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Playing With Shadows, Apinan Poshyananda
Playing With Shadows, Apinan Poshyananda
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
This essay reflects on the practice of the Indonesian artist Heri Dono, whose exhibition in Tokyo in 2000 is the anchor. It probes the cultural contexts in which the contemporary art of Dono plays out, identifying key trajectories that help clarify the concerns of this particular articulation: the locale of Yogyakarta, the mentality of the Javanese, and the device of the puppet presentation or the wayang, which derives from the ancient epics.[1] All this is located within the scheme of an exhibition of contemporary art and rendered in such a way that it conveys a certain aesthetic of hybridity and …
Questioning "The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction": A Stroll Around The Louvre After Reading Benjamin0, Jonathan Davis
Questioning "The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction": A Stroll Around The Louvre After Reading Benjamin0, Jonathan Davis
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
In this article I claim that Walter Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" merits renewed critical attention. Just as Dada had confronted art with anti-art, so Benjamin hoped his essay would confront aesthetics with an anti-aesthetic. I examine Benjamin's capsule history of the aura and show it to be misleading, criticize the essay's underdeveloped ontology of painting and sketch an alternative, and draw attention to the surprising proximity of Benjamin's notion of value to that of neoliberal thought. I conclude with a critique of Benjamin's cultural politics.
Carrying The Jade Tablet: A Consideration Of Confucian Artistry, Eric C. Mullis
Carrying The Jade Tablet: A Consideration Of Confucian Artistry, Eric C. Mullis
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
In this paper I discuss the aesthetic dimension of ritual action. In order to demonstrate how the rites render action aesthetically expressive, I draw on the notion of an "art of context" and further detail the Confucian understanding of artistic practice as an essential component for moral cultivation. In turn, I use John Dewey's account of aesthetic form in order to support and further demonstrate the ability of the rituals and arts to organize action and to thereby render it aesthetically significant. However, Dewey's account entails that we question either conceptual or institutional limitations of aesthetic form as such limitations …