Digital Commons Network^™

Listening To Musical Performers, Aron Edidin

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

In the philosophy of music and in musicology, aprt from ethnomusicology, there is a long tradition of focus on musical compositions as objects of inquiry. But in both disciplines, a body of recent work focuses on the place of performance in the making of music. Most of this work, however, still takes for granted that compositions, at leas in Western art music, are the primary objects of aesthetic attention. In this paper I focus on aesthetic attention to the performing activity itself. I begin by roughly characterizing what is involve in attending to the performing activity of musical performers. I …

What Is Temporal Art? A Persistent Question Revisited, John Powell

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This article examines the fourteen conditions constituting Levinson and Alperson’s taxonomy of conditions for temporal arts. It claims that some of the conditions and several of the lists of arts exemplifying them need revision. It recommends adding a new condition concerned with the effects of the passage of time on gardens, environmental sculpture, and outdoor installations. The article concludes that gardens may be a model for understanding and appreciating other arts sharing the same bi-(multi-) modality.

Annunciations - Figuring The Feminine In Renaissance Art, John M. Carvalho

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Viewers of Renaissance representations of the Annunciation miss an important irony. Where Mary is figured as unimpressed by Gabriel's proposal, she is upholding a masculinist ideal of female virtue. Where she is figured as delighted by the news, she represents an alternative feminine ideal that continues to be attractive to women and feminists, today. Inspired by the writings of Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, I figure Mary in Renaissance representations of the Annunciation as contesting an ideal of feminine virtue that would deny her sexual difference and deny her pleasure in fulfilling her role as the bride and mother of …

Epistemic Function And Ontology Of Analog And Digital Images, Aleksandra Lukaszewicz Alcarez

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

The important epistemic function of photographic images is their active role in construction and reconstruction of our beliefs concerning the world and human identity, since we often consider photographs as presenting reality or even the Real itself. Because photography can convince people of how different social and ethnic groups and even they themselves look, documentary projects and the dissemination of photographic practices supported the transition from disciplinary society to the present-day society of control. While both analog and digital images are formed from the same basic materia, the ways in which this matter appears are distinctive. In the case of …

One Song, Many Works: A Pluralist Ontology Of Rock, Dan Burkett

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

A number of attempts have been made to construct a plausible ontology of rock music. Each of these ontologies identifies a single type of ontological entity as the “work” in rock music. Yet, all the suggestions advanced to date fail to capture some important considerations about how we engage with music of this tradition. This prompted Lee Brown to advocate a healthy skepticism of higher-order musical ontologies. I argue here that we should instead embrace a pluralist ontology of rock, an ontology that recognizes more than one kind of entity as “the work” in rock music. I contend that this …

Performing Politics, Troy R.E. Paddock

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Walter Benjamin’s observation that fascism turns politics into aesthetics is, by now, a well-worn idea. This article argues that Benjamin’s critique of politics can apply just as much to the modern democratic politics of the United States. Borrowing from Benjamin, Jürgen Habermas, and Carl Schmitt, this article suggests that modern political discourse in the United States does not follow the classical liberal ideal of rational discourse in the marketplace of ideas within the public sphere. Instead, contemporary politics has become spectacle where images and slogans replace thought and debate in a 24/7 news cycle and political infotainment programs. The result …

Norms Of Cultivation, Kevin Melchionne

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

In this paper I identify a new group of aesthetic norms, which I call norms of cultivation. Judgments of taste are often accompanied by forecasts or expectations about future aesthetic satisfaction. When we find something beautiful, we expect to find it beautiful in the future. Forecasting is at play in all sorts of aesthetically motivated behavior. Yet psychologists have observed an unreliability in such forecasts. As a result of forecasting error, what we take as our taste can be an unreliable guide in our aesthetic lives. Compensating for the unreliability of taste are norms of cultivation, implicit rules for engaging …

Longing For Clouds - Does Beautiful Weather Have To Be Fine?, Mădălina Diaconu

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Any attempt to outline a meteorological aesthetics centered on so-called beautiful weather has to overcome several difficulties: In everyday life, the appreciation of the weather is mostly related to practical interests or reduced to the ideal of stereotypical fine weather that is conceived according to blue-sky thinking irrespective of climate diversity. Also, an aesthetics of fine weather seems, strictly speaking, to be impossible given that such weather conditions usually allow humans to focus on aspects other than weather, which contradicts the autotelic character of beauty. The unreflective equation of beautiful weather with moderately sunny weather and a cloudless sky also …

Fugitive Allusions In Boswell In Search Of A Wife, Or The Charming Mr. Boswell, Robert G. Walker

1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era

No abstract provided.

"Go Not Far To Dine" Pedagogical Approaches To Sustainable Consumption In The Eighteenth-Century Studies Classroom And Beyond, Marlon Pareja, Sher Li Ong, Michelle Merrill, Samara Anne Cahill

1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era

No abstract provided.

Permanent Markers The Monumental, The Mobile, And The Sustainable In Enlightened Eras, Kevin L. Cope

1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era

No abstract provided.

Sustaining The Eighteenth Century?, Samara Anne Cahill

1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era

No abstract provided.

The Arabian Nights And The Oriental Tale Sustainable Enlightenment Texts, Malcolm Jack

1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era

No abstract provided.

Three Bibliopoles, J. T. Scanlan

1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era

No abstract provided.

The Unending Dunciad Pope's Weird Revenge, Cedric D. Reverand Ii

1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era

No abstract provided.

Religious Exchanges Solomon's Temple, Holy Land Travel, And A Georgics Of Sacred Space In Seventeenth- And Eighteenth-Century English Writing, Michael Rotenberg-Schwartz

1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era

No abstract provided.

"Iron War" As "Daily Care"Sustainability And The Dialectic Of Care In Dryden's Georgics, Erin Drew

1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era

No abstract provided.

Shadows Of A Dream Gender Roles In Qing Literature As Seen In Gu Taiqing's Sequel To A Dream Of Red Mansions, Chee Meng Wong

1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era

No abstract provided.

An Eighteenth-Century Plea For Sustainable Forestry Ostervald's Description Des Montagnes & Vallees Du Pays De Neuchatel (1764), Alexandra Cook

1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era

No abstract provided.

Fighting Fire With Fire Anti-Methodist Exaggeration In Samuel Foote And William Hogarth, Brett C. Mcinelly

1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era

No abstract provided.

Book Reviews

1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era

No abstract provided.

Index

1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era

No abstract provided.

Akenside's Hymn To The Naiads And The Turn From The Ode, John Knapp

1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era

No abstract provided.

Satanic Devotions The Prayers Of Robert Lovelace In Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, Juliette Paul

1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era

No abstract provided.

Birthing The Poet Elizabeth Singer Rowe And The Athenian Mercury, Heidi Laudien

1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era

No abstract provided.

Archiving The Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer, James E. May

1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era

No abstract provided.

Postcession, Evan D. Pomerantz

Theses and Dissertations

This is a series of daily writings. Each day consists of a new topic and is closed at the end of the day. The ideas presented are philosophical, humorous, rambling, lamentations, incantations, doubt-ridden, aesthetic pep talks which combine into an affective representation of my studio practice’s becoming. There will be little congruency, some stories, and a lot of parallels because that is who I am.

Speed And Resolution In The Age Of Technological Reproducibility, Shawn Taylor

Theses and Dissertations

The rate of acceleration of the biologic and synthetic world has for a while now, been in the process of exponentially speeding up, maxing out servers and landfills, merging with each other, destroying each other. The last prehistoric relics on Earth are absorbing the same oxygen, carbon dioxide and electronic waves in our biosphere as us. A degraded .jpeg enlarged to full screen on a Samsung 4K UHD HU8550 Series Smart TV - 85” Class (84.5” diag.). Within this composite ecology, the ancient limestone of the grand canyon competes with the iMax movie of itself, the production of Mac pros, …

Armed With An Easel: Understanding Artistic Political Praxis Through The Works Of Theodor Adorno And Chantal Mouffe, Evelyn Yu Yu Swe

Senior Independent Study Theses

This Independent Study is divided into four chapters. The first chapter examines the role of capitalism in the formation of our culture. The argument presented here is that culture plays an important role in reinforcing modern neoliberal capitalism and that neoliberal capitalism has massive control over the dissemination of culture and the arts. The chapter concludes that it is necessary to utilize socio-cultural means in combating the influence of capitalism, and there does indeed exist emancipatory potential in artistic political praxis.

The second chapter focuses on Theodor Adorno’s aesthetic theory in articulating his conception of the emancipatory potential of art. …

A 'Paradox Of Expression': Bertolt Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt In Performance, Cohen L. Ambrose Mr.

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.