Aesthetics Commons^™

Stories In Pictures (And Non-Pictorial Objects): A Narratological And Cognitive Psychological Approach, Michael Ranta

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Narratological studies have frequently focused upon linguistic structures, considered to be paradigmatic cases of narrativity, while pictorial signs, such as icons and symbols or indices, have received comparably much less attention. In this paper, however, some basic and regularly occurring narrative aspects of pictures and non-pictorial objects will be presented and discussed.

A New Problem For Aesthetics, Kevin Melchionne

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

The essay introduces the problem of aesthetic unreliability, the variety of ways in which it is difficult to grasp our aesthetic experience and the consequent confusion and unreliability of what we take as our taste.

Notices

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

Affirming Difference: Everyday Aesthetic Experience After Phenomenology, Wood Roberdeau

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This article explores the complex relationships among two different types of critique, the socio-temporal zone known as "everyday life" and the moment of the encounter by those who are encountering art works. It proceeds with a close study of the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Mikel Dufrenne, and tests their key concepts against generalized contemporary art practices that question a model of the traditional aesthetic experience by suggesting the possibility that within the expanse of postmodernity such a paradigm has shifted, (although it is not completely irretrievable). The paper argues that this shift has been achieved by remobilizing readymade objects …

Disgust And Ugliness: A Kantian Perspective, Mojca Kuplen

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Contemporary discussions of the problem of ugliness in Kant’s aesthetic theory have, to my knowledge, left unexplored the relation of disgust to ugliness. At most, they have explained away disgust as merely an extreme form of ugliness or displeasure, as Guyer did in his interpretation of ugliness in Kant’s aesthetic theory,[1] and by that strayed from the phenomenological and conceptual uniqueness of disgust in comparison to ugliness, while Kant, as I argue, did not. As a matter of fact, careful investigation of the concept of disgust in Kant’s writing will reveal the distinctive and multifaceted character that he ascribed …

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 …

Philosophical Hermeneutics And The Ethical Function Of Architecture, Paul Kidder

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Karsten Harries’ book, The Ethical Function of Architecture, raises the question of how architecture can be interpretive of and for our time. Part of Harries’ pursuit of this question is done in dialogue with the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, whose evocatively expressed ontology of building and dwelling recovered, in philosophical and poetic terms, the power of buildings to symbolize and interpret the most fundamental truths of being and human existence. The present essay identifies contributions to this hermeneutic and ontological approach to architecture drawn from the philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, emphasizing Gadamer’s notions of play (Spiel), symbol, and the …

Everyday, Elsewhere: Allegory In Philippine Art, Patrick D. Flores

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

The essay traces certain contexts of the allegorical impulse in Philippine image making and art, specifically as it marks the self-consciousness of the maker of image and art to render time, place, and event legible. It conceives of it as an aesthetic of migration, prefiguring an elsewhere that is aspired to as well as a phantasm of affinity that describes a present condition. The allegorical, therefore, bears the desire to belong to the world, referencing both the critique of coloniality as well as the possibility of transcending it at the very moment of revealing its ethical failure.

The Role Of Westerners In The Conservation Of Legong Dance, Stephen Davies

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

The image of legong-sumtuosly costumed girl dancers crowned with frangiapanis-is the face of Balinese culture. Yet it is only one of twenty dance/drama genres and prominent in only some centers. Legong, a secular court dance, has often been (and still is) in danger of extinction. Balinese are now less interested in legong than ever before and musicians prefer to play other kinds of music.

Since the 1930s, legong has been presented at tourist centers and by ensembles touring overseas. Western expatriates have founded legong groups and generally brokered the relation between Balines and foreigners. Foreign scholars have studied, recorded, and …

Playing With Shadows, Apinan Poshyananda

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This essay reflects on the practice of the Indonesian artist Heri Dono, whose exhibition in Tokyo in 2000 is the anchor. It probes the cultural contexts in which the contemporary art of Dono plays out, identifying key trajectories that help clarify the concerns of this particular articulation: the locale of Yogyakarta, the mentality of the Javanese, and the device of the puppet presentation or the wayang, which derives from the ancient epics.[1] All this is located within the scheme of an exhibition of contemporary art and rendered in such a way that it conveys a certain aesthetic of hybridity and …

Politics Of Beauty, Ken-Ichi Sasaki

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

I look back at the history of modern aesthetics to grasp its current situation and to propose its possibilities for the future. The early modern period, during which aesthetics came into being, was a great historical turning point for civilization. Our contemporary period shares this character, and it is worthwhile for us to consult its history in order to reflect on our civilization. Aesthetics began with Baumgarten’s proposal, which consisted in a triple subject: sensibility, beauty, and art. His idea was accepted because it responded to the fundamental problems of the period. Sensibility was the only form of cognition of …

A Symposium On Laurent Stern's Interpretive Realism, John Gibson

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

Recent Publications

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

Response To Critics, Laurent Stern

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

Allowing The Accidental; The Interplay Between Intentionality And Realism In Photographic Art, Katrina Mitcheson

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

We experience photographs both as intentional and as prone to the accidental. The photograph is both capable of being an artwork with its own, constructed world and of drawing our attention to the reality of the objects used in creating it. In this article I employ the insights contained in the concepts of Barthes’ studium and punctum in order to explore how the artist’s intentions and the realism of photography interact aesthetically. I advance the idea that a unique aesthetics of photography can be rooted in the tension between the intentional, culturally coded message of a photograph and the emanation …

The Aesthetics Of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (Mri): From The Scientific Laboratory To An Artwork, Silvia Casini

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This article investigates the aesthetic potential of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), a medical imaging technique, both inside the laboratory and in the arts. By combining Rancière’s understanding of aesthetics with Merleau-Ponty’s notion of embodied perception, it argues that an image-generating technique conceived in the scientific field can successfully migrate into the realm of fine art, opening up new aesthetic and perceptual possibilities. Although aesthetic qualities are already present in the laboratory, they remain hidden by the necessity of reading the image-data obtained according to the interpretative framework of the medical discourse. Two paths are covered: the first goes from the …

A Functional Model Of The Aesthetic Response, Daniel Conrad

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

In a process of somatic evolution, the brain semi-randomly generates initially-unstable neural circuits that are selectively stabilized if they succeed in making sense out of raw sensory input. The human aesthetic response serves the function of stabilizing the circuits that successfully mediate perception and interpretation, making those faculties more agile, conferring selective advantage. It is triggered by structures in art and nature that provoke the making of sense. Art is deliberate human action aimed at triggering the aesthetic response in others; thus, if successful, it serves the same function of making perception and interpretation more agile. These few principles initiate …

Notices

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

Report: The Xviiith International Congress Of Aesthetics- "Diversities In Aesthetics" (Peking University, Beijing, China, 9-13 August 2010), Michael Ranta

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

Why Beauty Still Cannot Be Measured, Ossi Naukkarinen

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This article focuses on the question of whether the latest results achieved in sciences such as evolution studies and brain research can help us understand the nature of aesthetic judgments. It suggests that such approaches may offer interesting insights for understanding many problems in aesthetics, but for clarifying aesthetic judgments one needs a philosophical point of view. Aesthetic judgments cannot be proven right or wrong by scientific methods, and beauty or other aesthetic qualities cannot be directly measured. The “method” of both making and analyzing aesthetic judgments is discussion, and the article clarifies why this is still the case, even …

The Third Tear In Everyday Aesthetics, Katya Mandoki

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Although totally overlooked by mainstream aesthetic theory, various paths were nevertheless left open for addressing everyday aesthetics, a natural yet surprisingly controversial topic. Why they were never taken until recently, when the theme of everyday aesthetics is now becoming fashionable, can be explained not only by the obvious fact of philosophical aesthetics’ restrictive focal point on art but, among other reasons, by a kind of fetishism that demands an object of recognized value for legitimating an aesthetic inquiry. This new popularity entails, however, certain theoretical risks such as clinging to traditional art-centric and beauty-centric categories to explain the everyday and …

Laurent Stern's Interpretive Reasoning, Mary Wiseman

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

Interpretations: Deep, Reasonable, And Free, Paul Guyer

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

Nightwatch, Justin Winkler

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

In this essay I examine the features of night, in particular, urban night. I try to highlight the epistemological divide between day and night, light and darkness. Even as light-based experiencing, acting, and thinking, and their cultural tools colonize urban night, nocturnal elements relate dialectically to our daytime reasoning. I conclude with the question of whether a kind of half-tone thinking contained in a trialectic of light, twilight, and darkness would be capable of appreciating the peculiar qualities of night.

The reveries of the weak light guide into the innermost recesses of the familiar. It looks as if there are …

Another One Bites The Dust!, Gabriela Salazar

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

The contemporary landscape is rife with ruins, from circumscribed tourist attractions to urban decay and demolition sites. When examined, our aesthetic experience of these sites ranges from historical distancing to the sublime and, when found in our local communities (e.g., Providence, RI), to discomfort, displacement, and horror. In particular, this paper is interested in how certain forms of demolition, from slow and messy to explosively dramatic, can be understood as compressed and heightened experiences of the traditional sublime ruin. Additionally, as contemporary artists often use the vernacular of the ruin in their work, this paper considers how three artists, Gordon …

The Curatorial Muse, Michael J. Kowalski

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

An appreciation of the tension between the predicate, "to curate," and the subject, "the curator," is essential to understanding the convergence of creation, criticism, and administration in the graphic arts of our time. Curators were ideally positioned to step to the fore when the idea-versus-object dichotomy began to collapse in the work of Duchamp. The roots of activist curating can be found in Western Classical culture. The prevalence of conceptual art at the end of the twentieth century, combined with the explicit denigration of physical craft by artists, created a void into which activist curators moved. The curator's role as …

Sailing The Seas Of Cheese, Erik Anderson

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Memphis Elvis is cool; Vegas Elvis is cheesy. How come? To call something cheesy is, ostensibly, to disparage it, and yet cheesy acts are some of the most popular in popular culture today. How is this possible? The concepts of cheese, cheesy, and cheesiness play an important and increasingly ubiquitous role in popular culture today. I offer an analysis of these concepts, distinguishing them from nearby concepts like kitchy and campy. Along the way I draw attention to the important roles of cultural/historical context, background knowledge, and especially artist’s intentions as they are relevant to aesthetic assessments involving cheese and …

Musical Presence: Towards A New Philosophy Of Music, Charles Ford

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Most recent writings about the philosophy of music have taken an analytic or linguistic approach, focusing on terms such as meaning, metaphor, emotions and expression, invariably from the perspective of the individual listener or composer. This essay seeks to develop an alternative, phenomenological framework for thinking about music by avoiding these terms, and by extrapolating from the writings of Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger. On the basis of discussions of musical time, its multiple levels of matter, and its internal dialectics, the essay presents a particular understanding of “style” as the primary basis for mediation between production and reception. It concludes …

The Value Of Fictional Worlds (Or Why 'The Lord Of The Rings' Is Worth Reading), James Harold

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Some works of fiction are widely held by critics to have little value, yet these works are not only popular but also widely admired in ways that are not always appreciated. In this paper I make use of Kendall Walton’s account of fictional worlds to argue that fictional worlds can and often do have value, including aesthetic value, that is independent of the works that create them. In the process, I critique Walton’s notion of fictional worlds and offer a defense of the study and appreciation of fictional worlds, as distinguished from the works of fiction with which they are …

Water And Stone: Contemporary Chinese Art And The Spirit Resonance Of The World, Mary Bittner Wiseman

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

My claim that the new art in China operates at the level of matter and gesture, below that of discourse, is twofold. First, much of the art that is being made exemplifies principles articulated by Hsieh Ho (fifth century) and Shih Tao (seventeenth century) and refracted through the changes wrought by Mao in 1949 and Deng in 1979. Through their art, experimental Chinese artists ask what can art be in a world turned upside down, and what can it be to be artist in such a world and, in particular, to be a Chinese artist.

Second, in the course of …