Murray Smith presents an original approach to understanding film. He brings the arts, humanities, and sciences together to illuminate artistic creation and aesthetic experience. His 'third culture' approach roots itself in an appreciation of scientific innovation and how this has shaped the moving media.

The Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival has seen hundreds of arts, public and community groups coproduce over 300 events to over 25,000 audience members. Integral to this arts-based approach, in contrast to social marketing or public education models, is the notion that mental health is an essentially contested concept whereby meanings are negotiated and debate encouraged. With emerging evidence that the festival is an ef ective way of engaging people intellectually and emotionally, we explore (...) ethical issues, challenges and paradoxes that have emerged as the festival has developed. Consideration is given to issues of power, purpose, opportunity costs, reach, impact, programming risks, and participation from those with experience of mental ill-health. Throughout, we explore practical implications for funding, managing, programming, marketing and evaluation of this and similar endeavours. (shrink)

Film, Art, and the Third CultureSmithMurrayoup. 2017. pp. 320. £35.00.

This chapter rehearses the historical discourse over pornography with the intent of orienting the reader to the discourse and motivating a more constructive approach to dealing with pornography. Topics covered include pornography and obscenity law in the context of First Amendment protections to freedom of speech, pornography as harmful, including the arguments that pornography causes sexual violence or foments discrimination, the value of pornography, and whether pornography in general, and pornographic films in particular are art. The overall approach to this (...) chapter is exploratory and the conclusions offered are tentative. The goal of this piece is simply to motivate a more robust understanding of pornography, its place in society, and its place in the artworld. (shrink)

Volume 23, Issue 2, June 2019, Page 120-123.

My goal in this chapter is threefold. First, I argue that film is, at least partly, an art of sound. Most films are not made merely to be seen; they are also made to be heard. This offers an alternative to traditional accounts of film, which take film to be an essentially visual artform, and it suggests new directions for research in philosophy of film. Second, I argue that there are several distinct arts of sound (...) in film. Some of these arts, like film music, are “aesthetic” arts; others, like sound effects, are “functional” arts. Still others, like sound design, are both functional and aesthetic. Third, I consider and reply to the objection that the arts of sound in film cannot be arts at all, because they are all functional. (shrink)

From Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Decameron and Canterbury Tales to Monty Python’s televisual riffs on Arthurian legend in the 1970s and role-playing games like Pendragon or Hidden Kingdom, a fascination...

This book focuses on the role of photographs embedded in specific films to look at how we understand images. The book also explores how the viewer s perceptions of the photos are vital to the understanding and interpretation of each of the films discussed.".

Offering an ambitious study of the aesthetics of violence across art, literature, film and theatre, this volume brings together traditional German aesthetic and social theory with the modern problem of violence in art. Written in an engaging style, the book includes examples range from Homer and Shakespeare to slasher films and performance art.

Philosophical questions about the arts go naturally with other kinds of questions about them. Art is sometimes said to be an historical concept. But where in our cultural and biological history did art begin? If art is related to play and imagination, do we find any signs of these things in our nonhuman relatives? Sometimes the other questions look like ones the philosopher of art has to answer. Anyone who thinks that interpretation in the arts is an activity (...) that leaves the intentions of the author behind needs to explain how and why this differs so fundamentally from ordinary conversational interpretation, where the only decent models we have are ones that depend crucially on the recovery of intention. Anyone who thinks that imaginative literature has anything to tell us about time had better have a position on how earlier and later relate to past and future. Anyone who thinks that empathy plays a role in literary engagement had better have a psychologically plausible account of what empathy is. Philosophical questions about the arts also go naturally with other kinds of philosophical questions: we can't think constructively about representation in art without thinking about representation; text, meaning, reference and existence get similarly drawn into the conversation. Some ideas that philosophers of art deal with emerge from other disciplines. In literary theory an enormous amount of attention has been lavished on tracing the sources of unreliability in narrative. Is the result adequate to the details of the particular works we call unreliable? Contemporary film theory is generally hostile to the fiction/documentary distinction. Are there in fact any grounds for this? This book of thirteen connected essays examines questions of all these kinds. It ranges from the semantics of proper names, through the pragmatics of literary and filmic interpretation, to the aesthetic function of stone age implements. Some of the essays have not been published before; some that have are here substantially revised. (shrink)

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 78, Issue 1, Page 129-131, Winter 2020.

Once the province of film and media scholars, today the moving image is of broad concern to historians of art and architecture and designers of everything from websites to cities. As museums and galleries devote increasing space to video installations which no longer presuppose a fixed viewer, urban space becomes envisioned and planned through "fly throughs," and technologies such as GPS add data to the experience of travel, moving images have captured the attention of geographers and scholars across the (...) humanities and social sciences. Their practice of "mobility studies" is remaking how we understand a contemporary world in relentless motion. Media theorist and historian Anne Friedberg (1952-2009) was among the first practitioners of visual studies to theorize the experience of vision in motion. Although widely influential beyond her own discipline, Friedberg's work has never been the subject of an extended study. The Moving Eye: Film, Television, Architecture, Visual Art and the Modern gathers together essays by renowned thinkers in media studies, art history, architecture, and museum studies to consider the rich implications of her work for understanding film and video, new media, visual art, architecture, exhibition design, urban space, and virtual reality. Ranging from early cinema, to works by Le Corbusier, Sergei Eisenstein, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Pierre Huyghe, to theories of the image in motion informed by psychoanalysis, theories of the public sphere, and animal studies, each of the nine essays in the book advances the lines of inquiry commenced by Friedberg. (shrink)

Art and Pornography presents a series of essays which investigate the artistic status and aesthetic dimension of pornographic pictures, films, and literature, and explores the distinction, if there is any, between pornography and erotic art. Is there any overlap between art and pornography, or are the two mutually exclusive? If they are, why is that? If they are not, how might we characterize pornographic art or artistic pornography, and how might pornographic art be distinguished, if at all, from erotic art? (...) Can there be aesthetic experience of pornography? What are some of the psychological, social, and political consequences of the creation and appreciation of erotic art or artistic pornography? This book will contribute to a more accurate and subtle understanding of the many representations that incorporate explicit sexual imagery and themes. It is sure to stir debate, and healthy controversy. (shrink)

Giuliana Bruno _Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film_ London: Verso, 2002 ISBN 1859848028 484 pp.

In parallel to their monumental installations, which were built in the Western and South- western deserts of the U.S. in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a number of representatives of American Land Art have also produced works on film. Researchers have held divergent views about the importance of these films for the understanding of the installations and about their character as either independent works or mere documentations. This article takes a different approach and analyses an element common to (...) both installations and films: the critique of conventional constructions of illusionistic space. The repudiation of conventional spatial structures and of the representation of perspective is discussed on the basis of works by Walter De Maria and Robert Smithson. A formal analysis demonstrates that the films go beyond merely showing the conception of space in Land Art installations. Instead, they perform a similar critique of conventional ideas of space with decidedly cinematic techniques. (shrink)

This chapter explores a range of significant similarities and differences between videogames and films. It also examines the relationship between the philosophies of each. We begin by addressing the definition of videogames and the question of whether they count as a subcategory of some other artistic kind, namely, film or the moving image. We then turn to the debate about the art status of videogames and compare this to the debate concerning the art status of films. We go on (...) to explore the nature of interactivity in videogames and ask whether videogame interactivity differs from the kind of interactivity that one can find in other artistic domains. We conclude by exploring various ethical issues relating to videogames and, again, compare these to related issues which arise with respect to film. (shrink)

In the beginning was the night. All light, shapes, language, and subjective consciousness, as well as the world and art depicting them, emerged from this formless chaos. In fantasy, we seek to return to this original darkness. Particularly in literature, visual representations, and film, the night resiliently resurfaces from the margins of the knowable, acting as a stage and state of mind in which exceptional perceptions, discoveries, and decisions play out. Elisabeth Bronfen investigates the nocturnal spaces in which extraordinary (...) events unfold, and casts a critical eye into the darkness that enables the irrational exploration of desire, transformation, ecstasy, transgression, spiritual illumination, and moral choice. She begins with an analysis of classical myths depicting the creation of the world and then moves through night scenes in Shakespeare and Milton, Gothic novels and novellas, Hegel's romantic philosophy, and Freud's psychoanalysis. Bronfen also demonstrates how modern works of literature and film, particularly film noir, can convey that piece of night the modern subject carries within. From Mozart's "Queen of the Night" to Virginia Woolf 's oscillation between day and night, life and death, and chaos and aesthetic form, Bronfen renders something visible, conceivable, and comprehensible from the dark realms of the unknown. (shrink)

RESUMO Neste ensaio analiso as diferentes modalidades de pensamento que ocorrem entre a filosofia e as imagens em movimento partindo da distinção metafilosófica elaborada por Gilles Deleuze entre “pensar” e “filosofar”. Esta é uma distinção fundamental para a possível elaboração de uma filosofia do cinema, ou, pelo menos, para afirmar que “o cinema filosofa”, uma tese atualmente imersa num certo equívoco. Neste sentido, como possível resolução para tal mal-entendido, sugiro uma adequada designação deleuziana de “pensar com conceitos” e “pensar com (...) imagens”, num processo recíproco fundamental entre o campo filosófico e o não filosófico das artes. Começando com uma introdução à noologia em Deleuze e uma descrição dessas ideias e do seu valor estético, prossigo com uma análise mais detalhada sobre imagens em movimento, metáforas e adaptação cinematográfica de modo a, dentro de uma abordagem pós-continental e pós-analítica, questionar se o cinema filosofa. ABSTRACT In this essay I analyse the different modalities of thought that occur between philosophy and moving images, beginning with Gilles Deleuze’s metaphilosophical distinction between “thinking” and “philosophizing”. This is an essential distinction for the possible elaboration of a film philosophy, or at least one which claims that “film philosophizes,” a thesis that is nowadays immerged in a certain misconstruction. In this sense, I suggest, as a conceivable resolution to this misunderstanding, a more proper Deleuzian designation of “thinking with concepts” and “thinking with images,” in a fundamental reciprocal process between the philosophical and non-philosophical fields of the arts. Starting with an introduction to Deleuze’s noology and a description of these ideas and their aesthetic value, I proceed with a closer analysis of moving images, metaphors, and film adaptation in order to question, within a post-continental-analytic approach, whether film philosophizes. (shrink)

explanation is of course that Arnheim was working against the assumption that film cannot be art because it is mere mechanical recording. Thus what he needed to emphasize were all the ways in which film fails to accurately reproduce reality.

The interdisciplinary French-American thinker René Girard (1923-2015) has been one of the towering figures of the humanities in the last half-century. The title of René Girard's first book offered his own thesis in summary form: romantic lie and novelistic truth [mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque]. And yet, for a thinker whose career began by an engagement with literature, it came as a shock to some that, in La Conversion de l'art, Girard asserted that the novel may be an “outmoded” form (...) for revealing humans to themselves. However, Girard never specified what, if anything, might take the place of the novel. This collection of essays is one attempt at answering this question, by offering a series of analyses of films that aims to test mimetic theory in an area in which relatively little has so far been offered. Does it make any sense to talk of vérité filmique? In addition, Mimetic Theory and Film is a response to the widespread objection that there is no viable “Girardian aesthetics.” One of the main questions that this collection considers is: can we develop a genre-specific mimetic analysis (of film), and are we able to develop anything approaching a “Girardian aesthetic”? Each of the contributors addresses these questions through the analysis of a film. (shrink)

A great number of works of art, it is commonly claimed, are aesthetically valuable. Some philosophers have even argued that providing an aesthetically pleasing experience is their only proper function. However, some of these artworks display or invite us to adopt an immoral point of view. Even worse, they even seem to make immoral situations delightful and appealing. The following questions thus arise: Does the alleged immorality of these works count as an aesthetic or artistic defect? Can an immoral movie (...) or novel ever be a great example of its kind? In addition to these concerns related to art evaluation, the connection between various forms of art and morality has been investigated by discussing the capacity of works of art to move us emotionally. (shrink)

In this book, ten experts in philosophy of film explore the importance of transcendence for cinema as an art form in the films of the great directors, David Cronenberg, Karl Theodor Dreyer, Federico Fellini, Werner Herzog, Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch, Terrence Malick, Yasujiro Ozu, and Martin Scorsese.

Dying serves so often within the narratives of Western popular culture, as an exercise in self-improvement both to the individual dying and to those looking on. It enlightens, ennobles and renders exceptional all those affected by it. Though mainstream cinema's “grammar of dying” is mired in similar myths, film has the potential to do dying differently: it can, instead, connect us, ethically, to the vulnerability of others. The aim of this article is to pursue this potential of film. (...) Using the mainstream grammar of dying as a starting point, I will consider how the moving image, and this ethical potential, is harnessed within two hybrid-media pieces about a loved-one's decline and death: George Saxon's art installation, “A Record of Undying” (2014) and photographer Briony Campbell's short film The Dad Project (2009). While these works will be located within the traditions and transformations of moving image practice, the primary concern here is with how such emotionally resonant pieces navigate our relation to, and responsibility for, our own and others' harsh realities. In this way, the question of ethics is grounded not in the solipsistic circuits of affective modes – whether as the catharsis or betterment of mainstream myths, or what Jane Stadler privileges as the ethical effects of empathy – but in something more inherently, more inevitably, political. (shrink)

Each chapter covers one topic and largely consists of brief summaries of arguments for and against various themes. The topic of the first chapter is whether and on what basis a film can be considered art. Photography is used as an analogy. The arguments range from considering the mechanical form of cinema as an obstacle to arthood to arguments considering cinema’s mechanical nature as essential to its arthood; the former by those who ground art in human agency, the latter (...) by those who ground art in some conception of verisimilitude. Those worried by the former argument, emphasize editing and montage effects as the essential aspects of cinema, the idea being that the less representational veracity a film presented, the more it could be classified as art. On the other hand, for those who equate the art of film with verisimilitude, it is argued that the realism of film is superior to the realism of the other representational arts due to film’s retrieval of images as opposed to merely representing them. (shrink)

Bringing together Deleuze, Blanchot, and Foucault, this book provides a detailed and original exploration of the ideas that influenced Deleuze's thought leading up to and throughout his cinema volumes and, as a result, proposes a new definition of art. Examining Blanchot's suggestion that art and dream are "outside" of power, as imagination has neither reality nor truth, and Foucault's theory that power forms knowledge by valuing life, Eugene Brent Young relates these to both Deleuze's philosophy of time and his work (...) with Guattari on art. In doing so, he uses case studies from literature and popular film, including Kafka's Castle, Villeneuve's Arrival, and Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut. Providing important new insights for those working in literary and cinematic studies, this book advances a new definition of art as that which reverses the realities and truths of power to express obscure ideas and values beyond both our exterior and interior worlds. (shrink)

_Esotericism, Art, and Imagination_ is a uniquely wide- ranging collection of articles by scholars in the field of Western esotericism, focusing on themes of poetry, drama, film, literature, and art. Included here are articles illuminating such diverse topics as the Gnostic fiction of Philip Pullman, alchemical images, the Tarot, surrealism, esoteric films, and much more. This collection reveals the richness and complexity of the intersections between esotericism, artistic creators, and their works. Authors include Joscelyn Godwin, Cathy Gutierrez, M. E. (...) Warlick, Eric Wilson, and many others. (shrink)

Art or Porn? The popular media will often choose this heading when reviewing the latest sexually explicit novel, film, or art exhibition. The underlying assumption seems to be that the work under discussion has to be one or the other, and cannot be both. But is this not a false dilemma? Can one really draw a sharp line between the pornographic and the artistic? Isn't it time to make room for pornographic art and for an aesthetic investigation of pornography? (...) In answering these questions this book will draw on insights from many different disciplines, including philosophy, feminist theory, aesthetics, art history, film studies, theatre studies, as well as on the experience of people who are actually operating in the art world and porn industry. By offering a variety of theoretical approaches and examples taken from a wide range of art forms and historical periods, the reader will gain a fuller and deeper comprehension of the relations and frictions between art and pornography. (shrink)

In the beginning was the night. All light, shapes, language, and subjective consciousness, as well as the world and art depicting them, emerged from this formless chaos. In fantasy, we seek to return to this original darkness. Particularly in literature, visual representations, and film, the night resiliently resurfaces from the margins of the knowable, acting as a stage and state of mind in which exceptional perceptions, discoveries, and decisions play out. Elisabeth Bronfen investigates the nocturnal spaces in which extraordinary (...) events unfold, and casts a critical eye into the darkness that enables the irrational exploration of desire, transformation, ecstasy, transgression, spiritual illumination, and moral choice. She begins with an analysis of classical myths depicting the creation of the world and then moves through night scenes in Shakespeare and Milton, Gothic novels and novellas, Hegel's romantic philosophy, and Freud's psychoanalysis. Bronfen also demonstrates how modern works of literature and film, particularly film noir, can convey that piece of night the modern subject carries within. From Mozart's "Queen of the Night" to Virginia Woolf 's oscillation between day and night, life and death, and chaos and aesthetic form, Bronfen renders something visible, conceivable, and comprehensible from the dark realms of the unknown. (shrink)

Cultivation: Art and Aesthetics in Everyday Life is an inquiry into everyday practices with an aesthetic dimension such as collecting, walking and domestic life. I examine the implications of a critical engagement with these practices for philosophical aesthetics and cultural studies. Traditional aesthetic theory has been informed by a fine arts model of creativity and aesthetic experience and, thus, has not adequately treated everyday aesthetic life. The rapidly expanding field of contemporary cultural studies, on the other hand, has been (...) marked by a dramatic shift in attention toward non-fine art objects like film and television. However, the attention of cultural studies remains, for the most part, limited to mass produced commodities, thereby presenting a narrow picture of aesthetic life outside the fine arts. Cultivation presents an alternative to both approaches. Following John Dewey, I develop a model of cultivation that allows me to locate and describe creativity and aesthetic experience in everyday life. Seen within the framework of everyday life, cultivation becomes more than the development of aesthetic sensibility, as in traditional connoisseurship. Instead, it includes as well the ongoing development of the capacity to satisfy this sensibility through the creative manipulation of one's actions and the world. This Pragmatist version of cultivation emphasizes the importance of creating occasions for aesthetic experience, that is, of refining and developing experience through the design of aesthetically motivated endeavors like walking, interior decoration and collecting. Cultivation is essentially a process: we do or make things in order to have experiences which then, internalized through habit and re-organized and redirected upon reflection, serve as the basis for further doing or making and still more refined experiences. This model of cultivation is then deployed in extended analyses of everyday practices. In these analyses, I develop a critical approach that seeks to understand practice as a creative process whose possibilities are intrinsically open to development. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Art and the Educated AudienceJames O. Young (bio)1. IntroductionWhen writing about art, aestheticians tend to focus on the work of art and on the artist who produces it. When they refer to audiences, they typically speak only of the effect that the artwork has on its audience. Aestheticians pay little, if any, attention to the important active role that an audience plays in the workings of a healthy art (...) world. My goal in this essay is to do something to end the neglect of the audience. I will focus on the role of the informed or, as I will call it, educated audience. I begin by subjecting the concept of an audience to some old-fashioned conceptual analysis. Once we are clearer about what an audience is and, in particular, what an educated audience is, we can begin to determine what it can do. In my view, an educated audience can play an important role in encouraging the production of artworks with high aesthetic value. Indeed, highly valuable artworks are unlikely to be produced without a broad educated audience to whom artists are responsive. Consequently, the aesthetic education of audiences is crucial to the health of an art world.2. What Is an Audience?In its original sense, the noun "audience" refers to the people within earshot of some speaker: one held forth to an audience. In connection with the arts, "audience" was first used in something very like this original sense. It referred to those who heard actors perform plays or those who heard the recitation of poetry. Soon the concept of an audience also applied to those who heard the performance of musical works. By the mid-nineteenth century, the concept of an audience had been broadened. It came to apply to the readers of a novel or other works of literature. More recently, the concept of an audience has been applied to those who view paintings, sculptures, and films. [End Page 29] Now an audience consists of people who experience artworks of any sort. Having an experience of an artwork is a necessary condition of being part of an audience. This condition is, however, far from being sufficient.Some people experience works of art but are not part of an audience. Consider, for example, ushers in a concert hall or theater and guards in art museums. An usher hears the play or the concerto but may not regard it as an aesthetic object. Similarly, a guard sees the paintings (and so in this sense experiences them) but does not, perhaps, attend to them as aesthetic objects. Or consider a person who arranges to meet a friend in a gallery. He almost certainly sees the paintings, but he will not count as part of an audience if he is completely intent on looking for his friend. It seems, then, that members of an audience do not simply experience artworks. They must experience artworks in a certain way.Audience members experience an artwork in such a way that they are able to benefit from its aesthetic value. When I speak of "aesthetic value," I mean the value an artwork possesses in virtue of its sensuous properties. I will not here take a stand on the nature of experience of aesthetic value. Some writers have suggested that the contemplation of art involves a distinctive sort of experience. Perhaps it does. (It has been suggested, for example, that audience members must have a measure of "psychical distance" from some object if they are to have an aesthetic experience of it.) I simply hold that audience members experience an artwork in whatever way makes it possible for them to benefit from its aesthetic value. If aesthetic value causes pleasure (or "aesthetic emotion," understanding, or anything else) then audience members can have pleasure caused in them by an artwork's aesthetic value. The capacity to benefit from the aesthetic value of an artwork is a necessary condition of being part of the work's audience.Notice that not just anyone can be part of the audience for a given work of art. Audience members must possess certain capacities. In the most basic sense of the word, an audience is composed... (shrink)

The main aim of this paper is the critique of poststructuralist theory of art, and particularly thesis about the avant-garde peace of art as a kind of transgression. As a starting point of this critique, the ordinary language philosophy developed by American philosopher Stanley Cavell is used, particularly his film theory. While poststructuralist philosophy was developed around the notion of ideology, Cavell interprets film and arts in general around the notion of skepticism. While poststructuralism, because of thesis (...) about avant-garde as a kind of transgression within the field of ideology, is a kind of philosophy of negation, we point out that Cavell?s philosophy is a utopian theory of transcending of skepticism where avant-garde film has significant but not crucial place. Cavell?s thesis is used as a basis for re-thinking of modernism, which is in opposition to postmodernist turn realized by poststructuralism. nema. (shrink)

This is not the first time the title ‘Art and Technology’ has been used, but to distinguish what I have to say from Walter Gropius's Bauhaus exhibition of 1923, I am subtitling my paper ‘an old tension’, where the architect spoke of ‘a new unity’. In a way, Gropius has been proved right; the structures of the future avoiding all romantic embellishment and whimsy, the cathedrals of socialism, the corporate planning of comprehensive Utopian designs have all gone up and some (...) come down. We have a mass media culture also largely made possible by technology. Corporatist architecture, whether statist ‘social housing’ or freemarket inspired, films, videos, modern recording and musical techniques are all due to technological advances made mostly this century. Only in a very puritanical sense could what has happened be thought of as inevitably bringing with it enslavement. All kinds of possibilities are now open to artists and architects, which would have been imaginable a few decades ago. No one is forced to use these possibilities in any specific way. (shrink)

As a technology and an art form perceived to be capable of reproducing the world, it has long been thought that the cinema has a natural affinity with reality. In this essay I consider the Realist theory of film history out forward by Robert C. Allen and Douglas Gomery from the perspective of Radical Constructivism. I argue that such a Realist theory cannot provide us with a viable approach to film history as it presents a flawed description of (...) the historian’s relationship to the past. Radical Constructivism offers an alternative model, which requires historians to rethink the nature of facts, the processes involved in constructing historical knowledge, and its relation to the past. Historical poetics, in the light of Radical Constructivism, is a basic model of research into cinema that uses concepts to construct theoretical statements in order to explain the nature, development, and effects of cinematic phenomena. (shrink)

In the United States, property rights are afforded protection, but moral rights are not. Up until 1989, the United States adamantly refused to join the Berne Copyright Convention, the first multilateral copyright treaty, now ratified by seventy-eight countries. The American government refused to comply because the Berne Convention grants moral rights to authors. This international policy was—and is—incompatible with United States copyright law, which recognizes only economic rights. Although ten states have enacted some form of moral rights legislation, federal copyright (...) laws tend to prevail, and those are still wholly economic in their motivation. Indeed, the recent pressure for the United States to agree, at least in part, to the terms of the Berne Convention came only as a result of a dramatic increase in the international piracy of American records and films.In September 1986, Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts first introduced a bill called the Visual Artists Rights Act. This bill attempts to amend federal copyright laws to incorporate some aspects of international moral rights protection. The Kennedy bill would prohibit the intentional distortion, mutilation, or destruction of works of art after they have been sold. Moreover, the act would empower artists to claim authorship, to receive royalties on subsequent sales, and to disclaim their authorship if the work were distorted.4 This legislation would have prevented Clement Greenburg and the other executors of David Smith’s estate from authorizing the stripping of paint from Several of Smith’s later sculptures so that they would resemble his earlier—and more marketable—unpainted sculptures. Such moral rights legislations would have prevented a Japanese bank in New York from removing and destroying a sculpture by Isamu Noguchi simply because the bank president did not like it. And such legislation would have prevented the United States government from destroying Tilted Arc. 4. Although this section appeared in the original version of Kennedy’s bill, the current version provides for a study of resale royalties. Richard Serra is known for his large-scale site-specific works in landscapes, urban environments, and museums. (shrink)

I argue that Dilworth has not shown the type / token theory of film identity to be non-viable, since there is no reason to think that a single object cannot be a token of two types. Even if we assume a single inheritance view of types, Dilworth's argument runs into other problems. Dilworth does not provide any convincing argument as to why intentions are necessary for identifying film and why production history alone will not suffice for identifying hardly (...) conceivable forgeries. Intention is not necessary for distinguishing between fakes and the real thing, nor is it necessary to differentiate between two artworks with the same token. Moreover, taking the notion of intentions into consideration leads to a splintering problem. I propose that production history, presentation, and non-numerical template identity suffice to identify a film on a multiple inheritance type / token theory. (shrink)

Aims to improve an understanding of the theoretical issues in response to the influence of fiction. Four things in narrative unreliability; Relation between narration in literary fictions and film; Comprehension of narrative essentially a matter of intentional inference; Fictions misdescribed; Asymmetry between literature and film; Ambiguity and unreliability; Implied author and narrator.

This collection of 16 essays brings 20th-century French philosopher Henri Bergson's work on immanence together with the latest ideas in art theory and the practice of immanent art as found in painting, photography and film. It places Bergson's work and influence in a wide historical context and applies a rigorous conceptual framework to contemporary art theory and practice.

The title of the film by Steve Kloves (1989) refers to the dual-piano, languishing lounge act performed by two brothers. The resurgence and demise of the musical team is brought about by the addition of a sultry, female vocalist--Susie Diamond. Embedded within the story is an exploration of integrity and its augmentation by the virtues of courage and honesty. Integrity marks an individual whose self is a coherent, consistent whole. Important elements of the individual’s personality are mutually supportive rather (...) than being disparate or in conflict. The integrity scrutinized by the film is Jack’s; it involves the younger brother’s inconsistent fidelity to his considerable musical talent. Late in the story we learn that he despises performing the popular musical fare with his brother and that he really wants to be creative, playing jazz. Although Jack is shown playing piano with modulated passion at a jazz club, we infer that he does so infrequently. Jack’s older brother is not in conflict with himself because his talent is suited to playing the bland tunes that are the staple of the act. Jack’s integrity is compromised because his commitment to his art is half-hearted; he cannot make the leap of faith--in himself. He knows that he hates playing the lounge music, is moved by jazz, and has considerable ability. Jack therefore realizes, however vaguely, that he ought to give himself to the music he loves, despite the risks this would entail. The trajectory of the film-story can be viewed as Jack finally summoning the courage to honestly confront his struggle with integrity and deciding to do something about it. (shrink)