Aesthetics Commons^™

The Cluster Account Of Art: A Historical Dilemma, Simon Fokt

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

The cluster account, one of the best attempts at art classification, is guilty of ahistoricism. While cluster theorists may be happy to limit themselves to accounting for what art is now rather than how the term was understood in the past, they cannot ignore the fact that people seem to apply different clusters when judging art from different times. This paper shows that while allowing for this kind of historical relativity may be necessary to save the account, doing so could result in incorporating an essentially institutional component or making the theory extremely complex and virtually impossible to use.

Politics And Aesthetics: Partitions And Partioning In Contemporary Art, Jonathan Owen Clark, Joao Lima Duque

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Jacques Rancière defined the “distribution of the sensible” as the effect of a type of aesthetico-political decision-making that creates a partitioning of the realm of the perceivable in relation to both art and society. The artworld itself constructs its own particular types of curatorial partitioning: between “art” and “non-art,” between “dominant, residual, and emergent,” and between “mainstream” and “periphery.” This essay examines certain “boundary effects” that develop as a result of the act of the partitioning itself and closely examines what arguably are two new categories in contemporary art: “crossover” and “interventionist.” Both categories have a certain relationship to a …

Harnessing The Imagination: The Asymmetry Of Belief And Make-Believe, Elisa Galgut

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Contemporary philosophical discussion on the nature of the imagination has been influenced by recent empirical work in cognitive science. Our imaginative and emotional engagement with works of fiction has been explained by appealing to the similarities between our ordinary cognitive functioning and the workings of our imagination. Believing and imagining, it is argued, are governed by a “single code.” I argue against this claim, and suggest that our imagination – and in particular our literary imagination – in many respects functions very differently from ordinary cognition.

Anti-Essentialism, Tom Leddy

Faculty Publications

From the late nineteenth century to the 1950s one of the main foci of aesthetic inquiry was the attempt to develop definitions of art and such related concepts as visual art, music, tragedy, beauty, and metaphor. Clive Bell (1958) famously stated that either all works of visual art have some common quality or when we speak of “work of art” we speak nonsense. DeWitt H. Parker (1939) argued more generally that the assumption underlying every philosophy of art is the existence of some common nature present in all the arts. This search for a common quality or nature …

Everyday Aesthetics And Photography, Tom Leddy

Faculty Publications

Everyday aesthetics as a new subdiscipline within aesthetics benefits by constantly going back to and borrowing from earlier theorists, even those who were primarily concerned with the aesthetics of art. To that end, I will begin my discussion of everyday aesthetics and photography with a look at that classic formalist aesthetician from the beginning of the 20th century, Clive Bell (1958). Bell was notoriously very negative about photography. He basically saw photographs as mechanical imitations of reality. He also famously criticized illustrative or descriptive painting for doing what photography can do better. One of the problems he had with people …

Cinema In The Digital Age: A Rebuttal To Lev Manovich, Barbara Cail

Philosophy

In his book The Language of New Media, Lev Manovich claims the index is an ontological condition of cinema. Manovich asserts digital cinema can never be indexical and therefore has fundamentally altered the very nature of cinema, reducing it to a form of animation. This paper offers a refutation of Manovich’s redefinition of cinema, showing that digital cinema can be indexical, but indexicality is not an ontological condition of cinema.

Earth’S Garden-Happiness: Nietzsche’S Geoaesthetics Of The Anthropocene, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

This essay proposes a reading of the concept and metaphor of the garden in Nietzsche’s philosophy as a contribution to exploring his aesthetics of the human earth and, accordingly, of his idea of the Sinn der Erde. Following Zarathustra’s agreement with his animals’ repeated declaration that „the world awaits you as a garden,” after his ordeal in struggling with the thought of eternal recurrence, the essay draws on Z and other writings to explore the senses of cultivation, design, and perspective which the garden embodies. Nietzsche recognizes and endorses another dimension of the garden in his discussions of Epicurus’ …

Review Of Living In An Art World: Reviews And Essays On Dance, Performance, Theater, And The Fine Arts In The 1970s And 1980s By Noel Carroll, Curtis Carter

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Apocalyptic Beauty, Brian T. Scalise

Liberty Theological Review

A potent and formative text for a theological aesthetics faithful to the God revealed in the Scriptures is the Apocalypse of John (Revelation). An apocalyptic viewpoint is beautiful inasmuch as it observes the whole from within the part of time/space and inasmuch as the apocalyptic vision provides considerable unity of diverse theological themes with various expansions and enhancements, hence mimicking the very function of theological beauty to communicate the whole (God) in the part (here, in space-time). This essay traces major themes throughout Scripture, utilizing inter-textual interpretation en route, and seeks to clarify the Book of Revelation's role in recapitulation, …

Pharmacologies Of Texts And Images, Noel Fitzpatrick

Conference Papers

The problematic of Ekphrasis will be the central tenant of this paper, a relationship between text, language and image. Ekphrasis broadly understood as the relationship between images and words, however, in the case of this paper it will be taken to mean the relationship between words and images in relation to memory. Bernard Stiegler’s work has become well renowned in relation to his exploration of texts and in particular the relationship between texts and technology; an intimate relationship, if writing is to be considered as a form of technology, a mnemonic form. However, there is also another aspect in the …

Revisiting Ekphrasis: The Early Hermeneutic Phenomenology Of Paul Ricoeur., Noel Fitzpatrick

Conference Papers

Through revisiting the notion of the symbol and sign in the relatively early work of Paul Ricoeur it hoped to point to a yet unexplored element of his work in relation to Aesthetics and contemporary Critical Theory. This paper will focus on a particular point in the work of Paul Ricoeur, a point where the problematic of language begins to come to the fore within his structural phenomenology of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The publication of The Symbolism of Evil in 1960 represents a definite departure from the structural Phenomenology of his earlier works where the central concern …

Defining Maximalism: Understanding Minimalism, Patrick Templeton

Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

As little more than a buzz-word, maximalism has circulated around architectural discourses over the past decade. To illuminate the implications of the term and to explore its potential, this research explores minimalism in art and architecture to establish a foundation for a reciprocal definition for maximalism.

All-Nighter 2013, Students Of Risd, Risd Archives

All Student Newspapers

All-Nighter was a digital student publication that began in 2011 as all-nighter.com. The Spring 2013 issue is the only known print issue. It contains writing previously published online as well as new content. Highlights include photographs from Senior Open Studios; articles on the Quad mosaics, community gathering spaces, the timing of Thanksgiving break, Saturday night dinner parties in Ewing House, dining employees around campus, how Mike Fink saved Carr House, and the trouble with summer subletting; as well as comics by Maddy Trower, Jackie Ferrentino, and Casey Roonan.

Stability Of Art Preference In Frontotemporal Dementia, Andrea R. Halpern, Margaret G. O'Connor

Faculty Journal Articles

We examined aesthetic preference for reproductions of paintings among frontotemporal dementia (FTD) patients, in two sessions separated by 2 weeks. The artworks were in three different styles: representational, quasirepresentational, and abstract. Stability of preference for the paintings was equivalent to that shown by a matched group of Alzheimer's disease patients and a group of healthy controls drawn from an earlier study. We expected that preference for representational art would be affected by disruptions in language processes in the FTD group. However, this was not the case and the FTD patients, despite severe language processing deficits, performed similarly across all three …

The Aesthetic Unconscious, Roland K. Végső

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Within the context of recent European history, examines the phrase "aesthetic ideology" and attendant conceptual considerations. Discusses Jacques Rancière’s work and his unequivocal rejection of what he calls “this great anti-aesthetic consensus,” and the central category of the “distribution of the sensible” (le partage du sensible). Rancière calls some level of political engagement “primary aesthetics” and opposes it to actual “aesthetic practices.”

Further, considers Alain Badiou’s critique of Rancière’s Disagreement. Badiou summarizes Rancière’s argument by calling it “a democratic anti-philosophy that identifies the axiom of equality, and is founded on a negative ontology of the collective that sublates the …

A Symposium On Aesthetic Engagement

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

What Is 'Everyday' In Everyday Aesthetics?, Ossi Naukkarinen

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

The theme of everyday aesthetics has recently been addressed by numerous authors. However, the question of what is actually the nature of the everyday, as contrasted with the non-everyday and how this nature affects the aesthetics of the everyday has not been sufficiently elaborated. The purpose of this essay is to clarify the everydayness of the everyday and combine the general notion of everydayness with the key points of everyday aesthetics

The Propaganda Power Of Protest Songs: The Case Of Madison's Solidarity Sing-Along, Sheryl Tuttle Ross

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

The aim of this paper is to examine the propaganda power of Madison’s Solidarity Sing-Along. To do so, I will modify the Epistemic Merit Model of propaganda so that it can account for a broader spectrum of propaganda. I will show how this is consistent with other accounts of musical pragmatics and the potential political function of songs and music. This will provide the ground for a robust interpretation of the political meanings of the Solidarity Sing-Along. I will assume the Madison protests and the Solidarity Sing-Along can be considered a paradigm case of peaceful protest as it has been …

Crafty Entanglements: Knitting And Hard Distinctions In Aesthetics And Political Theory, Kate M. Daley

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Many theoretical writings on aesthetics and politics rely on hard distinctions between what is and is not art, and what is and is not political. In this article, I draw on the work of theorists, knitters, and fiber artists to argue that hand knitting provides a lens through which to unsettle some of these distinctions. I illustrate some of the ways in which aesthetic theory relies on hard distinctions between art and not-art and politics and not-politics, with particular focus on the work of Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, and Rancière. I explain how knitting is often seen as falling clearly outside …

Front Matter

1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era

No abstract provided.