The molecule, as a perfect and ageless building block of matter that exists beyond human reach, has been an object of fascination and admiration since the 19th century. However, the discourse surrounding nanotechnology – at least at its most optimistic – promises the possibility of human mastery over this domain and, as a result, over all matter. This belief carries forward the old idea of a division between a realm of the base, material and particular, on one hand, and a (...) realm of the perfect, immaterial and abstract, on the other, one which today is most powerfully expressed in information discourse. Within this framework, nanotechnology promises the ability to negotiate and even dissolve this division, allowing matter itself to be treated as a kind of information. The most enthusiastic adherents of this idea believe that this will one day allow us to ‘reprogram’ material reality itself. (shrink)

ABSTRACT George Berkeley is usually not discussed in the canonical histories of modern aesthetics. Similarly, Berkeley scholars do not seem to have paid attention to his possible contribution to modern aesthetics. Berkeley exploited certain theoretical potentials of the emerging aesthetic experience that was invented and formulated especially by his contemporaries like Joseph Addison, Richard Steele and Lord Shaftesbury. He applied these elements in shaping a theologico-aesthetic language in the very same period when Francis Hutcheson and Alexander Baumgarten wrote (...) their widely acclaimed first aesthetic theories in Europe. At the same time, Berkeley advances the linguistic and religious aspects of the modern aesthetic experience not in his theoretical, but in his pragmatical and popularizing writings. Instead of relying on a purely rational theology or a negative theology, he offers an ‘aesthetic’ one based on the model of the beautiful and the sublime. Aesthetically, this meant a re-interpretation and re-configuration of the duality of the beautiful and the sublime – decades before Edmund Burke's Philosophical Enquiry. (shrink)

This essay examines how Michel Henry's and Jean‐Luc Marion's continuation of phenomenology's turn to the invisible relates to painting, aesthetics, and theology. First, it discusses Henry and Marion's redefinition of phenomenality. Second, it explores Henry's “Kandinskian” description of abstract painting as expressing “Life.” Third, it explicates Marion's “Rothkoian” rehabilitation of the idol and renewed zeal for the icon—both phenomena exemplify “givenness.” Fourth, it unpacks my thesis: Henry's phenomenology, theologically applied, exercises an inadequate Kantian apophasis, characterized by a sublime (...) sacrifice of the imagination; although Marion's work sometimes evidences a similar tendency, its prevailing momentum offers theology a fully catholic scope. (shrink)

This text focuses on how to think the visual culture of disappearance – more closely, disappearance of animals. It takes as its starting point the Ernst Jünger novel The Glass Bees from 1957 in order to start an excavation into obsolescence, animals and the ecological crisis. The aesthetic themes of visibility/invisibility are entangled with the ecological questions of disappearance and pollution. This sort of media ecological question is unravelled, furthermore, with examples concerning the mass extinction of bees, also discussed in (...) Lenore Malen's video installation The Animal That I Am (2009–10). In this way, it argues for a media theoretical understanding of the visual culture of ecocrisis as well as the complex question of epistemology of such a visibility/invisibility. (shrink)

Two events, apparently distant one from the other and without any direct link between them, but nevertheless strictly connected by a common spiritual legacy, constitute the subject of this paper. The first one, took place in 1971, when a very special «ecumenical chapel» opened its doors to the public. It is known under the name of «Rothko Chapel», due to the general project, undertaken by the painter Mark Rothko. Since that time, it has become one of the most precious artworks (...) that represent the contemporary religious aesthetics. The black Rothko’s paintings, the Greek-cross building designed by the architect Philip Johnson, the Broken Obelisk of the artist Barnett Newman standing right out of the Chapel and the music composed for this ambient by the composer Morton Feldman, have replaced what traditionally has been called an «imago templi»; but contrary to all Christian tradition they represent (literally) no-thing. The second event, took place in 1795, when two young friends, Hegel and Schelling, were making a kind of oath under the sign of an Invisible Church, actualizing an ambiguous concept that, even if rooted in the Holy Scriptures, it had been condemned for its consequences as heretical. The relationship between these two events is given by contemporary art historians which have established that modern abstract painting, from a formal point of view, is rooted in the Romantic tradition. With this paper I would like to contribute to the establishment of this connection, not only by formal means, but by showing a common spiritual attitude towards images. Christianity, essentially figurative in its religious aesthetics, has always had to deal with the Jewish prohibition of image-making. This difficulty has been inherited to contemporary debates in which artist with classical readings and education, often of Jewish origins but active in Christian societies, try to create a new kind of art, above all traditions and free of dogmas. According to my suggestion, Rothko Chapel should be considered as the realization of a fragile balance in which both «aniconism» and «need of images» have simultaneously sublated their one-sidedness, producing a higher spiritual stage. Thus, such a chapel would not be a simple space where all religions could only meet and undertake a dialog, but should be considered as something more surprising: a unique realization of what logically appears as a pure contradiction: the realization of an Imago Templi for an Invisible Church. (shrink)

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is a frequent point of reference for Edward Said’s investigations into the various forces that structure and define the encounter of imperial societies with others. In Culture and Imperialism, Said explains the importance of Conrad’s novella by linking it to his concept of culture as the aesthetic acme of a society that simultaneously marks it and divides it from others. In Heart of Darkness, Said claims, we have a narrative that challenges its own imperial society (...) by emphasizing the ambiguity of its cultural limit. Heart of Darkness is thereby able to dramatize and emphasize the constituent elements of imperial society, even as it is unable to exceed that society’s fundamental character. Said’s reading is important, and even vital, for an appreciation of the complexities of Conrad’s novella, but it does not go far enough. The ambiguity of Conrad’s depiction of imperial society is only an ambiguity to the extent that the novella is critiqued at the level of content, with a corresponding lack of emphasis upon its rhetorical form. Through a consideration of the three primary elements of this form – the careful situation of the Nellie as the site of the narrative, the work of interruption in Marlow’s narrative, and the reverberation of Kurtz’s dying words in the conclusion of the novella – this essay argues that there is very little ambiguity in Conrad’s text. Indeed, what ambiguity remains is a function of its effort to dramatize the limit of imperialism precisely as a limitation, as a cultural determinant that through its form perpetually determines other societies as inferior, even as this very culture, as a limit set against these other societies, shows their richness to which imperialism is essentially blind. (shrink)

Aesthetics is a central topic in the works of Jean-Luc Marion and Michel Henry. While Henry focuses on abstract art (especially Kandinsky), Marion’s writings range over the history of art, including analyses of Courbet, Rothko, and Klee. This article examines their strikingly similar aesthetic theories and shows how they are grounded in a phenomenological claim about the relation between invisible and visible, hence about phenomenality itself. The artist becomes a paradigm for phenomenological receptivity in both thinkers, and art (...) is assigned a quasi-salvific function. This raises several important questions about their theories of art. (shrink)

Relying on Husserl as well as on the reflections by Merleau-Ponty on Cézanne, Henry on Kandinsky and Deleuze on Bacon, this essay sketches some basic problems that arise in a phenomenological account of non-figurative painting. An investigation of the distinction between phenomenological and pictorial perception, of the transposition of the painter’s mode of perception into a painted image, and of the expressive force of paintings inevitably confronts one with the enigma of the appearing of something invisible. The essay proceeds (...) in three steps. The first step describes pictorial perception in terms of a ‘seeing according to’. Such a mode of perception pays attention to visual ambiguities, to the ‘gaze of things’ and to the conditions of visibility that are ordinarily overlooked. The second step moves on to the issue of the transposition of a pictorial perception in a painted image. Deleuze’s account of “manipulated chance” proves to be very helpful here. In the final step, Henry’s and Deleuze’s emphasis on the painting’s expression of totally invisible ‘forces’ is discussed. (shrink)

Dragon days: introduction to the new edition -- Enter the dragon: on the vernacular of beauty 1 -- Nothing like the son: on Robert Mapplethorpe's X portfolio -- Prom night in flatland: on the gender of works of art -- After the great tsunami: on beauty and the therapeutic institution -- American beauty.

Biomechanical engineering is marked by highly experimental efforts to craft mechanical devices that might one day alleviate the scarcity of transplantable organs in the USA. A pronounced desire among bioengineers involves melding humans with machines, bearing the promise of perfecting the natural yet messy flaws of the ‘natal’ body. Not all bodies are considered equal within this field, however. Visual renderings of heart devices — as an unusual sort of body prosthesis — foreground a specialized aesthetic, where the well-toned male (...) form defines an idealized generic of beauty and perfection. This analysis considers the moral underpinnings of the embodied aesthetic in specific reference to engineers’ efforts to fabricate implantable ‘artificial’ hearts. Of central concern are the sociomoral consequences of a standardized male beauty, set alongside the striking absence — or invisibility — of the female form within this rarified field of science. (shrink)

Nanotechnologies produce many different types of images but are characterized by the ones that allow us to ‘see the atoms’ despite the fact that objects at the nanoscale are smaller than the wavelength of light and hence are ‘invisible’. Images from scanning probe microscopy (SPM), like ‘The Beginning’, have played an emblematic role in the constitution of the field and are also more likely to be used in communication outside the scientific field. These images are made, selected, modified and (...) evaluated with respect to the information that they communicate. The ‘life cycle’ of these images implies the transduction of this information. Outside of the scientific field, however, they are no longer defined by this information, nor according to technical and scientific criteria, but by their aesthetic power, and they become associated with other images from other fields (art, advertisement, entertainment). This process creates a psycho-social ‘halo’ about ‘nano’ in the public perception, and raises ethical issues about nanotechnological communication via images. We will analyze the halo of the nano in this respect and propose a strategy for a reflexive ‘accommodation’ to the images at the nanoscale. (shrink)

Marcel Duchamp is often viewed as an "artist-engineer-scientist," a kind of rationalist who relied heavily on the ideas of the French mathematician and philosopher Henri Poincaré. Yet a complete portrait of Duchamp and his multiple influences draws a different picture. In his _3 Standard Stoppages_, a work that uses chance as an artistic medium, we see how far Duchamp subverted scientism in favor of a radical individualistic aesthetic and experimental vision. Unlike the Dadaists, Duchamp did more than dismiss or negate (...) the authority of science. He pushed scientific rationalism to the point where its claims broke down and alternative truths were allowed to emerge. With humor and irony, Duchamp undertook a method of artistic research, reflection, and visual thought that focused less on beauty than on the notion of the "possible." He became a passionate advocate of the power of invention and thinking things that had never been thought before. The _3 Standard Stoppages_ is the ultimate realization of the play between chance and dimension, visibility and invisibility, high and low art, and art and anti-art. Situating Duchamp firmly within the literature and philosophy of his time, Herbert Molderings recaptures the spirit of a frequently misread artist-and his thrilling aesthetic of chance. (shrink)

Marcel Duchamp is often viewed as an "artist-engineer-scientist," a kind of rationalist who relied heavily on the ideas of the French mathematician and philosopher Henri Poincaré. Yet a complete portrait of Duchamp and his multiple influences draws a different picture. In his _3 Standard Stoppages_ (1913-1914), a work that uses chance as an artistic medium, we see how far Duchamp subverted scientism in favor of a radical individualistic aesthetic and experimental vision. Unlike the Dadaists, Duchamp did more than dismiss or (...) negate the authority of science. He pushed scientific rationalism to the point where its claims broke down and alternative truths were allowed to emerge. With humor and irony, Duchamp undertook a method of artistic research, reflection, and visual thought that focused less on beauty than on the notion of the "possible." He became a passionate advocate of the power of invention and thinking things that had never been thought before. The _3 Standard Stoppages_ is the ultimate realization of the play between chance and dimension, visibility and invisibility, high and low art, and art and anti-art. Situating Duchamp firmly within the literature and philosophy of his time, Herbert Molderings recaptures the spirit of a frequently misread artist-and his thrilling aesthetic of chance. (shrink)

Francis Sparshott introduced the term ‘remote art’ in his 1982 presidential address to the American Society for Aesthetics. The concept has not drawn much notice since—although individual remote arts, such as palaeolithic art and the artistic practices of subaltern cultures, have enjoyed their fair share of attention from aestheticians. This paper explores what unites some artistic practices under the banner of remote art, arguing that remoteness is primarily a matter of some audience’s epistemic distance from a work’s context of (...) creation. I introduce palaeoart—the depiction of extinct prehistoric fauna and flora, especially from the Mesozoic—as a paradigmatic case of remote art, showing that its remoteness is secured both by the deceptively rich cognitive load required for its creation and appreciation, and by its existence at the margins of the institutional artworld, which ensures that this cognitive loading is largely obscured. Too often, remote art is not just inscrutable, it is invisible to us. (shrink)

From time to time our tiny intellectual worlds are simultaneously shaken by big ideas – ideas that, however big they are, have their expiration-date. Such is the case with the idea of the impossibility to find life outside language. In this essay, I picture what I think is the current state of the philosophy of history after the so-called linguistic turn and what I think the direction is where the philosophy of history might be headed by taking into account the (...) important job done by linguistic theories. I regard the abandonment of epistemology and the arrival to the realm of aesthetics as a point of no return, and conclude that a new philosophy of history has to have an aesthetic character. However, due to the omnipotence of language I also detect a narrow constructive potential in linguistic theories and argue that a new philosophy of history has to have the dual task of searching for life outside language while remaining in the realm of aesthetics. As a next step, I identify Frank Ankersmit’s notion of an individual historical experience as a move towards the fulfillment of this dual task. Finally, because Ankersmit’s experience remains mute, in the second half of the essay I attempt to present an outline of the possibility of a fruitful cooperation between the philosophy of history and phenomenology. More precisely, I am trying to synchronize Ankersmit’s notion of an individual historical experience with László Tengelyi’s phenomenological experiments with experience and let Tengelyi speak where Ankersmit “stops talking”. As a result, with the help of Tengelyi, an aperture can be found in language through which experience might worm its way. Due to this fissure, experience might be regarded as an invisible driving force behind linguistic expressions, and thus behind historical writing. (shrink)

This article analyzes inscriptions cast on bronze mirrors of the Han dynasty to trace how the material property of brightness became emphatically aestheticized through an expressive rhetoric of radiance and brilliance, illumination and reflection. It argues that specular brightness as a defining feature of Han mirrors was exploited by artisans to attract potential buyers. In contrast to erudite philosophers who exclusively used the logograph ming 明 to modify the literary mirror in classical texts, artisans promoted their products by featuring terms (...) such as guang 光, zhao 昭, hui 輝, yao 耀, qing 清, and jiao 皎 in rhythmic proses of various lengths. Examining how artisans advertised their high-tin bronzes as embodiments of solar and lunar light, the study shows that specular brilliance was linked to a range of cosmetic, moral, and religious powers, from illuminating the individual and the physical world to revealing the invisible world, whether of human emotions or demons. The article further argues that the inscribed verses, while often formulaic and clichéd, were neither mere decorations nor generic blessings. In fact, they meaningfully structured and communicated a particular aesthetic appreciation shared by both Han artisans and users. This well-developed semantic fascination with specular brightness thus marks these metal discs as a distinctive genre of the decorative arts in early imperial China. (shrink)

Light seems to be a very changeable size in our build environment. Being an immaterial building stone, light takes a very liquid shape in our design-vocabulary. It consists of an invisible material – photons – and therefore it takes no specific form in itself but is only articulated through the meeting with form. Therefore, since form has been the major theme for the aesthetics up until now, giving form to light is a complex and challenging task and reducing (...) it to Lux and measurable numbers only an escape from facing what is actually perceived. In this way light seems to suffer from what can be called the dichotomy between the aesthetics of the objects and the aesthetics of the perception – as stated by Boehme. To improve practice this article conducts a study of our perception, focusing more on the effects of light and less on the physical light (lux). By doing so the article tries to give a better understanding of the differences of the regional lighting cultures and the influences creating the differences. The article tries to establish a link between the regional daylight and the use of artificial lighting, showing that daylight, as a background, along with our perception, are determinant factors for how the artificial lighting and the brightness of the room is perceived. The articlehereby suggests that light is not an absolute factor. This means the end of the dichotomy between daylight and artificial light – often expressed by artificial light replacing daylight – instead this article tries to establish a dialogue between the daylight and the artificial lighting. The article describes how light – this intangible building block – can become a more workable size in the aesthetic and architectural practice of today.  . (shrink)

An expanded edition of Hickey's controversial and exquisitely written apologia for beauty--championed by artists, reviled by art critics, and as powerful as ever 30 years on 1993: the AIDS pandemic rages through yet another decade, leaving society and the arts devastated and bereft. Dave Hickey sits down to produce a slim volume, The Invisible Dragon. The book ignites a firestorm, and from its ashes "beauty" again rises as a dominant force in artistic life. Academics argue about theoretical minutiae. Artists (...) pass the book around like a samizdat. This 30th-anniversary edition brings back into print Dragon's four essays on beauty and commingles them with five previously uncollected essays. Hickey's 1974 profile of Dolly Parton anticipates Dolly's longevity as a cultural and feminist icon; his appreciation of Richard Pryor weaves an elegiac tapestry; his review of John Rechy's seminal gay novel Numbers outs its literary innovation in the face of a homophobia that otherwise ghettoized it; and his singular essay on Ed Ruscha, a paragon of arts writing by an extraordinary prose stylist, enjoins us to listen to art, not just look at it. An afterword by Hickey's friend and Dragon's editor "queers" the brash, heterosexual gambler as it situates the creation of Dragon squarely within the AIDS pandemic. The book was in part an attempt to make beauty visible under the looming presence of death and bodily decay. Only now can we fully appreciate how artists continue to harness beauty as a source of meaning and joy. Dave Hickey (1938-2021) was one of the preeminent arts and cultural writers of the turn of the 21st century. A MacArthur "Genius" Fellow known as the "beauty guy" in the popular press, Hickey opened A Clean, Well-Lighted Place gallery in Austin, Texas, in the 1960s, before becoming executive editor at Art in America magazine. In the 1970s, he was a songwriter in Nashville, Tennessee, where he coined and helped create the "Outlaw country" music movement. By the 1990s, Hickey had made a home in Las Vegas, from where he regularly traveled to speak with audiences worldwide. (shrink)

Dragon days: introduction to the new edition -- Enter the dragon: on the vernacular of beauty 1 -- Nothing like the son: on Robert Mapplethorpe's X portfolio -- Prom night in flatland: on the gender of works of art -- After the great tsunami: on beauty and the therapeutic institution -- American beauty.

This handsomely produced volume contains 22 contributions from international scholars, which were originally presented at the 2000 Conference of the International Society for Phenomenology, Fine Arts, & Aesthetics. The papers center around the theme of gardens and include a wide range of topics of interest to phenomenologists but also, perhaps, to gardeners with a philosophical bent. A sampling of topics: Leonardo's Annunciation Hortus Conclusus and its reflexive intent; hatha yoga--a phenomenological experience of nature; the Chinese attempt to miniaturize the (...) world in gardens; conflating and compressing time in commodified space and architecture; constructing the deconstructive landscape (the ruin aesthetic); and a phenomenological-anthropological aproach to Zen gardens. The volume is lightly indexed by name (mostly philosophers). Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:134 When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it —­Genesis 3:6 Abstract Aesthetics has emerged as an important battleground in the moral quest for a lower carbon society. Especially in the case of proposed wind farms (an environmentally benign technology in terms of low carbon (...) emissions), opponents frequently refer to the unsightly machines creating negative landscape impacts and ruining the view. This essay seeks to reflect on the particular ways in which visual aesthetics are framed and mobilized in this moral debate. Exploring the dividing lines between pictoral and more-­ than-­ representational approaches I ask if the moral dilemmas in our landscape decisions (e.g. individual rights to beauty or collective duties toward future generations) are obscured by physical or visual realms. The largely invisible nature of wind, electricity and climate change, set within the physical and tangible nature of landscapes and turbines, challenges us to experience the aesthetics of landscapes-­ with-­ machines through more creative and engaging means that are not limited to visibility, nor deaf to morality. SIN, DUTY, AND THE AESTHETICS OF NATURE As the first act of sin in the bible, Eve’s consumption of a visually aesthetic fruit led to humans being banned from the Garden of Eden. Looking at the above sentence more closely, we could even argue that “good for food” is not a positive condition (e.g. tasty, nourishing), but Justice in the Eye of the Beholder? ‘Looking’ Beyond the Visual Aesthetics of Wind Machines in a Post-­Productivist Landscape DAN VAN DER HORST Dan van der Horst / Justice in the Eye of the Beholder? 135 rather the absence of a negative (e.g. inedible), whilst “also desirable” may sound like the hunger for wisdom was only a secondary, additional attraction. The sentence thus draws attention to the key role of aesthetics in the making of a moral decision; would Eve have eaten the forbidden fruit if it was not “pleasing for the eye”? Aesthetic judgments may be informed by a range of factors, but as this bible quote illustrates, morality is key among them. Associations between right and wrong on the one side and beauty or ugliness on the other, are not exactly rare in written history, be they religious, literary or scholastic works. As a marked contribution to the latter, Immanuel Kant has paid particularly close attention to the links between aesthetics and morality, arguing amongst others that any universal agreement in judgments of the sublime must rest on an appeal to moral feelings.1 But universality is not the only logical link between aesthetic judgementandmorality.Peoplecanfeelasenseof‘duty’tofindcertainthings beautiful e.g. because that is the aesthetic judgment of the group they aspire to belong to.2 Whilst this sense of duty can refer to social conditioning and group belonging, it also has resonance for landscape aesthetics at a time of anthropogenic climate change (a universal threat) when we must “learn to love the low carbon landscape.”3 This presents a point of departure from the debate on the moral obligation of preserving aesthetically pleasing landscapes (as we tend to do through legal designations, e.g. national parks), an ethical logic which leads, to use the words of Holmes Rolston, “from beauty to duty.”4 Moreover a posi­ tive aesthetical appreciation of a landscape because it accommodates low carbon technologies, would potentially require an inverse ethical logic, i.e. from duty to beauty.5 Notwithstanding the clear conceptual links between moral and aesthetic judgment, in everyday life it may be far less clear what kind of moral issues may underpin particular expressions of aesthetic sensibility. This can be particularly problematic for the deployment of environmental technologies (i.e. technologies pursued to reduce pollution ) that have significant landscape footprints. That is where we can find universal moral claims demanding environmental action for the common good rubbing up against aesthetic landscape judgments in places where such developments are proposed. This produces an unsatisfactory situation in which the deployment of clean technologies ENVIRONMENT, SPACE, PLACE / VOLUME 10 / ISSUE 1 / 2018 136 is delayed, tensions within local communities may increase... (shrink)

Taking into account my personal path as a philosopher and as a painter, I try to sketch the perspective on aesthetics that was opened to me by a cross-cultural encounter. The European tradition, on one side, and the Sino-Japanese tradition, on the other side, are the two mirroring currents along which I moved in order to trace a sort of “deconstruction” and a “restructuring” of artistic and philosophical vision. In my painting, I aim for a confluence of different streams (...) of thought by thinking about European informal art and landscape ink-painting of China and Japan. This confluence continues to produce a fertile dialogue, enlivening the deep resources that constitute the core of a subjectivity in process. Aesthetics converts itself into ethics: an ethical move, beyond the opposition of visible and invisible as dull substances, beyond the opposition of immanence and transcendence, is one of the inner goals of this pathway between art and philosophy. (shrink)

:Visual culture – art, film, entertainment, advertising – are saturated with images of normative heterosexual masculinity. They form visual narratives that project a largely coherent kind of masculinity where heterosexual men are shown to be creative and powerful; they initiate heroic action, take the moral high ground and preserve traditional roles and the status quo. This widely extensive visual field, peopled with normative images of masculinity, also affects and infiltrates the domain of art exemplified by Jackson Pollock and abstract expressionism (...) which, to the present day, continues to project masculinity as the originator and pioneer of aesthetic value. This essay reviews feminist and queer artists’ image making that appropriates the myth of homogeneous masculinity and turns it into a medium for a variety of creative and hybrid explorations. I argue that Deleuzoguattarian concepts such as becoming-woman and becoming-imperceptible help us to understand this molecularisation of masculinity. And importantly in the other direction, these feminist and queer image makers allow us to understand and explore more fully these concepts. (shrink)

Is aesthetics a product of evolution? Are human aesthetic behaviors in fact evolutionary adaptations? The creation of artistic objects and experiences is an important aesthetic behavior. But so is the perception of aesthetic phenomena qua aesthetic. The question of evolutionary aesthetics is whether humans have evolved the capacity not only to make beautiful things but also to appreciate the aesthetic qualities in things. Are our near-universal love of music and cute baby animals essential to our species’ evolutionary development, (...) which took place over thousands of years? In other words, do aesthetic practice and appreciation help people to survive or reproduce? Do aesthetic behaviors help to propel natural selection? If so, what does that tell us about ourselves as human beings? What does it tell us about art, our other aesthetic practices, and aesthetic experience? (shrink)

Our contributors explore a rich variety of aesthetic problems that bring about the self-reflexive re-evaluation of ideas.

Early in the course of undertaking empirical research on the sexual diversity of the judiciary I had to address a particular challenge. Sexuality, I was repeatedly told, is not and ought not to be a difference that is taken into account. At best it ought to be disregarded or taken out of consideration. This generated a number of challenges for my research. How do you research and make sense of sexuality as a difference that key informants assert is absent or (...) seek to make invisible and irrelevant? How do you research the operation and effects of that which is not to be spoken about? How do you research the sexual norm when its existence and operation is denied? This article explores one response. It is a project that may for some be surprising and unexpected. It is a study of judicial portraits. Drawing on the insights of queer theory and art historical scholarship on portraits I undertake a textual analysis of these images, focusing upon the aesthetic and artistic traditions used to make them. A small case study of portraits of the Chief Justices of the Supreme Court of New South Wales is used to explore how, if at all, sexuality figured in these portraits. (shrink)

The paradoxical logic of transparency and mediation Transparency is the metaphor of our time. Whether in government or corporate governance, finance, technology, health or the media – it is ubiquitous today, and there is hardly a current debate that does not call for more transparency. But what does this word actually stand for and what are the consequences for the life of individuals? Can knowledge from the arts, and its play of visibility and invisibility, tell us something about the paradoxical (...) logics of transparency and mediation? This Obscure Thing Called Transparency gathers contributions by international experts who critically assess the promises and perils of transparency today. (shrink)

Published under the auspices of The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning, 19 essays document the April 1998 international congress held at Harvard University. They ponder on such topics as the phenomenology of the experience of enchantment, Leonardo's enchantress, the ambiguous meaning of musical enchantment in Kant's Third Critique, art and the reenchantment of sensuous human activity, the creative voice, the allure of the Naza, Henri Matisse's early critical reception in New York, Zizek's sublimicist aesthetic of enchanted fantasy, (...) and enchantment in Baroque festive court performance in France. There is no subject index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

Since antiquity, ideas regarding true beauty have been usurped by the purview of mathematics. From the aesthetic “logic” of Aristotle to the instrumentalized brutality of the Final Solution and its methodical anthropometric measurements, we see how the symmetry of numbers has been used to quantify the bodily politic according to an empirical prescript for centuries. The cultural mores of new media have served to elevate this phenomenon of cosmetic nomenclature to new and alarming levels, engineering an insidious mathematical visuality for (...) the world like never before. Whether it be the way a digital camera transforms the human body into a matrix of numerical codes or the way various items of technological fetish both imitate and influence our visual preferences for people, all things deemed attractive and unattractive are now part of a new mathematical milieu: an aesthetic calculus that ensures our bodies and our machines share a single unified ornamentation. (shrink)

A hijacking is a violent takeover, a misappropriation of something for a purpose other than its intended one, by parties other than those for whom the thing was meant. This issue explores the aesthetic practices and consequences of unauthorized repurposing.

In her book, Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett thinks through what ontological, political, and ecological questions would look like if humans could admit that matter and nonhuman things are living, creative agents; the contributors to this issue of Evental Aesthetics begin to think through what aesthetic questions would look like.

From Alfred Stieglitz to Trevor Paglen, photographs of the sky have engaged with the relationship between abstraction and representation. This article argues that Stieglitz’s attempt to convert the ‘natural’ abstraction of the sky into the ‘cultural’ abstraction of the modernist image opens a space through which recent photographers have moved to use the sky photograph as a means of interrogating issues of openness and concealment that are at once aesthetic and political. The invisibility of signs of military-industrial power embedded within (...) airspace is, in Richard Misrach’s and Paglen’s photographs, registered but not exactly shown, since the capacity of the photograph to reveal the unseen is challenged by the effectiveness of contemporary modes of concealment. What is shown in these images, however, is the condition of hiddenness itself, which is encountered by Misrach and Paglen not only through the abstraction of the sky photographs but by situating those images within a discursive field – through the use of titles, captions and an explication of working methods – that regrounds the atmospheric as a spectacular function of power’s open secret. (shrink)

Emily Brady provides a systematic account of aesthetics in relation to the natural environment, offering a critical understanding of what aesthetic appreciation ...

Advertisements for high-technology products and services visualize processes and phenomena which are unvisualizable, such as globalization, networks, and information. We turn our attention specifically to the case of nanotechnology advertisements, using an approach that combines visual and sonic culture. Just as phenomena such as complexity and networks have become established in everyday discourse, nanotechnology seizes the social imaginary by establishing its own aesthetic conventions. Elaborating Raymond Williams’ concept of structures of feeling, we show that in visualizing nanotechnology, its stakeholders employ (...) spaces, verbs, and objects of feeling. These favorable nanotechnology structures of feeling are woven into the social imaginary, recursively producing the reality they describe. (shrink)

Based on a Lived Experience Description written by an experienced nurse in Denmark, this article offers an ontological and existential‐phenomenological exploration of aesthetic dimensions of excellence in nursing. In the research of Patricia Benner and colleagues, excellence in nursing is described as a matter of intuitive pattern recognition based on clinical experience and narrative understanding. In this article, and based on phenomenological reflections and philosophical inspirations from the Danish philosopher Dorthe Jørgensen and the French philosopher Maurice Merleau‐Ponty, I suggest an (...) extended understanding of excellence in nursing, and I argue that the work and research of Benner seem to overlook ontological and aesthetic aspects of excellence in nursing. This article argues that aesthetic aspects of excellence in nursing can be comprehended as moments where nurses sense a surplus of meaning and moments where the nurse and the patient share and are subjected to communal and unfolding life phenomena. Aesthetic dimensions of being in nursing can, from an ontological approach, best be described as similar to the way human beings listen to a piece of music or to how artists try to give a voice to the world: as a resonant way of being and becoming within the moment. (shrink)

This is a sweeping and provocative work of aesthetic theory: a trenchant critique of the philosophy of art as it developed from the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century, combined with a carefully reasoned plea for a new and more flexible approach to art.Jean-Marie Schaeffer, one of France's leading aestheticians, explores the writings of Kant, Schlegel, Novalis, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Heidegger to show that these diverse thinkers shared a common approach to art, which he calls the "speculative theory." (...) According to this theory, art offers a special kind of intuitive, quasi-mystical knowledge, radically different from the rational knowledge acquired by science. This view encouraged theorists to consider artistic geniuses the high-priests of humanity, creators of works that reveal the invisible essence of the world. Philosophers came to regard inexpressibility as the aim of art, refused to consider second-tier creations genuine art, and helped to create conditions in which the genius was expected to shock, puzzle, and mystify the public. Schaeffer shows that this speculative theory helped give birth to romanticism, modernism, and the avant-garde, and paved the way for an unfortunate divorce between art and enjoyment, between "high art" and popular art, and between artists and their public.Rejecting the speculative approach, Schaeffer concludes by defending a more tolerant theory of art that gives pleasure its due, includes popular art, tolerates less successful works, and accounts for personal tastes."[A] remarkable work.... [Schaeffer's] writing is governed by... the ideals of clarity and consequence, the ideas of logic, truth, and evidence.... Schaeffer is so precise and unrelenting a philosophical critic that one wonders how some of the philosophies he anatomizes here can possibly survive the operation."--From the foreword by Arthur C. Danto. (shrink)

This reference essay surveys recent work in the emerging sub-discipline of everyday aesthetics, which builds on the work of John Dewey to resist sharp distinctions between art and non-art domains and argue that aesthetic concepts are properly applied to ordinary domains of experience.