Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Keyword
-
- Aesthetics (3)
- Kant (3)
- Deleuze (2)
- Hermeneutics (2)
- Ontology (2)
-
- Phenomenology (2)
- Taste (2)
- AIDS/HIV (1)
- Aesthetic education (1)
- Aesthetic stimuli (1)
- Aesthetic value (1)
- Agency (1)
- Altered (1)
- Anthropology (1)
- Appreciation (1)
- Art and aesthetics (1)
- Art history (1)
- Artistry (1)
- Barthes (1)
- Beauty (1)
- Behavioral sciences (1)
- Behavioralism (1)
- Binary opposition (1)
- Cognitive gaze (1)
- Cognitive iconology (1)
- Consciousness (1)
- Constructed (1)
- Culture (1)
- Danto (1)
- Death (1)
Articles 1 - 23 of 23
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
A Reply To Puolakka, Serge Grigoriev
A Reply To Puolakka, Serge Grigoriev
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
No abstract provided.
Gesture, Pulsion, Grain: Barthes' Musical Semiology, Michael Szekely
Gesture, Pulsion, Grain: Barthes' Musical Semiology, Michael Szekely
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
Although Barthes is perhaps best known as a semiotician, he is paradoxically always in search of precisely that which defies the constraints of language, whether art, signs or, in fact, language itself. Enter the relevance of music for Barthesian aesthetics. Barthes called for a "second semiology," in contrast to the classical semiology, which would explore "the body in a state of music." In this essay, I explore Barthes' musical semiology in terms of key concepts, including gesture, pulsion, grain, and jouissance. I extend the relevancy of Barthes' concepts, often articulated within the context of the Western classical musical tradition, to …
Fact And Fiction: Writing The Difference Between Suicide And Death, John Carvalho
Fact And Fiction: Writing The Difference Between Suicide And Death, John Carvalho
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
Did Michel Foucault die of AIDS or did he kill himself? Did he knowingly infect others in the bath houses in San Francisco or was he unaware that he was ill and of how less-than-safe sex could spread the same virus that infected him? What did he know about AIDS/HIV and what do we know about what he knew? Answers to these questions are ambiguous. This is due, in part, to the culture of homosexuality and the cultural response to AIDS/HIV at the time. It is also due to the conflicting reports about what Foucault knew, and when, in the …
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 …
Reflections On An Aesthetics Of Touch, Smell And Taste, Mădălina Diaconu
Reflections On An Aesthetics Of Touch, Smell And Taste, Mădălina Diaconu
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
Modern aesthetics regards sight and hearing as the only senses which were able to produce art. Touch, smell and taste might offer pleasant stimuli, but can never achieve the status of art objects. What are the arguments for this rejection, and are they still sustainable? This paper focuses on the general and specific difficulties of forming an aesthetics of touch, smell and taste; some can be overcome, while others are still waiting for a proper answer. At the same time, artistic movements, as well as changes in recent discussions of the aesthetics of everyday life prove the necessity of extending …
Paradoxes And Puzzles: Appreciating Gardens And Urban Nature, Stephanie Ross
Paradoxes And Puzzles: Appreciating Gardens And Urban Nature, Stephanie Ross
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
To explore our appreciation of gardens and urban nature, I propose a recursive definition of original or wild nature together with guidelines for discerning degrees of naturalness. Arguing (contra Robert Elliott) that nature can be restored as well as degraded, I characterize four varieties of urban nature - interrupted, altered, constructed, and virtual. I build on Stan Godlovitch's comments about scale to suggest two modes of appreciation - macroscopic and fine-focused. I close by discussing some particular examples - parks, environmental art, gardens - and drawing some conclusions for the appreciation of vernacular gardens.[1]
A Plea For A Cognitive Iconology Within Visual Culture, Ian Verstegen
A Plea For A Cognitive Iconology Within Visual Culture, Ian Verstegen
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
A place is needed for a 'cognitive iconology' within "visual culture." Like Logical Positivism before it, visual culture must reexamine its tacit assumption that conflation of psycho-sociological contributions to visual meaning is an adequate methodology, and that sociologism is a worthwhile overriding philosophy. Cognitive iconology isolates the psychological contribution to the study of images and does not monopolize it but isolates the foundational basis for it on which narrower interpretations must be built. With examples from the work of Titian, it is shown how the cognitive and 'cultural' contributions must work together to make meaning. Using the philosophy of Maurice …
Wittgenstein And Haydn On Understanding Music, Yael Kaduri
Wittgenstein And Haydn On Understanding Music, Yael Kaduri
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
Wittgenstein's remarks about music have motivated philosophers to build a comprehensive picture of his philosophy of music, concentrating on the central issues of musical meaning. It is often claimed that, according to Wittgenstein, understanding music consist in grasping the internal relationships between musical events. Musical practice, however, is naturally saturated with what philosophers often call extra-musical meanings. The present study, by considering a musical issue in Haydn's instrumental music, attempts to show that musical language games in the Wittgensteinian sense involve explanations of music that enhance the listener's ability to understand music by broadening his musical competence. Nevertheless, constituting understanding …
The Color Of The Sublime Is White, Jeffrey Downard
The Color Of The Sublime Is White, Jeffrey Downard
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
In this paper, I examine Melville's discussion in Moby Dick of the whiteness of the whale from the perspective of a Kantian account of the sublime. My aim, in the first instance, is to see if the comparison helps to shed light on Melville's puzzling discussion of the color white and why this color serves to heighten the feeling of being overwhelmed by terror when confronted with something extremely large or powerful. In turn, I intend to use Melville's discussion of whiteness to put pressure on some of the philosophical assumptions behind a Kantian analysis of the sublime. In particular, …
Symposium On Pictorial Realism
Symposium On Pictorial Realism
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
No abstract provided.
Depiction And The Sense Of Reality, John Armstrong
Depiction And The Sense Of Reality, John Armstrong
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
No abstract provided.
Realism And The Riddle Of Style, Catharine Abell
Realism And The Riddle Of Style, Catharine Abell
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
No abstract provided.
The Special And General Theory Of Realism: Reply To Abell, Armstrong, And Mcmahon, Dominic Lopes
The Special And General Theory Of Realism: Reply To Abell, Armstrong, And Mcmahon, Dominic Lopes
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
No abstract provided.
Beautiful Noise, Will Swanson
Beautiful Noise, Will Swanson
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
This article aims to explore the nature of discordant sound, such as guitar feedback, in several respects: its status as music, its status as art and the extremely interesting aesthetic responses it evokes. I will argue for its value as an art form on the grounds that: (1) it is a neglected and overlooked area of music in terms of philosophical aesthetics; (2) it raises some interesting ontological questions about the nature of artworks; and (3) it highlights some key aspects of aesthetic responses, e.g., emotions and the body. Examining the works of such music artists as The Jesus and …
Interrupting Danto's Farewell Party Arrangements: Comments For Grigoriev, Kalle Puolakka
Interrupting Danto's Farewell Party Arrangements: Comments For Grigoriev, Kalle Puolakka
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
This paper is a response to Serge Grigoriev's article "Living Art, Defining Value: Artworks and Mere Real Things" (Contemporary Aesthetics Volume 3, 2005) in which he develops Joseph Margolis' provocative Danto-criticism. He especially criticizes Danto's art-philosophical starting point, the problem of indiscernibles, claiming that it presupposes an objective value judgment that cannot be maintained and that it misrepresents the way in which people interact with art. In this article, Grigoriev's argument is found lacking mainly on two grounds. First, it overlooks where the source of Danto's starting point lies; and second, I argue that it does not lead to the …
From Aesthetics To Politics: Rancière, Kant And Deleuze, Katharine Wolfe
From Aesthetics To Politics: Rancière, Kant And Deleuze, Katharine Wolfe
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
What does politics have to do with aesthetics? Surely, both politics and aesthetics are concerned with imagining, envisioning, and even creating, yet aren't the kinds of things these fields of inquiry imagine, envision and create greatly disparate? Jacques Rancière argues that what is at stake in politics, just as it is in aesthetics, is the distribution of the sensible, and that politics happens not only through the disruption of a certain aesthetic organization of sense experience but through the eruption of a distinct aesthetics. Here I elaborate the Kantian foundation for Rancière's conception of the kind of aesthetics that politics …
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 …
Musical Experience As Aesthetic: What Cost The Label?, Wayne Bowman
Musical Experience As Aesthetic: What Cost The Label?, Wayne Bowman
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
This brief essay draws upon a number of themes introduced in Carolyn Korsmeyer's recent book Gender and Aesthetics: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2004; ISBN: 0415266599). It does not attempt a comprehensive or critical review of her book; instead it focuses selectively on certain of her points in order to raise concerns of some significance to the music education discipline and, perhaps, to philosophical aesthetics. [1]
The Varieties Of Aesthetic Disinterestedness, Norman Kreitman
The Varieties Of Aesthetic Disinterestedness, Norman Kreitman
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
Disinterestedness, a comparatively recent concept in aesthetics, is commonly held to be one of the characteristics of an appropriate response to art, but can be understood in a number of senses. Three varieties are distinguished: a strong form which confines attention exclusively to the internal relations of the work of art; a moderate variety which links internal and external features of the work but solely within the cognitive domain; and a weak form which permits the appreciator to draw on a wide range of external referents but proscribes purely idiosyncratic responses. An illustration is given of the confusion which can …
The Perceptual Constraints On Pictorial Realism, Jennifer Mcmahon
The Perceptual Constraints On Pictorial Realism, Jennifer Mcmahon
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
No abstract provided.