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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Yellowism And Ontology: A Skeptical Analysis, Wesley D. Cray
Yellowism And Ontology: A Skeptical Analysis, Wesley D. Cray
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
When Vladimir Umanets entered the Tate Modern on October 7, 2012 and defaced Rothko's Black on Maroon, he was operating, not as an artist or a vandal, but as a Yellowist. Yellowism is neither art nor anti-art but is instead a supposedly new cultural element that exists for its own sake and is about nothing but the color yellow. It might be tempting to write Yellowism and the Rothko defacement off as a mere prank or as pseudo-intellectual fraud, but I argue that, intentionally or not, the Yellowists have raised issues salient to those invested in both the ontology of …
Epistemic Function And Ontology Of Analog And Digital Images, Aleksandra Lukaszewicz Alcarez
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 …
Video Games As Mass Art, Grant Tavinor
Video Games As Mass Art, Grant Tavinor
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
Videogames are one of the most significant developments in the mass arts of recent times. In commercial terms, they are now among the most prominent of the mass arts worldwide. This commercial and cultural success does not exhaust the interest in videogames as a mass art phenomenon because games such as Grand Theft Auto IV and Fallout 3 are structurally radically different from previous forms of mass art. In particular, the ontology of videogames, the nature and identity of their works, and how they are instanced and evaluated is a departure from the familiar mass arts of film and popular …
Performance Hero, Craig Derksen, Darren Hudson Hick
Performance Hero, Craig Derksen, Darren Hudson Hick
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
The Guitar Hero series of video games and their spin-offs have provided millions with a new way to interact with music. These games are not only culturally significant but also philosophically significant. Based on the way that these games allow people to interact with music we must decide that either playing a song in one of these games can be a legitimate performance of that song or that our current accounts of performance are inadequate.
Unlimited Additions To Limited Editions, Christy Mag
Unlimited Additions To Limited Editions, Christy Mag
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
In this paper I target the relationship between two prints that are roughly qualitatively identical and share a causal history. Is one an artwork if and only if the other is an artwork? To answer this, I propose two competing principles. The first claims that certain intentional relations must be shared by the prints (e.g., editioned prints vs. non-editioned prints). The second appeals only to minimal print ontology, claiming that the two prints need only be what I call 'relevantly similar' to one other. In the end, I endorse the second principle. There are no trumping features over and above …
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.
Ontology, Criticism, And The Riddle Of Art Versus Non-Art In The Transfiguration Of The Commonplace, Arthur C. Danto
Ontology, Criticism, And The Riddle Of Art Versus Non-Art In The Transfiguration Of The Commonplace, Arthur C. Danto
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
In this "Reply to my Critics," I explain that The Transfiguration of the Commonplace was essentially a contribution to the ontology of art in which two necessary conditions emerge as essential to a real definition of the art work: that an artwork must (a) have meaning and (b) must embody its meaning. Many issues have emerged in the course of art's history that are very much part of its practice but are not part of art's essence. In response to Cynthia Freeland, I argue that though the book does not address art criticism, the two necessary conditions specify a viable …
A Phenomenological Aesthetic Of Cinematic 'Worlds', Christopher Yates
A Phenomenological Aesthetic Of Cinematic 'Worlds', Christopher Yates
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
Contemporary film aesthetics is beset by difficulties arising from the medium itself and the bewildering itinerary of film theory. Inspired by Martin Heidegger's hermeneutical vision in "On the Origin of the Work of Art" (1935), my essay seeks to overcome this paralysis by grounding the aesthetic value of cinematic art in its ability to "disclose the world" through a convergence of artist and viewer intentionalities. Stanley Cavell has gone far by exploring a corresponding "natural relation" between philosophy and cinema, but his work assumes an ontological discourse without an appropriate phenomenological method. I contend that Mikel Dufrenne's phenomenology of aesthetic …
Commitment And Communication: The Aesthetics Of Receptivity And Historicity, Todd Mei
Commitment And Communication: The Aesthetics Of Receptivity And Historicity, Todd Mei
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
A general tension in contemporary aesthetics can be described as existing between objective truth claims and historical relativity. The former is generally represented by the Enlightenment approaches and its descendants that ground aesthetic judgment in rationality. The latter characterizes the postmodern appeal to historicity and the exposure of historical prejudice. Following mostly the hermeneutical philosophy of Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricoeur, and Dupré, this paper argues how aesthetic theory, defined by either pole, inadequately accounts for historicity. In response to this critique, this paper attempts to navigate between these two poles in returning to an analysis of the nature of history and …