Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Landscape De/Re-Construction Through Art, Manuel Gonzalez

Masters Theses

Contemporary landscape architecture practice and education primarily focus on ecological and technical interventions. The climate crisis we find ourselves in demands scientifically informed decisions and well-engineered execution of projects, but, more importantly, creativity and innovation.

The fine arts, which were once integral and foundational to design, are today largely unappreciated and appropriated. The spiritual power of Art, Aesthetics, and Beauty, explored at length through art history and theory, are often viewed as indulgent or secondary to execution. The gap between Art & Design has widened. As a result, designers face challenges in fostering in individuals the kind of care and …

Uncovering Emotional Contamination: Five Sites Of Trauma, Abigail Zola

Masters Theses

“Emotional contamination,” describes residual feelings associated with a space where a negative or tragic event occurred to an individual or group either personally, historically, or politically. Emotional contamination affects people’s associations with place and informs their willingness to spend time in them. This project considers a set of design principles rooted in uncovering and acknowledging the lifespan of a site, and considers how this acknowledgment can exist as an urban system rather than an individual architectural artifact. My thesis work analyzes five case studies in Berlin where political and economic factors determined the result of intervention, and how these sites …

Un-Done: The Historiographical Dialogue Between Past And Present, Rachel Cobler Wollert

Masters Theses

Art critic for The Nation and professor of at Columbia, Arthur C. Danto led the charge with his essay “The End of Art” in 1984 to declare the end of art. Thirty-eight years later, the awareness of colonial problematics in the elite institutionalism of art history today warrants a reanalysis of art historical ontologies of progress (and their ties to colonialism), which have seemingly disbanded in the discipline’s current rhetoric. Because Danto’s historical framework to end art focuses on progress through artistic means, does it fall short or even negate itself by missing the deconstruction of colonial afterlives still present …

Feral Devices : An Additive Fabrication, Kat Jarvinen

Masters Theses

This collection of stories takes place in a nearby dimension, in which objects and entities that are obsolete, mundane, discarded, or overlooked, define alternative rules for value and purpose. Here, a broken machine suffers an existential crisis while a hungry spider explores its interior; a dog imagines life as a moth; a feral creature escapes from a woman’s mind; and a worker suffers spam email induced headaches. United by the destructive capitalist logic of planned obsolescence and an attraction to blue light, these characters traverse mind, matter, metaphor, and technology to find their way into new forms, reinventing themselves and/as …

Internal Resonance, Xiangyu Wang

Masters Theses

This thesis explores the interaction between my inside and outside worlds. It includes my discussion towards Zen methodology, homeostasis, nature, antiquity, inner order and the concept of Qi. It can also be seen as a process that scrutinizes my daily life and looks deep into those things which slowly echo in my body and push me to make my own response.

Picture Collection Subject Index, Fleet Library, Visual + Material Resources

Picture Collection Indexes

The Subject Files cover people, places, objects, design, fashion, buildings, nature, and concepts. Research a time period by looking at subjects that are subdivided chronologically, such as Automobiles, Costume, Family Life, Advertising, Furniture, Interiors, Houses, Street Scenes, and U.S. History. The collection covers many decades, from the 19th century to the present day, and contains many images that you won't find on the internet, and they all circulate!

Humor And Enlightenment, Part I: The Theory, Peter H. Karlen

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Part I of this article advances a new theory of humor, the Enlightenment Theory, while contrasting it with other main theories, including the Incongruity, Repression/Relief/Release, and Superiority Theories. The Enlightenment Theory does not contradict these other theories but rather subsumes them. As argued, each of the other theories cannot account for all the aspects of humor explained by the Enlightenment Theory. The discussion is illustrated with examples of humor and explores the acts and circumstances of humor, its literary and artistic expressions, and its physical reactions. Part II shows how the Enlightenment Theory meets challenging issues in humor theory where …

Introduction, Ananta Sukla

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

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.

Can We Get Inside The Aesthetic Sensibility Of The Archaic Past?, Frederic Will

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This essay is about getting inside the sensibility of the archaic past.[1] Can we get into the creative mind of the painter of The Sorcerer? Can we reconstruct the sensibility of prehistoric humans? Can we recover the humor of the prehistoric artist? Can we do it? After all, sense equipment is the same in men and women of all ages, and though each age inflects its sense usages uniquely, there should remain an underlying continuity among sensibilities. Shouldn't we be able to return into earlier forms of those usages? Can we tell whether we have been successful in accomplishing …

Implied World Views In Pictures: Reflections From A Cognitive Psychological And Anthropological Point Of View, Michael Ranta

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

In traditional art history, iconological attempts to analyze visual works of art by treating their formal and semantic features as symptoms of more general, implied world views or cultures have occurred rather frequently. Still, such attempts have been criticized for permitting subjective and non-verifiable interpretations. In this paper, however, I will argue that (i) pictorial works of art indeed imply wider world views or schemata, and (ii) that our comprehension of these schemata can be explained by taking into account recent research within cognitive psychology. More specifically, I will argue that intelligence partly consists of the storage and retrieval of …

Paleolithic Flints: Is An Aesthetics Of Stone Tools Possible?1, Riva Berleant

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This paper asks whether an aesthetics of Paleolithic tools is possible, and if so, what it might be. The application of our own aesthetic sensibilities to artifacts of prehistory is not difficult. We easily recognize and appreciate their visual and tactile qualities. The more complicated questions that the paper explores are whether we can uncover the aesthetic sensibilities of their makers and, if we cannot, whether aesthetic examination of prehistoric tools from our own perspectives is adequate or useful. The paper is based on study of Paleolithic flints from French archaeological sites dating from about 500,000 years ago to about …

Recent Publications

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

'Man Has Always Danced': Forays Into The Origins Of An Art Largely Forgotten By Philosophers, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Philosophers have had comparatively little to say of the art of dance, a surprising fact given the range of people both inside and outside of dance who have claimed that 'man has always danced.' This essay attempts to substantiate this claim by an inquiry into the origins of dance, its focal attention being on the word always and any linkage to males deriving from that focal point of attention. It begins with evolutionary considerations in the form of courtship displays, behaviors finely and extensively described by Darwin, and goes on to consider displays by chimpanzees in particular. These considerations point …