Aesthetics Commons^™

Editorial

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

Learning From Venice, Max Ryynänen

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

What role does arrival play in our aesthetic interaction with a city? Traveling to Venice drastically changed following the building of the railway. The way the city was perceived was wholly altered. The facade of Venice moved from the harbor to the railway station, without any changes being made to the city itself or its architecture. How did this change Venice and how did it change visiting it, and what can we learn from this case?

Aesthetics And Mobility - A Short Introduction Into A Moving Field, Ossi Naukkarinen

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Aesthetics cannot by any means be defined only as philosophy of art. Everything can be approached from an aesthetic standpoint. Aesthetically interesting ways to move about can be found in most everyday situations. Our everyday mobility consists of various ways of getting about, and sometimes our approach to them is aesthetically colored. That we move in different ways and link them with aesthetic considerations of some sort is deeply rooted in our thinking. Our bodily experiences of the world are typically movement experiences, and our conceptual thinking is also built on them: We simply cannot make sense of the world …

From Mobile Ontologies To Mobile Aesthetics, Jos De Mul

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

We are living in a globalizing world, characterized by constant and rapid innovation. As we are inclined to go with this flow and its accompanying discourse of mobility, there is a danger that we overlook the persistence of cultural traditions. However, this paper argues that important differences exist between pre-modern, modern and post-modern traditions with regard to the form mobility takes. After a short discussion of the role information and communication technologies play in post-modern traditions, it is argued that these technologies transform our world, and not only our electronic files, into a global database and, as a consequence, generate …

Moving Pictures - Advertising, Traffic And Cityscape, Pasi Kolhonen

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

There are two major factors responsible for the way contemporary cities look the way they do. One is the ever-increasing volume of traffic, and the other is the present commercial culture which manifests itself most visibly through advertising. This paper deals with the effects of advertising in a city environment; the main focus is on advertising linked to traffic. Nowadays we have become so accustomed to advertising that it sometimes is actually hard to recognize just how much is around. Spaces without some form of advertisements are becoming progressively fewer in today's Western cities. The city-dweller's field of vision is …

Movement And Participation: Journeys Within Everyday Environments, Johanna Hällsten

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Motion is an elementary part of our everyday life; it determines our perception and appropriation of environmental features. We are immersed in the world while on foot, grounding awareness of the three-dimensionality of the world and ourselves through movement. As a site-specific installation artist, movement is a crucial aspect of my practice in the sense that it makes the work occur. I argue that the installation comprises the experience of the participant through his or her interaction with the space and the intervention that has occurred through movement. The experience is one which unfolds and changes as the participant walks …

Recent Publications

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

Editorial

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

Are Supertasters Good Candidates For Being Human Ideal Critics?, Francis Raven

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This paper asks whether supertasters possess the criteria for ideal critics that David Hume outlines in his essay "Of the Standard of Taste." This might seem like a straightforward question, but there is a paradox involving supertasters: They possess more tastebuds than normal tasters, making it reasonable to assume they fulfill the requirements for Humean ideal critics with respect to taste. However, because they have more tastebuds, supertasters find certain foods bitter that normal tasters do not and thus negatively evaluate them. This might indicate that supertasters actually make poor candidates for being Humean ideal critics with respect to taste. …

Response To Jon Boone's Critique, Yuriko Saito

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

The Aesthetic Dissonance Of Industrial Wind Machines, Jon Boone

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Yuriko Saito recently published an essay in this journal, "Machines in the Ocean: The Aesthetics of Wind Farms" (Contemporary Aesthetics, 2 (2004)). The bulk of her essay is a search for the right aesthetic justification for wind plants sited in the ocean as well as for those onshore. Because wind power does not emit toxins into the air and its source of energy is recurrent, it offers the promise of a clean, renewable alternative to fossil fuels. The central problem with harnessing any form of energy is that enormous energies are wasted in the process of producing and channeling a …

Production Theories And Artistic Value, David E.W. Fenner

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

In this paper, I want to argue that what I call "production theories" - theories that purport to account for the value of a work of art instrumentally and in terms of something experienced by audience members in attending to the work - are insufficient to account for artistic value. The production theories I will discuss include those of Monroe Beardsley, Nelson Goodman, Leo Tolstoy (for lack of a more current pure affective theory), and Alan Goldman (whose account may be seen as an amalgam of the first three). The first three of these theorists represent the most popular and …

The Eye And The Hand: Professional Sensitivity And The Idea Of An Aesthetics Of Work On The Land, Justin Winkler

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Academic aesthetics is guided by the visual and notions of distance. In this article I want to study how an aesthetics of work, of process and proximity, could function. I am asking why the peasant population has been always been supposed not to have an aesthetic appreciation of their land. I contend that they had some kind of appreciation, but that this was conceived expressed in terms fundamentally different from the academic and pictorial landscape aesthetics. With the term 'professional' sensitivity and examples from the Swiss Alps and Southern France, I discuss the question of how an archaeology of an …

Immersive Contemplation In Video Art Environments, Tiffany Sutton

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This essay examines a form of video art -- what is called a "video environment" -- that calls upon as much as it departs from familiar conventions that are bound up in museum display. I argue that the way that works in this genre are housed in museums enables them to give rise to a form of contemplation, one involving immersion, that is, if not unique to this genre, then certainly demonstrated by it. My examples of video environments make a case for the coherence of this rarely experienced immersive form of contemplation, the value of which, in turn, makes …

Burn The Panopticon: Irigaray's Ethics, Difference, Poetics, Simone Roberts

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph of Prologue]

The following essay has a purpose more than a thesis. This essay explains the central tenets of Irigaray's ethics of sexual difference through an understanding her work as that of a symbolist philosopher. Symbolist poetry and French Feminist philosophy like Irigaray's have several qualities in common. One is that the literal level of language is not where the action is. A reader must think associatively on many levels at once in order to gather and interpret the several indirect messages sent by a particular image or metaphor. Another is an acquired comfort with paradox. Paradoxes lie …

Empiricism, Edward N. Martin

SOR Faculty Publications and Presentations

No abstract provided.

Review Of The Aesthetics Of Cultural Studies, By Michael Bérubé, 2005, David Banash

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

The Aesthetics Of The Road, Road Art, And Road Traffic, Yrjš Sepänmaa

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Three things are required for a good road: economy, safety and beauty. A key concept of this trinity is fitting: how to fit the road into the landscape. Together, the road and the landscape form a work of road art. Art attached to the road environment - in this case the other meaning of road art - is at its simplest art works placed beside a road. Art in a more demanding form gives the landscape new dimensions of meaning. Road and art in unison are more than the sum of their parts. Furthermore, travelling is a way to get …

Notices

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

Aesthetic Functionalism, Sven Ove Hansson

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

According to the strongest version of aesthetic functionalism, aesthetic value is completely determined by and therefore reducible to practical function. According to the opposite view, function and aesthetic value are completely independent of each other. Both these views are shown to be untenable, and instead aesthetic dualism is defended. By this, I mean that some aesthetic judgments that can legitimately be made about an object refer to it under descriptions of its practical function, whereas others refer to it, for instance, under descriptions of its physical appearance. Since valuations of the former type are in most cases positively correlated with …

Natural And Empty Desires: An Epicurean View Of Musical Experience, Daniel Putnam

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Epicureans distinguish natural desires, which have their origin in the body itself, from empty desires which are imposed by society. Natural desires allow a person to enjoy pleasures free from anxiety and worry. Empty desires such as those for status or luxury are endless and lead to a life of frustration, resentment and anxiety. In this paper I apply this distinction to musical experience and differentiate between the genuine enjoyment of music and musical experience tainted by empty desires.

Symposium: The Body (Concluded From Vol. 2)

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

The Mystery Of Lonergan, Richard Liddy

Department of Religion Publications

No abstract provided.

Workflow 2004, Students Of Risd, Risd Archives

All Student Newspapers

Workflow was a student publication on photography. This 2004 issue was the first and possibly only issue, and featured online photography resources, news from the RISD Photography department, responses to the First International Photography and Video Triennial, graduate and undergraduate work, alumni profiles, and a brief interview with Gary Metz.

Muffin February-March 2004, Students Of Risd, Risd Archives

All Student Newspapers

Muffin was a newsletter produced in the early aughts by RISD’s Queer Student Union as a student guide to queer culture. The February/March 2004 issue was the first and features highlights from a lecture on 17th century "romantic friends" the Ladies of Langollen, Brown Queer Student Alliance updates, gay bar reviews, queer social groups and websites, and a short story by Nikki Ripple "Portrait of Lover #27."

The Thomistic Cosmological Argument, W. David Beck

SOR Faculty Publications and Presentations

No abstract provided.

Rosenzweig's Messianic Aesthetics, Jules Simon

Selected Works Temporary Series

No abstract provided.

Poetry And The Question Of God, Richard Liddy

Department of Religion Publications

No abstract provided.

Augustine's Intellectual Conversion, Richard Liddy

Department of Religion Publications

No abstract provided.

Review: Biblical Ideas Of Nationality: Ancient And Modern, Donald L. Fowler

SOR Faculty Publications and Presentations

No abstract provided.