetician of the twentieth century, Aizu Yaichi. Thinkers of the Tokyo School adopted a "scientific" method in the study of art theory. Part 3, "Aesthetics at the University of Tokyo," focuses on the ideas of Otsuka Yasuji (holder of the world’s first Chair of Aesthetics), Onishi Yoshinori, Watsuji Tetsuro, Abe Jiro, Takeuchi Toshio, and Imamichi Tomonobu. The section concludes with a look at the contemporary philosopher Sakabe Megumi. The last section, "Aesthetics at the University of Kyoto," includes essays on Nakagawa Shigeki and Fukada Yasukazu, pioneers in the field of aesthetics, and on the philosophy of art of the "Kyoto School," which was deeply inspired by the thought of Nishida Kitaro. Finally the work of Kuki Shuzo, an influential teacher of Western philosophy at the University of Kyoto, is examined. A History of Modern Japanese Aesthetics is a companion volume to Modern Japanese Aesthetics: A Reader (UH Press, 1999). (shrink)

The history of twentieth-century visual arts can no longer be written as a succession of avant-garde movements, contends eminent art historian Bernard Smith in this stimulating book. He argues that a return to the concept of period style is inevitable and that modernism--the dominant "style" of art that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century and continued through the 1960s--deserves recognition as a period style. Smith renames this period Formalesque since it is no longer modern and since it (...) emphasizes the formal values of art more than any previous period does. In a wide-ranging reformulation of art history in the twentieth century, the author defines the nature and development of Formalesque--an avant-garde style that arose between 1890 and the First World War, was institutionalized between the world wars, and flourished anew between 1945 and 1960. Identifying the Formalesque period, says Smith, makes it possible also to identify dialectical adversaries, such true oppositional avant-garde styles of the twentieth century as Dada, Surrealism, and the Neue Sachlichkeit. These constitute the formative elements of the modernism--now called postmodernism--that became increasingly dominant after 1960. The author locates twentieth-century artistic movements and developments in a broad cultural context and concludes with a thought-provoking examination of the relation between the Formalesque and European and American cultural imperialism. (shrink)

Princess Diana’s death was a tragedy that provoked mourning across the globe; the death of a homeless person, more often than not, is met with apathy. How can we account for this uneven distribution of emotion? Can it simply be explained by the prevailing scientific understanding? Uncovering a rich tradition beginning with Aristotle, _The Secret History of Emotion_ offers a counterpoint to the way we generally understand emotions today. Through a radical rereading of Aristotle, Seneca, Thomas Hobbes, Sarah Fielding, and (...) Judith Butler, among others, Daniel M. Gross reveals a persistent intellectual current that considers emotions as psychosocial phenomena. In Gross’s historical analysis of emotion, Aristotle and Hobbes’s rhetoric show that our passions do not stem from some inherent, universal nature of men and women, but rather are conditioned by power relations and social hierarchies. He follows up with consideration of how political passions are distributed to some people but not to others using the Roman Stoics as a guide. Hume and contemporary theorists like Judith Butler, meanwhile, explain to us how psyches are shaped by power. To supplement his argument, Gross also provides a history and critique of the dominant modern view of emotions, expressed in Darwinism and neurobiology, in which they are considered organic, personal feelings independent of social circumstances. The result is a convincing work that rescues the study of the passions from science and returns it to the humanities and the art of rhetoric. (shrink)

Schelling’s philosophy of art between 1801 and 1807 can be defined as metaphysics of art. The object of that metaphysics is to deploy the absolute as the being of art and of the arts. Schelling has been criticized on the basis that this metaphysics of art represses the infinite diversity of existing works of art, while overlooking concrete aesthetic experience. Based on Schelling’s definition of the “philosophical construction” of art as an inseparably speculative and historical construction, the aim of this (...) paper is to challenge such assertions. It will show that “historical construction” has to be understood in a twofold manner: first, as a transcendental history of the absolute’s artistic individuation and second, as a cultural history of both the ancient and modern worlds of art. Working within this twofold setting the paper argues that Schelling’s systematic approach, while exhibiting a unifying force, still remains open to the otherness of the real. (shrink)

In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno argues that, in modernity, art and philosophy are reciprocally dependent upon each other for legitimation and critical force. This claim has puzzled scholars and provoked controversy. I argue that Adorno’s thesis may be comprehended in the following manner: art requires philosophy because, without the latter, art would lack the power to critique social and historical reality (in particular, the ideological elements that often remain invisible as second nature), and to rationally interpret the material particularity expressed by (...) such reality; and, conversely, philosophy requires art because the latter expresses historical experience to reason. Such material historical experience is necessary in order to prevent philosophy from falling into ideological convention; idle speculation; or abstract and reified instrumentality. Thus, the constellation of history, art, and philosophy is essential to Adorno’s aesthetics. (shrink)

Over a decade ago, Arthur Danto announced that art ended in the sixties. Ever since this declaration, he has been at the forefront of a radical critique of the nature of art in our time. After the End of Art presents Danto's first full-scale reformulation of his original insight, showing how, with the eclipse of abstract expressionism, art has deviated irrevocably from the narrative course that Vasari helped define for it in the Renaissance. Moreover, he leads the way to a (...) new type of criticism that can help us understand art in a posthistorical age where, for example, an artist can produce a work in the style of Rembrandt to create a visual pun, and where traditional theories cannot explain the difference between Andy Warhol's Brillo Box and the product found in the grocery store. Here we are engaged in a series of insightful and entertaining conversations on the most relevant aesthetic and philosophical issues of art, conducted by an especially acute observer of the art scene today.Originally delivered as the prestigious Mellon Lectures on the Fine Arts, these writings cover art history, pop art, "people's art," the future role of museums, and the critical contributions of Clement Greenberg--who helped make sense of modernism for viewers over two generations ago through an aesthetics-based criticism. Tracing art history from a mimetic tradition through the modern era of manifestos, Danto shows that it wasn't until the invention of Pop art that the historical understanding of the means and ends of art was nullified. Even modernist art, which tried to break with the past by questioning the ways of producing art, hinged on a narrative.Traditional notions of aesthetics can no longer apply to contemporary art, argues Danto. Instead he focuses on a philosophy of art criticism that can deal with perhaps the most perplexing feature of contemporary art: that everything is possible. (shrink)

Whether art has come to an “end” in the modern age has been a question of interest for generations of philosophers and art critics since Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics. Beat Wyss takes up this question in the context of a wide-ranging account of post-Hegelian art history and art historians that has now been translated into English. Wyss’s project, whose larger aims can perhaps be better glimpsed from the book’s German title, divides into two major sets of reflections—the first devoted (...) specifically to Hegel’s treatment of art and the second to four critics who share with Hegel some sense of art’s having reached its fulfillment. (shrink)

'The Aestheticization of History and the Butterfly Effect: Visual Arts Series' introduces the audience to philosophical concepts that broach the beginning of the history of Western thought in Plato and Aristotle to that of more modern thought in the theoretician Jacques Rancière in which the main conceptual framework of this anthology is predicated. The introduction is mainly concerned with Rancière's concept of the distribution of the sensible, which is the arrangement of things accessible to our senses, what we experience (...) in real-time and space- compartmentalization and categorization of all things. These things do not just involve tangible items, but audible speech, written language, and visibilities. Rancière's theory of the regimes of art is undertaken as the unfolding of the distribution. Such is evoked in the various genres of visual art forms, from two-dimensional paintings to three-dimensional sculptures and architectures. Understanding the aesthetic regime of art is crucial for grasping how art performs time travel. One way of understanding this phenomenon is in terms of embodied philosophy imbued vis-à-vis art forms, which are subsequently challenged by contemporary artists. The contributing essays examine these reiterations, reevaluations-performances. Aesthetics is a term deriving from the 18th-century European Enlightenment. It is here that aesthetics as the study of beauty is probed for its political potential after the failure of the French Revolution. Many major thinkers during this period signed on to the aesthetic moment, recognizing that Reason in its present state failed to develop humankind beyond barbarism. J.E.B. Stuart's statue is part of an equestrian theme that approximates the Western canon of power and class in the pursuit of domination. But such power and domination will be dethroned in the restaging of history and the redistribution of said canon. This reimagining of the form not only alters perception but constitutes a new narrative. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 38.2 (2004) 116-120 [Access article in PDF] Art History in the Age of Bellori: Scholarship and Cultural Politics in Seventeenth-Century Rome, edited by Janis Bell and Thomas Willette. Cambridge: Cambridge Universtiy Press, 2002, 396 pp. Giovan Pietro Bellori is a name familiar to all who have studied seventeenth-century Italian art. His magisterial book, The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (Le (...) vite de' pittori, scultori, ed architetti moderni), published in Rome in 1672, continued in the grand tradition of artists' biographies established by Giorgio Vasari in the sixteenth century, while at the same time espousing a classical theory of artistic creation that has often been seen as the foundation of academic classicism, popular well into the nineteenth century. He is, in other words, an immensely significant figure, as a source of information on artists' lives, and, more importantly, as a cogent, early spokesperson for one of the dominant aesthetic modes of Western European culture.Given this importance, the relative dearth of publications dedicated toBellori, especially in the Anglo-American world, is surprising. PerhapsBellori's famously negative assessment of Caravaggio, or his complete avoidance of two of the most successful Italian artists of the seventeenth century, Pietro da Cortona and Gian Lorenzo Bernini, account for the scarcity ofscholarly treatments, or maybe his supposed insistence that all great art should be grounded in rules is to blame. The reasons are hard to pin down, but the volume of essays under consideration here goes some significant way towards rectifying the situation. Stemming from a 1996 conference organized by the Association for Textual Scholarship in Art History and held at the American Academy in Rome, the volume is divided into two roughly equal sections, one on "Bellori and the Republic of Letters in Seventeenth-Century Rome," and the other on "Bellori's Lives: History, Criticism, Theory." It comprises twelve essays, including a long and very useful introduction by Janis Bell, one of the editors of the book. The overall goal of the collection is to treat Bellori's activity as a whole, rather than focus single-mindedly on the Lives. After all, as Bell points out, the preponderance of Bellori's publishing was not dedicated to aesthetic theory, or even artists' biographies, but to antiquarian studies. In this, the present volume is very different from the other major new work on Bellori, a two-volume cataloguepublished in 2000 to accompany anexhibition held at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, L'idea del Bello: viaggio per Roma nel Seicento con Giovan Pietro Bellori. The exhibition did acknowledge Bellori's antiquarian interests, but was aimed principally at something else: making visible his aesthetic theory. Unfortunately, the authors of Art History in the Age of Belloriwere not able to take into account fully [End Page 116] the conclusions of this important study,although it should be noted that several authors are represented in both publications.The first group of essays in the book, six in number, treats a wide range of themes, with the intention of crafting a context, both literary and political, for understanding Bellori's achievement. Giovanna Perini's essay, the first of section one, describes Bellori's career trajectory, and, more significantly, how this path had an impact on his life as a scholar. Bellori did not come from the wealthiest stratum of society. On the contrary, he was of relatively modest means, which meant that he had to rely on employment income. One implication of being economically beholden to his employers was that his writing had to conform to their political agendas. The Vite, for instance, are famous for lionizing the French artist Nicolas Poussin, of obvious appeal to his Francophile patrons. Diego Velázquez, however, was not included in the Vite, perhaps because he was Spanish and would thus have appealed to the opposing political faction in Rome at the time, which was linked to Spain. At the same time, Perini convincingly argues that Bellori's own voice was not drowned out in the process... (shrink)

Because of their basic level, textbooks show the assumptions and biases of art historians more clearly than does advanced, and therefore more restricted, scholarship. Textbooks are the rock, as it were, within which lie the strata of historical method. They bury, and so preserve for the good and ill of students , not so much individual historical data, which can be picked up or rejected rather easily, as those things which give the appearance of intellectual grasp to historical writing: its (...) generalizations, its interpretations, its sweeping perspectives. The successive editions of Helen Gardner's Art through the Ages can tell us much about the assumptions that have pervaded art historical education in America over the past century. The first edition, published fifty years ago last year, is worth looking at in some detail, because for all its seminal importance in the teaching of art history it is by now little more than a deposit in library stacks. A mere glance will show that it is not ours. Indeed, the distance we have gone since then is exactly measured by the gaucheries it displays. It is half the length of modern surveys, and it makes no pretense either to completeness or to objectivity. It is arranged by period and style until we reach the Renaissance , at which point, in keeping with the interest of an earlier age in national characteristics, each country receives its due chapter. The Italian Renaissance, as befits the central position of the primitives in American taste then, has four chapters to itself. Thereafter, except for a final, brief section on contemporary art, each national school is taken to the period of its decline. This, of course, will vary. France is taken through Cézanne; England through the Pre-Raphaelites and William Morris; Spain, thanks to Goya, into the early nineteenth century; and Dutch and Flemish art only through the seventeenth century, but without Bosch or Bruegel. As for Germany, though the chapter heading promises us "From the Gothic Age to the Nineteenth Century," in fact it is on Durer and Holbein. What fulfills the promise of the title appears in its entirety thus: "After the death of these two masters, largely on account of exhaustion from wars there was very little production, until the second great manifestation of the German people came in the music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries."1 No pretense here at dutiful compilation; high points, after all, are high points. · 1. Helen Gardner, Art through the Ages: An Introduction to Its History and Significance , p. 345. Marcel Franciscono is the author of Walter Gropius and the Creation of the Bauhaus in Weimar. He is associate professor of art history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. (shrink)

The article deals with the professional decorative and applied art of Krasnoyarsk from the 50s of the twentieth century to the present. The aspect of consideration is the use of the ethnographic motif of the Krasnoyarsk Territory and the features of its embodiment in the products of Krasnoyarsk artists of decorative and applied art. Using the example of the creativity of N.V. Kasatkina, A.G. Tkachev, A.S. Moskvitin, A.S. Migas, S.E. Anufriev and E.A. Krasnova, the aspects of the use of the (...) ethnographic motif and their transformation over time, which led to the formation of archeoart in modern decorative and applied art and the features of its embodiment in the works of the main conclusions of the study are shown. The principles of the use, functioning and transformation of signs of an ethnographic motif in works of decorative and applied art in the Krasnoyarsk Territory are presented. The process of forming a new style in art took place from quoting and simple stylization of individual objects of ethnography in the works of artists to the gradual increase of signs of an ethnographic motif in the works of masters, which led to the formation of a new understanding of the region in art. The main visual concept of modern archeoart is the representation of Yenisei Siberia as the "cradle of humanity". The ethnographic motif associated with the history and mythology of indigenous peoples becomes the starting point in the artistic image, through which the elevation of regional visual signs to symbols understandable to every person takes place. (shrink)

This Handbook re-examines the concept of early modern history in a European and global context. Volume II engages with philosophy, science, art and architecture, music, and the Enlightenment, and examines the military and political developments within and beyond the boundaries of Europe.

Saturn and Melancholy remains an iconic text in art history, intellectual history, and the study of culture, despite being long out of print in English. Rooted in the tradition established by Aby Warburg and the Warburg Library, this book has deeply influenced understandings of the interrelations between the humanities disciplines since its first publication in English in 1964. This new edition makes the original English text available for the first time in decades. Saturn and Melancholy offers an unparalleled inquiry into (...) the origin and development of the philosophical and medical theories on which the ancient conception of the temperaments was based and discusses their connections to astrological and religious ideas. It also traces representations of melancholy in literature and the arts up to the sixteenth century, culminating in a landmark analysis of Dürer's most famous engraving, Melencolia I. This edition features Raymond Klibansky's additional introduction and bibliographical amendments for the German edition, as well as translations of source material and 155 original illustrations. An essay on the complex publication history of this pathbreaking project - which almost did not see the light of day - covers more than eighty years, including its more recent heritage. Making new a classic book that has been out of print for over four decades, this expanded edition presents fresh insights about Saturn and Melancholy and its legacy as a precursor to modern interdisciplinary studies. (shrink)

Until fairly recently, most of the attention of art historians and others in these debates has been paid to differences among the partisans of various disciplinary methodologies, or to the differential benefits of one or another school of thought or theoretical perspective in other areas of the humanities and social sciences as these might arguably apply to questions of art historical practice.1 Yet there has also come about among art historians a renewed interest in the historical origins of the academic (...) discipline itself, and in the relationships of its institutionalization in various countries to the professionalizing of other historical and critical disciplines in the latter part of the nineteenth century. These interests have led increasingly to wider discussion by art historians of the particular nature of disciplinary knowledge, the circumstances and protocols of academic practice, and the relations between the various branches of modern discourse on the visual arts: academic art history, art criticism, aesthetic philosophy, the art market, exhibitions, and musicology.2 What follows does not aim to summarize or characterize these developments but is more simply an attempt to delineate some of the principal characteristics of the discipline as an evidentiary institution in the light of the material conditions of academic practice that arose in the latter half of the nineteenth century in relation to the history of mueological display. In brief, this essay is concerned with the circumstances of art history’s foundations as a systematic and “scientific” practice, and its focus is limited to a single, albeit paradigmatic, American example. 1. An extended discussion of these issues may be found in Donald Preziosi, Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science , pp. 80-121. See also The New Art History, ed. A. L. Rees and Frances Borzello .2. One important sign off these discussions has been a series of “Views and Overviews” of the discipline appearing in The Art Bulletin in recent years, of which the most recent has been perhaps the most extensive and comprehensive: Mieke Bal and Norman Byrson, ”Semiotics and Art History,” The Art Bulletin 73 : 174-208. Donald Preziosi is professor of art history at the University of California, Los Angeles, and, beginning in 1992, at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He is the author of Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science and is currently completing a book on the history of museums entitled Framing Modernity. (shrink)

Lindroos constructs an alternative interpretation on history, time, politics and art, approached through the moment of the Now (Jetztzeit). In the first section, she elaborates the critique of chronologic-linear way of understanding history. Through a close reading of Benjamin's "Work of Art" essay, the second section examines the problems of origins, authenticity and traditions of art through the ideas of artistic avant-garde and politicization of aesthetics. The end of the book discusses the concept of image and the new images as (...) an Image-Space (Bildraum) of action. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Abraham, Planter of Mathematics":Histories of Mathematics and Astrology in Early Modern EuropeNicholas PopperFrancis Bacon's 1605 Advancement of Learning proposed to dedicatee James I a massive reorganization of the institutions, goals, and methods of generating and transmitting knowledge. The numerous defects crippling the contemporary educational regime, Bacon claimed, should be addressed by strengthening emphasis on philosophy and natural knowledge. To that end, university positions were to be created devoted (...) to "Artes and Sciences at large," rather than to the professions. High salaries would render lecturers "able and sufficient," undistracted from their task. Most famously, he argued that teaching of the "operatiue studie of many Scyences" should involve sophisticated technical education. The study of natural philosophy demanded not only books, but globes, astrolabes, and other "instrumentals." Most significantly, yielding reliable and meaningful knowledge from experiential gleanings required a rigorous system of deductive reasoning.The legacy of this colossal proposal has earned Bacon honored status as devisor of the scientific method.1 But Bacon's educational reform extended [End Page 87] beyond the methods of producing and transmitting knowledge. To facilitate more efficient "vse and administration" of the knowledge produced by his system, he also demanded a searching examination of the history of learning. This history would provide a mirror enabling his contemporaries to deploy the fruits of his method, by considering how learning in the past had been used successfully or ill-advisedly. Producing this history was the ambition of the Advancement, for he explained: "no man hath propounded to himselfe the generall state of learning to bee described and represented from age to age, as many have done the works of Nature, & the State civile and Ecclesiastical." He continued:And yet I am not ignorant that in divers particular sciences, as of the Iurisconsults, the Mathematicians, the Rhetoricians, the Philosophers, there are set down some smal memorials of the Schooles, Authors, and Bookes: and so likewise some barren relations touching the Invention of Arts, or usages. But a iust story of learning, containing the Antiquities and Originalls of Knowledges, & their Sects; their Inventions, their Traditions; their diverse Administrations and Managings; their Flourishings, their Oppositions, Decayes, Depressions, Oblivions, Removes, with the causes, and occasions of them, and all other events concerning learning, throughout the ages of the world; I may truly affirme to be wanting.2Bacon thus positioned himself not only as a Father of Modern Science, but also a Father of the History of Science.Following Bacon's suggestion, I will examine the "small memorials" of the history of mathematics—and particularly the mathematical art of astrology—in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. My conclusion, however, will not bear out Bacon's claims. Despite his frustration, Bacon was only one of many early modern scholars appraising the role of mathematics within history. And he devoted less energy than others to mapping its origins and tracing its transmissions between communities. In fact, Bacon's 1605 proposal for a history of mathematics was already out-of-date. Discussions [End Page 88] of the history of mathematics had been rife on the continent and in England throughout the previous century.3The evidence that Renaissance scholars inherited was sprawling and inconclusive. Several genealogies for mathematics could be found within classical Greek, Latin, and patristic references. One lineage claimed mathematics began in ancient Assyria, where the priestly caste, the Chaldeans, practiced a form of mathematics that seemed a corrupt admixture of philosophy, medicine, and religion, and relied heavily on observation of the heavens. Other scholars traced the origins to Egypt, claiming that the field developed to survey lands frequently flooded by the Nile. The real problem for ancient, late antique, and medieval scholars had not been the origins of mathematics, but what exactly mathematics were. For some, the term strictly referred to the quadrivium: geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music. But for others, mathematics' origins amongst the Egyptians or Chaldeans inextricably linked it to forms of astrological divination, augury, and necromancy that were unsavory to both Latin and Christian traditions. Mathematici were included alongside ghastly lists of Magi, Brahmins, Aruspices, Genethliaci, and other diabolic practitioners of idolatrous magic. These might or might not be distinguished from mathematici such as Pythagoras... (shrink)