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Articles 1 - 8 of 8
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Humor And Enlightenment, Part I: The Theory, Peter H. Karlen
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
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
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
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
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
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 …
'Man Has Always Danced': Forays Into The Origins Of An Art Largely Forgotten By Philosophers, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone
'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 …