Aesthetics Commons^™

The Aesthetic Experience, Flow, And Smart Technology: Viewing Art In A Virtual Environment, Carol Ikard

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Smart technology can support art educators and museum professionals in mediating the aesthetic experience. It can also increase museum attendance, enrich the viewer's delight and engagement with artworks and art collections, and provide an avenue for extending art on a global level. The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which a mobile art app with text-based narrative influences scores on an aesthetic experience questionnaire. This quantitative research measured the difference in pretest and posttest human-computer interaction scores on the Aesthetic Experience Questionnaire Form after participants used two versions of a mobile art app. Csikszentmihalyi's flow was …

A Moral Problem For Difficult Art, Antony Aumann

Journal Articles

Works of art can be difficult in several ways. One important way is by making us face up to unsettling truths. Such works typically receive praise. I maintain, however, that sometimes they deserve moral censure. The crux of my argument is that, just as we have a right to know the truth in certain contexts, so too we have a right not to know it. Provided our ignorance does not harm or seriously endanger others, the decision about whether to know the truth ought to be left to us. Within this limit, therefore, difficult art is morally problematic if it …

The Difference That Art Makes, Mariana Ortega

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

In the following essay I discuss Monique Roelofs’s The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic. I show that Roelofs’s rich and complex notion of the aesthetic, informed by promises, modes of address, and aesthetic relationality, offers an important and novel way of understanding the aesthetic within a context attuned to questions of difference. I point out that Roelofs’s analysis may be enhanced by notions theorized by Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa, and María Lugones. Moreover, I raise a question regarding the intricate link between Roelofs’s notion of the aesthetic and morality

Considering Triple Self-Portraiture In The Work Of María Izquierdo, Brooke Lashley

The Quiet Corner Interdisciplinary Journal

This paper looks to María Izquierdo’s paintings, Prisioneras (Prisoners) of 1936 and Sueño y presentimiento (Dream and Premonition) of 1947, as case studies for activating a theory of triple self-portraiture. The theory reflects how plurality arises in the singular or in single significations of the self and disrupts homogeneity in thinking about identities for the self and others within the genre of self-portraiture. In activating a theory of triple self-portraiture, I found three forms of the self in Izquierdo's works: the self as oppressed (the past); the self as oppressing (the current); and the self as an emancipator (future). Although …

Postcession, Evan D. Pomerantz

Theses and Dissertations

This is a series of daily writings. Each day consists of a new topic and is closed at the end of the day. The ideas presented are philosophical, humorous, rambling, lamentations, incantations, doubt-ridden, aesthetic pep talks which combine into an affective representation of my studio practice’s becoming. There will be little congruency, some stories, and a lot of parallels because that is who I am.

To Each His Own Reality: How The Analysis Of Artistic Exchanges In Cold War Europe Challenges Categories, Mathilde Arnoux

Artl@s Bulletin

How to reconstruct artistic relationships among four European countries, situated on both sides of the Iron Curtain, during the period that commenced post-Stalin and lasted until the fall of the Berlin Wall? This is one of the questions that faces the research program To Each His Own Reality: The notion of the real in the art of France, West Germany, East Germany and Poland between 1960 and 1989, which was initiated in January 2011. The paper discusses syntheses of the questions that the research team is facing, descriptions of its methodology, an analysis of preliminary results and what they allow …

In Search Of The Artist: The Influences Of Commercial Interest On An Art School - A Narrative Analysis, Michael Leonard Sette

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The current study will investigate how identities and roles of the artist converge with competing identities and roles fostered at the institutional level within an art college as revealed through the marketing literature that they produce to attract students and business partnerships. The sociological focus for this proposal is the tension between art as a creative expressive endeavor and art as a commodity that has entered into social transactions unintended by the original expression of the artist. The researcher documents and describes (via narrative analysis) how an art school negotiates competing relationships between the pressures to teach and promote art …

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.

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 …

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 …

Illusion In The Commonplace : Reinterpreting Ernst Gombrich's Concept Of Illusion, Jonathan Auyer

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

In the dissertation I analyze and interpret Ernst Gombrich's book Art and Illusion, focusing on his view that illusion is involved in pictorial representation. Since Gombrich never gave a concise, systematic account of illusion, my goal will be to fill this void by using the text of Art and Illusion as well as Gombrich's subsequent writings in order to present a coherent account of how illusion might play a role in a picture's representing an object.

Atopia & Aesthetics. A Modal Perspective, Yves Millet

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Living in an era where global exchanges of forms and ideas are the norm raises some questions about the status of artistic practices. To explore these questions, we use Roland Barthes’ notion of atopia and the complementary yet related notion of Neutral on which Barthes commented in his later years. Atopia highlights the fact that rather than viewing current artistic activities as searches for homogenous identity, we need to view them as belonging to plural communities of practices offering modal and qualitative distinctions. We suggest that adopting this perspective sheds light on the capacity of any individual to act creatively …

Aesthetics And Art Of Friendship, Sheila Lintott

Faculty Contributions to Books

In the spirit of exploring fresh perspectives, I offer this investigation into the aesthetic aspects of personal relationships with a focus on friendship.1 Glossing the aesthetic aspects of friendship, as we too often do, impoverishes our understanding of the value and meaning of friendships, relationships which give shape and content to our lives, which animate our lives or, as Nancy Sherman (1993) puts it, relationships which structure the good life. The friendships we forge and those we forgo, the loves we cultivate and those we lose, these varying and variable relations broaden (or impoverish) our experiences, intensify (or diminish) our …

When Is Artification?, Roberta Shapiro, Nathalie Heinich

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

How do people do or make things that come to be seen as works of art? In other words, when is there artification? The answer to this question is simultaneously symbolic, material, and contextual. It has to do with meanings, objects, interaction, and institutions. We seek to define not what art is nor how it should be considered, but how and under what circumstances it comes about by way of methodical observation and inquiry in a variety of fields. Circus acrobats, break-dancers, fashion designers, chefs, graffiti artists, printers, photographers, and jazz musicians are some of the examples we explore. This …

Artification Of Sport: The Case Of Distance Running, Matti Tainio

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This article deals with the possibilities of artification in sport, using distance running as an example. Sport is viewed as one phenomenon in the history of physical cultures, with both predecessors and also the possibility of developing into something new. Sport was first defined primarily as a competitive activity but, by the end of the twentieth century, it had developed as part of the athletic trend towards exploring experience-seeking fitness sports. Through the developments of contemporary visual art, sport has also become a possible medium of art. These developments, both in sport and art, provide an opportunity to look for …

Unlimited Additions To Limited Editions, Christy Mag

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

In this paper I target the relationship between two prints that are roughly qualitatively identical and share a causal history. Is one an artwork if and only if the other is an artwork? To answer this, I propose two competing principles. The first claims that certain intentional relations must be shared by the prints (e.g., editioned prints vs. non-editioned prints). The second appeals only to minimal print ontology, claiming that the two prints need only be what I call 'relevantly similar' to one other. In the end, I endorse the second principle. There are no trumping features over and above …

The Divine Geometry Of Chocolate: Artist's Essay, Mariángeles Soto-Díaz

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

The artist discusses her series of paintings, The Divine Geometry of Chocolate, using a reappraised notion of the universal in the context of contemporary Latin American abstraction.

Integrative And Disintegrative Art, Ossi Naukkarinen

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This article compares and analyzes two seemingly opposite approaches to visual arts that can be called integrative and disintegrative. They are usually seen to be contradictory, and the latter is often favored in contemporary art discourse. The article suggests, however, that the integrative approach can still be quite as favorable to art as the disintegrative one. Both views are useful for certain purposes and in the context of individual art works they are often actually intertwining. Especially from the perspective of art education, it is easy to understand the different implications of these views. This is because in that context …

"The People Are Missing", Maryvonne Saison

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

It is through the ideal of a sensus communis that Aesthetics has offered to Philosophy an articulation to Politics. I will question the idea of an "aesthetic sociability" through the concept of "régime esthétique" (aesthetic regime) proposed by Jacques Rancière to define the 18th century fundamental change carried by Aesthetics in order to think art and sensibility together.

One question will be the central core of my essay, which is how to understand nowadays Deleuze’s assertion that art should be "contributing to the invention of a people."

Consensus and dissensus are two reefs between which art and philosophy navigate at …

Not Just Mere Things, Thomas E. Wartenberg

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This paper examines Arthur Danto's contention, put forward in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, that at a certain point in its history art becomes philosophy. The similarities and differences between Danto's view and the Hegelian one from which it is derived are examined. Using Danto's favorite example of a philosophical work of art, Andy Warhol's Brillo Box (1965), it is argued that a more plausible interpretation of the meaning of the work undermines Danto's claims about art's transformation into philosophy.

Identidad Y Entendimiento. Schelling O Una Instancia Intermedia Entre Kant Y Hegel, Adriana Renero

Publications and Research

Resumen:

Existe una tendencia a estudiar los puntos de encuentro o desencuentro entre Kant y Hegel pero se olvida la reflexión de Schelling, crucial para comprender el diálogo entre estos sistemas de pensamiento. Un caso en que se patentiza este olvido se advierte en Sublime Understanding, Aesthetic Reflection in Kant and Hegel (2005) de Kirk Pillow, quien desarrolla un modelo estético para ensanchar la noción de entendimiento humano. Partiendo de la Crítica del juicio de Kant y las Lecciones de estética de Hegel, Pillow encuentra una instancia intermedia entre el valor cognoscitivo de la determinación conceptual hegeliana y la indeterminación …

Aesthetics And The Environment: Repatriating Humanity, Nikolaos Gkogkas

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

If aesthetics is to claim its place among the fundamental philosophical disciplines, it must adequately deal with the ecological challenge, that is, the need to explain the continuity-relation between human and non-human environments. To that effect, Arnold Berleant's aesthetics of engagement constitutes an attractive proposal. Its critics (Allen Carlson and others) seem to miss its point and attack it on the basis of a particular understanding of Kantian aesthetics (mainly the disinterestedness thesis). But not only can Berleant's aesthetics meet the ecological challenge; it is also possible that it encourages a re-evaluation of traditional aesthetic categories (like disinterestedness) without necessarily …

Architecture Vs. Art: The Aesthetics Of Art Museum Design[1], Larry Shiner

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Many art critics have complained that the most dramatic art museum designs of the last decade have upstaged or interfered with the art within. This essay examines eight contemporary cases before drawing some lessons for art museum design, and ends by setting the architecture vs. art problem in the context of the philosophy of architecture, focusing on the issues of function and symbolism.

Art And Embodiment: Biological And Phenomenological Contributions To Understanding Beauty And The Aesthetic, Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Increasing awareness of the crucial and complex role of the body in making and experiencing art has led to a diverse range of biological and phenomenological philosophies of art. The shared emphasis on the role of the body re-connects these contemporary theories of art to aesthetics' pre-Kantian origin as a science of sense-perception (aesthesis) and feeling. Tracing some of the current positions in such diverse thinkers as Dissanayake, Langer, and Merleau-Ponty, this paper will examine their shared interest in art as a pre-reflective, non-discursive mode of knowing, symbolizing, and being-in-the-world. This paper argues that while some biologically based theories have …

Colorization Revisited, Julie C. Van Camp

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This article is both philosophical and practical in its intent. It endeavours to bring into focus an idea with an Ancient Greek lineage, poiesis, and determine whether it may revitalise our thinking about the 'making' of art. The art-making considered in this paper will concentrate exclusively on Western art and its historical and contemporary manifestations. I suggest that poiesis - that which "pro-duces or leads (a thing) into being'" - may enable practitioners in the varying art forms, and aestheticians who reflect upon them, to come to a deeper sense of how artworks work: that they realize themselves inter-dependently …

Poiesis And Art-Making: A Way Of Letting-Be, Derek H. Whitehead Ph.D.

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This article is both philosophical and practical in its intent. It endeavors to bring into focus an idea with an Ancient Greek lineage, poiesis, and determine whether it may revitalise our thinking about the 'making' of art. The art-making considered in this paper will concentrate exclusively on Western art and its historical and contemporary manifestations. I suggest that poiesis - that which "pro-duces or leads (a thing) into being'" - may enable practitioners in the varying art forms, and aestheticians who reflect upon them, to come to a deeper sense of how artworks work: that they realize themselves inter-dependently …

Leese Webster (1979) By Ursula K. Le Guin, Gareth B. Matthews

Picture Books

Leese was a spider, born in a palace throne room. Like other members of the “Webster” family, Leese knew how to spin an elegant and efficient web of traditional design. But then she started to produce webs of original designs like the flowers portrayed in the carpet and the huntsmen and hounds in a painting. Were these images pictures? Many animal species dance, adorn themselves, and build elaborate nests to attract mates. Can they be more and less aesthetically gifted? Authorities had Leese’s webs encased in glass and put on exhibit. Did that change their metaphysical status?

3. Sources And References For Suki, Matthew Lipman

Secondary School Curriculum

This sequential bibliography matches the 1978 edition of Suki page by page. It contains both sources—works that influenced Matthew Lipman in writing the novel, references to philosophical works he and Ann Margaret Sharp recommend to explore the novels’ philosophical themes, and brief commentary on them by Lipman.

2. Writing: How And Why (Instructional Manual To Accompany Suki, Matthew Lipman, Ann Margaret Sharp

Secondary School Curriculum

The aim of this program is to engage students in philosophical inquiry into aesthetics and related philosophical issues. The instructional manual includes short, accessible explanations of the philosophical concepts found in SUKI, the novel, as well as hundreds of exercises and discussion plans to prompt and assist the student's inquiry. As poetry is the primary aesthetic genre taken up in the novel, the explanations and activities in this manual offer numerous additional poems as objects of aesthetic inquiry. The manual also includes numerous activities that invite students to transform their thinking and dialogue into essays, poems and short stories, so …

1. Suki (Novel), Matthew Lipman

Secondary School Curriculum

Suki, a young adolescent, loves poetry and its world of metaphor. Her friend Harry hates literature class and the idea of writing poetry frightens him. Their worldviews begin to converge as the two come to see logic and poetry as two ways of finding meaning in life experience, though not before they have confronted a number of problems of language, knowledge and aesthetics. As Suki, Harry and their classmates work through the obstacles they encounter in creative writing, they construct new understandings of concepts like friendship, freedom, integrity, originality, harmony, form, balance, personhood and meaning.