This paper describes an experimental course in the preparation of art teachers. The goal of the course was to engage final-year art students in thinking about the fundamental questions in aesthetic education and in considering various views of their roles as teachers of art. The classes presented a dialogue between two teachers: a philosopher of art and an artist. We discussed the social justification of art, the place of art in education and more generally the portrayal of visual culture (...) in philosophical thought. The bibliography for the course comprised a list of basic texts in aesthetic education, from Friedrich Schiller to Nelson Goodman. In class we linked the range of philosophical views examined to the artistic exploration of themes (mainly in contemporary and local art). The course also incorporated guest speakers who presented their own projects relating to different meeting points of art and education, including social-activist artists, curators, philosophers of education and school architects. The article presents the rationale for the course, its method and a sample of its content. (shrink)

Most instructors who teach introductory courses in aesthetics or the philosophy of arts use the visual arts as their implicit reference for "art" in general, yet until now there has been no aesthetics anthology specifically orientated to the visual arts. This text stresses conceptual and theoretical issues, first examining the very notion of "the visual arts" and then investigating philosophical questions raised by various forms, from painting, the paradigmatic form, to sculpture, photography, film, dance, kitsch, and (...) other forms on the borders of the visual arts. The selections represent both classical and contemporary views and include sections by artists, art historians, and critics as well as philosophers. A singularly important text for courses in the philosophy of arts or aesthetics, this anthology is designed to enrich the philosophical and critical examination of our beliefs about the visual arts. (shrink)

Schizoanalysis is Deleuze and Guattari's fusion of psychoanalytic-inspired theories of the self, the libido and desire with Marx-inspired theories of the economy, history and society. Schizoanalysis holds that art's function is both political and aesthetic - it changes perception. If one cannot change perception, then, one cannot change anything politically. This is why Deleuze and Guattari always insist that the artists operate at the level of the real (not the imaginary or the symbolic). Ultimately, they argue, there is no necessary (...) distinction to be made between aesthetics and politics. One is simply the flipside of the other because both concern the formation and transformation of social and cultural norms. Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Visual Art explores how every artist, good or bad, contributes to the structure and nature of society because their work either reinforces social norms, or challenges them. On this view of things, we are all artists, we all have the potential to exercise what might be called a 'aesthetico-political function' and change the world around us; or, just as easily, we can dwell like assassins, and not only let the status quo endure but fight to preserve it as though it were freedom itself. (shrink)

Most instructors who teach introductory courses in aesthetics or the philosophy of arts use the visual arts as their implicit reference for "art" in general, yet until now there has been no aesthetics anthology specifically orientated to the visual arts. This text stresses conceptual and theoretical issues, first examining the very notion of "the visual arts " and then investigating philosophical questions raised by various forms, from painting, the paradigmatic form, to sculpture, photography, film, dance, kitsch, (...) and other forms on the borders of the visual arts. The selections represent both classical and contemporary views and include sections by artists, art historians, and critics as well as philosophers. A singularly important text for courses in the philosophy of arts or aesthetics, this anthology is designed to enrich the philosophical and critical examination of our beliefs about the visual arts. (shrink)

The oral eye is a metaphor for the dominance of global designer capitalism. It refers to the consumerism of a designer aesthetic by the 'I' of the neoliberalist subject, as well as the aural soundscapes that accompany the hegemony of the capturing attention through screen cultures. An attempt is made to articulate the historical emergence of such a synoptic machinic regime drawing on Badiou, Bellmer, Deleuze, Guattari, Lacan, Rancir̈e, Virilio, Ziarek, and Zizek to explore contemporary art (post-Situationism) and visual (...) cultural education. Jagodzinski develops the concept of an 'avant-garde without authority,' 'self-refleXion' and 'in(design)' to further the questions surrounding the posthuman as advanced by theorists such as Hansen, Stiegler and Ziarek's 'force' of art. (shrink)

The article focuses on the differences between Eastern and Western art, characteristics of the representation of women's images in Eastern and Western art, and aesthetic criteria regarding women's images in Eastern and Western art. The author emphasized the need to understand the image of women in Eastern and Western visual artworks in different cultural and historical contexts and concluded that studying the image of women in visual art can help one better understand regional gender paradigm differences. To understand (...) the representation of women in Eastern and Western cultures, it is necessary to first understand the differences and similarities between these two cultures in order to gain a deeper understanding of how women are portrayed in these cultures. A few of the differences that can be found between East and West include the geographical structure, the ethno-cultural colors, the social outlooks, and the aesthetic ideals of the two regions. In addition to these factors, it is also important to consider how the visual arts of the two regions differ in their methods, materials, and religious, philosophical and philosophical perspectives. Throughout the article, the author discusses these aspects in great detail, showing specific approaches as to how the female image is represented in Eastern and Western visual art traditions. As such, the article provides valuable insight into the cultural divide between East and West and how their respective artistic styles have interacted with each other. (shrink)

At a time when professional art criticism is on the wane, the ancient quarrel between art and philosophy demands fresh answers. Professional art criticism provided a basis upon which to distinguish apt experiences of art from the idiosyncratic. However, currently the kind of narratives from which critics once drew are underplayed or discarded in contemporary exhibition design where the visual arts are concerned. This leaves open the possibility that art operates either as mere stimulant to private reverie or, (...) in the more contentful cases, as propaganda. The ancient quarrel between art and philosophy is that art influences surreptitiously while philosophy presents reasons that invite rational scrutiny. As such, in contrast to philosophy, art would undermine our agency. In July 2017, a group of philosophers gathered at the Art Gallery of NSW (AGNSW), in Sydney, Australia, in the presence of two AGNSW curators to explore the basis of their own experiences of selected artworks. Here, those commentaries are reproduced. Each reveal that objective grounds for an experience of art can be based in the community from which one draws one’s terms of reference. In our commentaries we see the expertise of the respective philosophical communities but other communities of culture or expertise might serve the same purpose and hence resolve the ancient quarrel. Before hearing these commentaries, I explain what is at stake when the ancient quarrel between art and philosophy is understood in contemporary terms. This Issue of the Curator also includes an article on the community-based art criticism that emerges from these commentaries followed by an exhibition review which reveals the incorrigible impulse (also demonstrated in the commentaries) to find the basis for the most apt experience of an artwork. A response by the AGNSW curators completes this issue. (shrink)

This book is an important contribution to the philosophy of art that bridges the disciplines of philosophy and art. It engages with a long-standing debate about what it is that bestows the designation 'art' on an artwork. Tiffany Sutton shows how the history of art should influence the classification of visual art. She considers the various theories that have been put forward to define the nature of the artwork and then offers her own set of classificatory norms. (...) Amongst the critical questions that are addressed in the process are: how important is patronage in the contemporary visual arts, and what lends conceptual art its specific aura? (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Resemblance Modularity Conclusion.

CHAPTER ONE Because a work of art is a product of man it must be explained and judged differently from a product of nature. The explanation of a product of ...

This volume investigates the meaning of visual rhythm through Piet Mondrian's unique approach to understanding rhythm in the compositional structure of painting, drawing reference from philosophy, aesthetics, and Zen culture. Its innovation lies in its reappraisal of a forgotten definition of rhythm as 'stasis' or 'composition' which can be traced back to ancient Greek thought. This conception of rhythm, the book argues, can be demonstrated in terms of pictorial strategy, through analysis of East Asian painting and calligraphy with (...) which Greek thought on rhythm has identifiable commonalities. The book demonstrates how these ideas about rhythm draw together various threads of intellectual development in the visual arts that cross disparate aesthetic cultural practices. As an icon of early 20th Century Modernism, Mondrian's neoplasticism is a serious painterly and philosophical achievement. In his painting, Mondrian was deeply influenced by Theosophy, which took its influence from Eastern aesthetics; particularly East Asian and Indian thought. However, Mondrian's approach to visual rhythm was so idiosyncratic that his contribution to studies of visual rhythm is often under-recognized. This volume shows that a close inspection of Mondrian's own writing, thinking and painting has much to tell scholars about how to understand a long forgotten aspect of visual rhythm. Rodin's famous criticism of photography ("athlete-in-motion is forever frozen") can be applied to Muybridge's zoopraxiscope, the Futurists' rendition of stroboscopic images, and Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase." Through a comparative study between Mondrian's painting and these seminal works, this volume initiates a new convention for the cognition of the surface of painting as visual rhythm. "Mondrian's simultaneous emphasis on the static and the rhythmic is hardly fodder for a publicist. Eiichi Tosaki has taken on the challenge of elucidating Mondrian's theories of rhythm, and particularly his conception of "static" rhythm. The result is a tour de force that will forever alter the reader's encounter with the works of Mondrian." Prof. Kathleen Higgins. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show how a sensory approach to visual arts can be relevant for philosophy and how this prism, once brought to philosophy, can give insights on art in return. I will try to demonstrate that the difference between modernity’s two main schools of thought (namely, materialism and idealism) can be understood – thanks to the model of painting as an allegory of the world – as an exclusive preference for one sense: (...) touch for materialism and sight for idealism. Much as the two schools differ, both consider the painting (or the world) a finite picture, whose elements can be juxtaposed in a single homogeneous plane of knowledge devoid of any opacity. This leads to separate both vision and the mind from the body and from the world. As a result, sight and touch end up dissociated. That is why, to challenge this modern paradigm and renew with a holistic relationship to the world and to ourselves, philosophers and artists propose a shift towards a synaesthetic approach to painting. Such an approach will uncover a modality of being where the body, the subject, and the world, as well as sight and touch, can be reunited. Thus, I will show that Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh – that echoes through the paintings of artists who attempt to break free from the frame and engage the observer with all his senses and being, such as Racławice Panorama, Malevich, El Lissitzky, Cézanne or the Navajos’ sand paintings – can offer, thanks to a synaesthetic approach, both a new framework for philosophy and a new understanding of visual arts. (shrink)

Visual Arts Practice and Affect brings together a group of artist scholars to explore how visual arts can offer unique insights into the understanding of place, memory and affect. Each contributor highlights the crucial role the creative arts play in envisaging new perspectives on the making of meaning, ones that are grounded in the practicalities, materialities and embodied knowing of artistic practice. Art offers other ways of seeing, thinking, understanding the world. It can be very messy, very challenging, (...) but also moving, exquisite, astounding. The book opens a space for experiential appreciation by offering a writing that allows both the writer and the reader to consider those sorts of embodied sensibilities. (shrink)

This volume consists of papers given to the Royal Institute of Philos ophy Conference on 'Philosophy and the Visual Arts: Seeing and Abstracting' given at the University of Bristol in September 1985. The contributors here come about equally from the disciplines of Philosophy and Art History and for that reason the Conference was hosted jointly by the Bristol University Departments of Philosophy and History of Art. Other conferences sponsored by the Royal Institute of Philosophy have (...) been concerned with links between Philosophy and related disciplines, but here, with the generous support of South West Arts and with the enthusiastic co-operation of the staff of the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol we were able to attempt even more in the way of bridge building; not only were we able to hold some of our meetings in as possible to the general the Gallery, thus making them as accessible public, but we were also privileged in having our discussions supported by two exhibitions of contemporary painting that together presented contrasting aspects of the abstracting enterprise. One, featuring works by Ian McKeever, and drawings and painting by Frank Auerbach, some of which are discussed and illustrated in the present volume, was about the painterly exploration of 'abstracting from' images in nature and in painting itself. The other, curated by Waldemar Januszczak, while showing some figurative works, was concerned with the 'pure' power of colour perceived 'abstractly, in its own right. (shrink)

It is the aim of this work to examine the pivotal role of Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768) as a judge of classical sculpture and as a major contributor to German art criticism. John Harry North seeks to identify the key features of his treatment of classical beauty, particularly in his famous descriptions of large-scale classical sculpture. Five case studies are offered to demonstrate the academic classicism that formed the core of his philosophy of art. North aims to establish Winckelmann's (...) place in the development of the German language. His prose contributed to a literary style that was suitable for the expression of an emotional response to visual experiences. His use of rhetoric in the assessment of classical art, however, make his judgements propagandist rather than analytical. The published works of Winckelmann, his draft essays and his collected private correspondence are advanced as criteria in the evaluation of his impact on the development of German classicism that culminated in the Weimar group of poets and writers. His Grecophile enthusiasm, however, led him to introduce stylistic categories in the development of classical marble sculpture that are no longer regarded as truly reflecting the evolution of Greco-Roman art. Thus his historicity and his classification of styles remain in doubt. Winckelmann proposed that the training of modern artists should concentrate on the observation and imitation of classical models instead of looking to nature as the source of inspiration. This plan succeeded to some extent in the generation that followed his untimely death. Throughout the succeeding century, artists and their sponsors did favour classical models and developed stylistic classicism in European freestanding sculpture, in painting and in architecture. (shrink)

'The Aestheticization of History and the Butterfly Effect: Visual Arts Series' introduces the audience to philosophical concepts that broach the beginning of the history of Western thought in Plato and Aristotle to that of more modern thought in the theoretician Jacques Rancière in which the main conceptual framework of this anthology is predicated. The introduction is mainly concerned with Rancière's concept of the distribution of the sensible, which is the arrangement of things accessible to our senses, what we experience (...) in real-time and space- compartmentalization and categorization of all things. These things do not just involve tangible items, but audible speech, written language, and visibilities. Rancière's theory of the regimes of art is undertaken as the unfolding of the distribution. Such is evoked in the various genres of visual art forms, from two-dimensional paintings to three-dimensional sculptures and architectures. Understanding the aesthetic regime of art is crucial for grasping how art performs time travel. One way of understanding this phenomenon is in terms of embodied philosophy imbued vis-à-vis art forms, which are subsequently challenged by contemporary artists. The contributing essays examine these reiterations, reevaluations-performances. Aesthetics is a term deriving from the 18th-century European Enlightenment. It is here that aesthetics as the study of beauty is probed for its political potential after the failure of the French Revolution. Many major thinkers during this period signed on to the aesthetic moment, recognizing that Reason in its present state failed to develop humankind beyond barbarism. J.E.B. Stuart's statue is part of an equestrian theme that approximates the Western canon of power and class in the pursuit of domination. But such power and domination will be dethroned in the restaging of history and the redistribution of said canon. This reimagining of the form not only alters perception but constitutes a new narrative. (shrink)

What influences people’s appreciation of works of art? In this paper, we provide a new cognitive approach to this big question, and the first empirical results in support of it. As a work of art typically does not activate intuitive cognition for functional artefacts, it is represented as an instance of non-verbal symbolic communication. By application of Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory of communication, we hypothesize that understanding the artist’s intention plays a crucial role in intuitive art appreciation judgements. About (...) 60 works of fine art, representing a wide range of periods, genres and styles, were selected in the permanent exhibitions at Tate Britain in London, and rated by more than 500 visitors for goodness and understanding of the artist’s intention. Results suggest that works of art whose artist’s intention is easy to understand tend to be preferred over those with more obscure intentions, even when controlling for familiarity effects. (shrink)

In this paper I distinguish between illustrative and performative uses of artworks in the teaching and communication of philosophy, drawing examples from the history of art and my own practice. The former are where works are used merely to illustrate and communicate a philosophical idea or argument, the latter are where the artist or teacher philosophizes through the creation of art. I hope to promote future collaboration between philosophers, art historians and artists, with artworks becoming catalysts for artistic-philosophical investigation, (...) thus revitalizing the idea of universities embodying ongoing and open-ended conversations. (shrink)

Aesthetic Pursuits is a new collection of essays from Jerrold Levinson, one of the most prominent philosophers of art today, focusing on literature, film, and visual art, while addressing issues of humour, beauty, and the emotions. More than half of the essays in the volume are previously unpublished.

Brings together essays on the philosophy of art in which a philosophical theory of aesthetic judgment is tested and developed through its application to particular examples. Each essay approaches, from its own field of study, what Roger Scruton argues to be the central problems of aesthetics -- what is aesthetic experience, and what is its importance for human conduct? The book is divided into four parts. The first contains a resume of modern analytical aesthetics, which also serves as an (...) introduction to subsequent chapters. It also includes an essay that reviews current theories of literary criticism. The second part is devoted to musical aesthetics and contains the theoretical core of the work. Here Scruton describes the contours of aesthetic understanding, and defends the view that the object of aesthetic experience is inherently significant, even when it has no "content" that can be described in propositional terms. He rebuts the view that music is representational, and in the third part goes on to propose a theory of representation whereby to refute the suggestion that photography is a representational art. This third section also contains a study of film. The final part comprises essays relating aesthetic judgment to the understanding of culture, humor, and design. It covers many subjects, including the prose works of Samuel Beckett and the architecture of Leninism. The essays in this book form parts of a single intellectual enterprise, which is to give analytical foundations to the criticism of literature, visual art, music, and culture. (shrink)

Deconstruction and the Visual Arts brings together a series of new essays by scholars of aesthetics, art history and criticism, film, television and architecture. Working with the ideas of French philosopher Jacques Derrida, the essays explore the full range of his analyses. They are modelled on the variety of critical approaches that he has encouraged, from critiques of the foundations of our thinking and disciplinary demarcation, to creative and experimental readings of visual 'texts'. Representing some of the most (...) innovative thinking in the various arts disciplines, these contributions offer important challenges to existing disciplinary orthodoxies. Also included in this volume is a long interview with Derrida, published here for the first time. (shrink)

Apin's cabinet of printed curiosities -- Thinking through plural images of logic -- The visible order of student lecture notebooks -- Visual thinking in logic notebooks and Alba amicorum -- The generation of art as the generation of philosophy.

Bakhtin and the Visual Arts is the first book to assess the relevance of Mikhail Bakhtin's ideas as they relate to painting and sculpture. First published in the 1960s, Bakhtin's writings introduced the concepts of carnival and dialogue or dialogism, which have had significant impact in such diverse fields as literature and literary theory, philosophy, theology, biology, and psychology. In his four early aesthetic essays, written between 1919 and 1926, and before he began to focus on linguistic and (...) literary categories, Bakhtin worked on a larger philosophy of creativity, which was never completed. Deborah Haynes's in-depth study of his aesthetics, especially his theory of creativity, analyses its applicability to contemporary art theory and criticism. The author argues that Bakhtin, with such categories as answerability, outsideness and unfinalisability, offers a conceptual basis for interpreting the moral dimensions of creative activity. (shrink)

This paper approaches the topic of visual art in medical education from a philosophical perspective, drawing on arguments from epistemology, philosophy of science, aesthetics, and contemporary ethical theory. Several medical ethicists have noted that the traditional clinical paradigm may increase the epistemic and emotional distance between patient and physician in part by focusing on the physical body and medical technology. Some of these same writers recommend a new approach to patients based on empathy and increased attention to suffering. (...) After reviewing these arguments, supporting examples, and recommendations, I explain how visual art that expresses or symbolizes the emotional response to illness could be used to introduce an additional paradigm into medical education. This would be a paradigm based on empathetic attention to patients' emotional experiences in illness. My own argument is that this additional way of perceiving and relating to patients may reduce the distance between patient and physician and may allow physicians to better meet the ideal of treating the patient as a person. (shrink)

It seems obvious that signs in visual art and musical notation are static carriers of visual and acoustic information. Both types of sign, however, represent dynamic processes. In real space-time, there exists no static visible thing or static audible sound. The sources of visible or audible information are dynamic – i.e. complementary substantialenergetic-informational – entities extending in space-time. The same is true of an artificial or organic receiver and processor of visual or audible information. Reality and semiosis (...) – to be, to be perceived, and to be understood or to communicate – are dynamic processes. From a semiotic point of view, thus, pictures, photographic or artistic sign structures can’t be icons – in any case, if icons in a Peirceian manner are understood as signs representing objects for an interpretant by similarity . Similarity between icon and object is not a static precondition but a dynamic result of visual semiosis, i.e. of categorizing. Seeing something or hearing something is, as a consequence, not an “intuitive” or instantaneous Gestalt shift between representamen and object ongoing in an interpretant. And so, according to Fernande SaintMartin 1990: “visual semiotics … has to adopt an epistemology which is more in agreement with the dynamics of observed phenomena. It will recognize that matter is not inertness, but energy.” If the material carrier of semiosis, the representamen, already is to be understood as energy or dynamic process, all the more the whole complementary triadic sign-relation – object-representamen-interpretant – has to be understood as energetic information flow. This is being recognized in the transition from naturalistic, i.e. reproducing or mapping art, to modern, i.e. processing or interpreting/transducing art. Paul Klee 1990 for example says about the semiotic function of visual art: “Art doesn’t reproduce the visible but makes visible” . And he correlates the artistic activity of visualizing with the primordial, cosmogonic process of formation: “Reduced to the primordial process of formation, to creation, the process of cell division emerges” . Visual artistic semiosis is, thus, obviously to be understood as the process of emerging dynamic sign structures. It is the skill of the painter that makes the static results of dynamic semiosis “readable” for the viewer as signs – lines and surfaces - of the dynamic visual meaning of the picture. (shrink)

The concept of the “work of art” is paradoxically both widely used and often unexamined. This book re-evaluates the scope of “work,” “art,” and “the aesthetic” from the viewpoint of deconstructionist philosophy and suggests that Derrida’s analyses resolve some central questions in the discourses of contemporary visual arts.

How can aesthetic enquiry contribute to the study of visual culture? There seems to be little doubt that aesthetic theory ought to be of interest to the study of visual culture. For one thing, aesthetic vocabulary has far from vanished from contemporary debates on the nature of our visual experiences and its various shapes, a fact especially pertinent where dissatisfaction with vulgar value relativism prevails. Besides, the very question ubiquitous in the debates on visual culture of (...) what is natural and what is acquired in our visual experiences has been a topic in aesthetics at least since the Enlightenment. And last but not least, despite attempts to study visual culture without employing the concept of art, there is no prospect of this central subject of aesthetic theory ebbing away from visual studies. The essays compiled in this volume show a variety of points of intersection and involvement between aesthetics and visual studies; some consider the future of visual art, some the conditions and characteristics of contemporary visual aesthetic experience, while others take on the difficult question of the relation between visual representation and reality. What unites them is their authors' willingness to think about contemporary visual culture in the conceptual frame of aesthetics. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of philosophical aesthetics, art history, and cultural studies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 38.1 (2004) 105-112 [Access article in PDF] Philosophy of Art Today:Calling Frameworks into QuestionBeyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays, by Noël Carroll. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, 450 pp., $29.00. Merit: Aesthetic And Ethical, by Marcia Eaton. Oxford University Press, 2001, 252 pp., $52.00. But Is It Art? by Cynthia Freeland. Oxford University Press, 2001, 231 pp., $11.95. In his magisterial study of modern aesthetics, (...) The Theory of the Arts, Francis Sparshott observed that while "normal science" is what T.S. Kuhn called "hackwork" because it is carried out within a framework it never calls into question, there is — in that same sense — no such thing as "normal art" (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982). The twenty years since thepublication of Sparshott's book have done nothing but underscore this point. No theme in the arts has been more prominent than the challenging of existing frameworks. Equally, no project in the philosophy of art has proven more important than the remapping and expanding of prior conceptual boundaries. In both the arts and the philosophy of art, the new norm is the foreswearing of the normal. And just as contemporary art challenges the concept we have of art itself, contemporary aesthetics challenges the traditional notion we have of aesthetics. Of late, this challenge has been vigorous, persistent, heated. Yet, although it has produced some affronts to establishedsensibilities, it has not led to the wholesale undoing of prior advances in aesthetic theory, as many had feared.It is this development, rather than any particular movement or advance within the field, that stands out as the distinguishing characteristic of aesthetics today. Similar assaults on basic assumptions, disciplinary borders, and theoretical frameworks have raged in neighboring academic domains where they have inspired debilitating internecine conflict and conceptual disarray. Postmodernist attacks on the very possibility of theoretical coherence have been the most notorious, but far from the exclusive, examples of effects of this sort. Similar skeptical developments have proven corrosive in disciplines from anthropology to theology. Yet the field of aesthetics has generally welcomed framework challenge. It has not been driven by it into warring camps, and has taken this challenge as a positive contribution to the field's strength and importance.Three excellent recent works illustrate different ways in which the a-normality of contemporary aesthetics is being played out, and demonstrate [End Page 105] why it is both constructive and worthwhile. Cynthia Freeland's But Is It Art? is presented as an introduction to art theory, but it is really a provocative analysis of ways in which the visual arts have blown out their parameters and the demands this development places on intelligent response. Noël Carroll's Beyond Aesthetics takes as its theme the idea that, to make proper sense of the present world of aesthetic phenomena, we must "reach beyond aesthetic theories of art and their various prohibitions." And Marcia Eaton's Merit, Aesthetic and Ethical argues that the truly important issues we encounter in making sense of aesthetic experience require an integration of normative considerations formerly thought of as discretely ethical or aesthetic. Each of these works looks at the ways art and aesthetics have forced us to think differently about both of them, due to the way each has recently evolved. Yet none of them takes the radical view that all of what happened before is rendered insignificant by the revolutionary novelty of current work. Instead, these works are syncretic in just the way that contemporary philosophy of art is syncretic; they show how apparent discontinuities can be squared with the general thrust of the best historical work.The picture that emerges from these (as well as many other recent works) is this: Aesthetics today is a discipline pleased both to rethink its own basic concepts and to examine its connections to a variety of regions of concern not traditionally regarded as its province. A century ago, aestheticians were content to think of themselves as custodians of grand and noble values — principally the values of beauty and... (shrink)

Has art theory any function and any importance? A function and importance for who? For the practising artist, theorists, writers on art? Art speak and its place in art theory, art criticism and artists’ statement. - Many tools to create an intersubjective and universal frame of reference to make sense of any art exist., for example art history, labels such as expressionism, impressionism, modern art, contemporary art, Fine art, Visual Arts, Northern Baroque Art, minimalist, post-minimalist, anti-art, anti-anti-art, New Aesthetics, (...) new media, slow art movement, etc and ‘art speak”. (shrink)

Remodel[l]ing Reality is an inquiry into Wittgenstein's notion of übersichtliche Darstellung and the phenomenon of installation in visual art. In a sense, both provide a perspicuous overview of a particular part of our complex world, but the nature of the overview differs. Although both generate knowledge, philosophy via the übersichtliche Darstellung gives us a view of how things stand for us, while the installation shows an unexpected, exiting point of view. The obvious we tend to forget and the (...) ambiguity of reality are related to each other in a dynamic way. It is in this reflexive dynamics that we constantly remodel our reality. Tools we use are our creative abilities and our powers of imagination. In our choices and solutions we show which aspects of reality we find important and how we communicate these values. The outcome of this investigation is a new perspective on the art of installation and a new insight in Wittgenstein's notion of übersichtliche Darstellung. Because of this combination, the book is itself an artwork: an InstallationPackage. The book is distributed by Ideabooks Amsterdam, Isbn 978 90 804240 3 6. Remodel[l]ing Reality is included in Special Collections, Allard Pierson Museum Amsterdam. (shrink)

The discourse regarding intentionality and interpretation in analytic philosophy of art, although ample and lively, has concerned itself almost exclusively with the literary medium. Starting from a paper published by Hans Maes, I discuss the complications that may arise in straightforwardly applying current intentionalist strategies to the realm of the contemporary visual arts. I first present a detailed account of the difference between hypothetical intentionalism and moderate actual intentionalism which will help to better understand the nature of Maes’s (...) arguments in his paper. I then argue that the characteristics which shape the approach of moderate actual intentionalism cannot be accommodated by certain contemporary visual artworks. I will demonstrate how in certain contemporary artworks, should a viewer be interested in accepting actual intentions within her interpretation, she will have to do so with an extreme intentionalist posture rather than a moderate actual one. (shrink)

The paper is an example of interdisciplinary research. It combines aspects of mythology, philosophy, psychoanalysis, aesthetics and feminism to support the analysis of images of water associated with woman and seduction, mainly in visual art. The author’s question is as follows: What are the basic characteristics of woman, water and seduction that have enabled them, throughout the world’s history, to fuse into a complex that can be found in myths, fairy tales, philosophical treatises, psychoanalysis and especially in works (...) of art? Is it a kind of Jungian archetypal image? To answer this question the author searches for a philosophical explanation of seduction in Jean Baudrillard’s On Seduction, and for an explanation of women’s identity in the works of Helene Cixous and Julie Kristeva. Further, an explanation of the development of the image of the mermaid is offered. The main emphasis is put on the interpretation of several works of art: What a Water Gave Me by Frida Kahlo, The Seduction and The Collective Invention by Rene Magritte, Queen of the Fish by Mimi Parent, and Bathing Nymphs by Paul Delvaux. (shrink)

This paper provides a précis of Ernst Cassirer’s concept of art as a symbolic form. It does so, though, in a specific respect. It points to the fact that Cassirer’s concept of “symbolic form” is two-sided. On the one hand, the concept captures general cultural phenomena that are not only meaningful but also manifest the way man makes sense of the world; thus myth, religion, and art are considered general symbolic forms. On the other hand, it captures the formal structures (...) and semiotic tools thanks to which meaning is constructed within each general symbolic form ; thus, in art, perspective or the golden section are well-known examples of symbolic forms, now in a narrow sense, i.e. they are means to configure parts into an organized, meaningful whole. The paper will comment on art along both these two dimensions, but its main goal is to provide with concrete examples of aesthetic symbolic forms in the narrow sense in order to show how conceptual meaning can be inscribed in the space of aesthetic intuition. (shrink)

This paper applies the Sonoma Model of Critical Thinking to visual arts in an educational setting. The analysis produces insights into the functioning of the model, insights into visual arts, and pragmaticconclusions regarding relationships among art historians, visual artists, and others. We summarize the Sonoma Model of critical thinking and apply it to thinking about art history and visual arts. We use these insights to apply the Sonoma Model to thinking critically about visual arts in (...) an educational environment. One application of the model for visual artists and art historians is in appreciating these disciplines, something that is often lacking among and between them. We find further insight in the application of the elements of the model to themselves, and close with practical affective conclusions for applications of the model by faculty and administrators. (shrink)

The earliest preoccupations of human beings show close interconnections and parallel developments between the world of the sacred and the world of art. The sacred has been the important aspect of human life since the dawn of humanity, often seen as awesome and extraordinary, to be feared and revered at the sametime, while the evolution of artistic expression can be traced to its beginning in the spiritual world of the sacred. This paper proposes to discuss some of the prevailing theories (...) that define the sacred and its representation in the visual arts. (shrink)

This is the first collection of essays focused on the many-faceted work of Kendall L. Walton. Walton has shaped debate about the arts for the last 50 years. He provides a comprehensive framework for understanding the arts in terms of the human capacity of make-believe that shows how different arts--visual, photographic, musical, literary, or poetic--can be explained in terms of complex structures of pretense, perception, imagining, empathy, and emotion. His ground-breaking work has been taken beyond aesthetics to address foundational (...) issues concerning linguistic and scientific representations--for example about the nature of scientific modelling or to explain how what we say is mostly quite different from the literal meanings of our words. Contributions from a diverse group of philosophers probe Walton's detailed proposals and the themes for research they open to provide an overview of important debates that have Walton's work at their core. This book will be of interest to scholars and graduate students working on aesthetics across the humanities, as well as those interested in the topic of representation and its intersection with perception, language, science, and metaphysics. (shrink)