*A Financial Times Book of the Year* 'The first time I opened What Artists Wear, I gasped with pleasure. Imagine it as a kind of punk cousin to John Berger's Ways of Seeing, liberally illustrated with the most astonishing images of artists, decked out in finery or rags ... It transported me to somewhere glamorous, exciting, even revolutionary' Olivia Laing, Guardian Most of us live our lives in our clothes without realizing their power. But in the hands of artists, garments reveal themselves. They are pure tools of expression, storytelling, resistance and creativity: canvases on which to show who we really are. In What Artists Wear, style luminary Charlie Porter takes us on an invigorating, eye-opening journey through the iconic outfits worn by artists, in the studio, on stage, at work, at home and at play. From Yves Klein's spotless tailoring to the kaleidoscopic costumes of Yayoi Kusama and Cindy Sherman; from Andy Warhol's signature denim to Charlotte Prodger's casualwear, Porter's roving eye picks out the magical, revealing details in the clothes he encounters, weaving together a new way of understanding artists, and of dressing ourselves. Part love letter, part guide to chic, and featuring generous photographic spreads, What Artists Wear is both a manual and a manifesto, a radical, gleeful, inspiration to see the world anew-and find greater pleasure and possibility in the clothes we all wear.

- The book uses globally recognized films as a basis for analysis. - Studies on digital culture and digital spaces are becoming increasingly relevant in today's world (particularly in light of the pandemic), so demand for books exploring this subject is growing for both research and teaching markets. - Includes examples from a diverse range of film genres: science fiction, horror, comedy, European art films.

This book analyzes the relationship between art and politics in two contrasting modern dictatorships. Through a detailed look at the Chilean and Romanian dictatorships, it compares the different ways in which political regimes convey their view of the world through artistic means. It examines how artists help \ convey a new understanding of politics and political action during repressive regimes that are inspired by either communism or anti-communism (neoliberalism, traditionalist, conservative). This book demonstrates how artistic renderings of life during dictatorships are similar in more than one respect, and how art can help better grasp the similarities of these regimes. It reveals how dictatorships use art to symbolically construct their power, which artists can consolidate by lending their support, or deconstruct through different forms of artistic resistance.

Systems theory emerged in the mid-20th century along with related theories such as Cybernetics and Information Theory. Recently it has included Complexity Theory, Chaos Theory and Social Systems Theory. Systems theory understands phenomena in terms of the systems of which they are part. This book is about a systems theoretical approach to thinking about art. It examines what it means to look to systems theory both for its implications for artistic practice and as a theory of art. This publication provides a sustained discussion on the application of systems theory to an account of art.

This book builds a new understanding of the body and its relationship to images and technology, using a framework where novel writings of pragmatist somaesthetics and phenomenology meet new research on bodily reactions. Max Ryynanen gives an overview of the topic by collecting the existing information of our bodies gazing at visual culture and the philosophies supporting these phenomena, and examines the way the gaze and the body come together in our relationship to culture. Themes covered include somatic film; the body in artistic documentation of activist art; body parts (and their mutilation or surgeries) in contemporary art and film; robot cars and our visual relationship to them; the usefulness of Indian rasa philosophy in explaining digital culture; and an examination of Mario Perniola's work about the idea that we, human beings, are increasingly experiencing ourselves to be simply "things." The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, aesthetics, cultural philosophy, film studies, technology studies, media studies, cultural studies, and visual studies.

The essays, collected by Berleant in this volume all express the impulse to reject the received wisdom of modern aesthetics: that art demands a mode of experience sharply different from others and unique to the aesthetic situation, and that the identity of the aesthetic lies in keeping it distinct from other kinds of human experience, such as the moral, the practical, and the social. Berleant shows, on the contrary, that the value, the insight, the force of art and the aesthetic are all enhanced and enlarged by recognizing their social and human role, and that this recognition contributes both to the significance of art and to its humanizing influence on what we like to call civilization.

This book investigates how we are involved in politically informed structures and how they appear to us. Following different approaches in contemporary aesthetics and cultural philosophy, such as everyday aesthetics, atmosphere and aestheticization, the contributions explore how embedded powers in politics, education, democracy, and landscape are analyzed through aesthetics.

Claude Simon: Fashioning the Past by Writing the Present considers the aesthetic, cultural, and philosophical facets of a temporal paradox in the works of French novelist Claude Simon (1913-2005), and its broader implications for the study of narrative, and for cultural and post-modern theory. This paradox emerges from the problematic representation of the past through an aesthetic rooted in an exclusive valorization of the present. In his 1985 Nobel speech, as well as on other numerous occasions, Simon expressed a fascination with simultaneity through the provocative claim that he never wrote about the past, but attempted to capture only what was happening during the writing process, that is, in the "present of writing," as he put it. Simon's seemingly unambiguous claim raises significant issues and contradictions that become extensively apparent when the statement is considered in the light of his fictional works, since these must be construed, for the most part, as explorations of the past. In this study Alina Cherry propose to look at the tensions that arise from this paradox, and examine the present of writing holistically-that is both as a stylistic device and within the thematic context of Simon's works-in order to assess its capacity for becoming an instrument of ontological and epistemological inquiry that can also intervene powerfully in the decisive philosophical and socio-political debates that have animated the cultural landscape of post-World War II France. Simon's vivid portrayals of suffering and devastation open new ways of understanding the impact of some of the most traumatic historical events of the twentieth century: the two World Wars and the Spanish Civil War. This impact is necessarily connected with a need to tell these events, and to tell them in highly innovative ways, namely by creating a distinctive style that revolutionizes the outworn narrative traditions of a world whose very foundations have been shattered by the chaos of war and effectively undermines various institutions and dominant socio-cultural structures, revealing implicitly and explicitly, a strong ethical vein.

This book offers a sustained, interdisciplinary examination of taste. It addresses a range of topics that have been at the heart of lively debates in philosophy of language, linguistics, metaphysics, aesthetics, and experimental philosophy. Our everyday lives are suffused with discussions about taste. We are quick to offer familiar platitudes about taste, but we struggle when facing the questions that matter-what taste is, how it is related to subjectivity, what distinguishes good from bad taste, why it is valuable to make and evaluate judgments about matters of taste, and what, exactly, we mean in speaking about these matters. The essays in this volume open up new, intersecting lines of research about these questions that cross traditional disciplinary boundaries. They address the notion of aesthetic taste; connections between taste and the natures of truth, disagreement, assertion, belief, retraction, linguistic context-sensitivity, and the semantics/pragmatics interface; experimental inquiry about taste; and metaphysical questions underlying ongoing discussions about taste. Perspectives on Taste will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in aesthetics, philosophy of language, linguistics, metaphysics, and experimental philosophy.

In The Aesthetics of Qiyun and Genius: Spirit Consonance in Chinese Landscape Painting and Some Kantian Echoes, Xiaoyan Hu provides an interpretation of the notion of qiyun, or spirit consonance, in Chinese painting, and considers why creating a painting-especially a landscape painting-replete with qiyun is regarded as an art of genius, where genius is an innate mental talent. Through a comparison of the role of this innate mental disposition in the aesthetics of qiyun and Kant's account of artistic genius, the book addresses an important feature of the Chinese aesthetic tradition, one that evades the aesthetic universality assumed by a Kantian lens. Drawing on the views of influential sixth to fourteenth-century theorists and art historians and connoisseurs, the first part explains and discusses qiyun and its conceptual development from a notion mainly applied to figure painting to one that also plays an enduring role in the aesthetics of landscape painting. In the light of Kant's account of genius, the second part examines a range of issues regarding the role of the mind in creating a painting replete with qiyun and the impossibility of teaching qiyun. Through this comparison with Kant, Hu demystifies the uniqueness of qiyun aesthetics and also illuminates some limitations in Kant's aesthetics.

This bookoffers a sustained scholarly analysis of Gadamer's reflections on art and our experience of art. It examines fundamental themes in Gadamer's hermeneutical aesthetics such as play, festival, symbol, contemporaneity, enactment, art's performative ontology, and hermeneutical identity.

The Sound of Ontology: Music as a Model for Metaphysics explores connections between Western art music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the ideas that dominated philosophy leading up to and during that period. In the process of establishing John Cage as Richard Wagner's heir via Arnold Schoenberg, the author discovers that the old metaphysics of representation is still in charge of how we think about music and about experience in general. Instead of settling for the positivist definition of music as mere sound framed by time, LaFave provides a phenomenology of music that reveals pitch as the ontological counterpart to frequency, and music as a vehicle for understanding how, as Heidegger observed, the Being of "things of value" are invariably grounded in the Being of "things of nature." Numerous musical examples and a poem by Wallace Stevens illustrate LaFave's case that hierarchy is intrinsic to this understanding. Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy is brought to bear alongside Heidegger's phenomenological ontology to show that not only music, but reality itself, depends on a play of interlocking hierarchies to effect the nature-value connection, making aesthetics first philosophy.

This edited volume explores the intersections of the human, nonhuman, transhuman, and posthuman from a phenomenological perspective. Representing perspectives from several disciplines, these investigations take a closer look at the relationship between the phenomenology of life, creative ontopoiesis, and otherness; technology and the human; art and the question of humanity; nonhumans, animals, and intentionality; and transhumanism. Ontological positioning of the human is reconsidered with regard to the nonhuman, transhuman, and posthuman within the cosmos. Further examination of the artificial and object in the lifeworld is also explored. This volume also pays tribute to Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka and her methodical contributions to phenomenology. This text appeals to students and researchers of phenomenology worldwide.

This book explores the ethical and psychological dilemmas connected to the lived experiences of love, uniquely proposing an ethical framework that can be applied in loving relationships. The book provides an introduction to the study of ethics, moral psychology, and ancient philosophy. Examining key themes of love, such as unconditional love, romantic love, anger, desperation, and fairness, this book offers the reader a way to exercise and strengthen their personal critical thinking on ethical dilemmas, especially in relation to loving feelings. The author believes that ethics is the heart of love in the same way as logic is the brain of reasoning; we do not need ethics to love but we can love in a much healthier way if we train our ethical skills to love. After laying the theoretical framework for the book, chapters are organized into themes relating to ethical problems and begin with an exemplary piece from Greek and Latin literature. Using these writings as a starting point, Susi Ferrarello discusses whether it is possible to have a sound ethical theory of love, especially in cases relating to justice, despair, and rage, and demonstrates how this framework can be applied in new and established relationships. Filled with case studies throughout, spiritual exercises are listed at the end of chapters to help the reader increase their understanding of love and their ethical choices surrounding emotional dilemmas. This interdisciplinary book is essential reading for undergraduate and graduate students who take classes on ethics, marriage and family therapy, psychology, philosophy, classics, ancient philosophy, and politics, as well as those interested in the ethics of love and emotional decision-making.

This book offers a unique account of the role imagination plays in advancing the course of freedom's actualization. It draws on Paul Ricoeur's philosophical anthropology of the capable human being as the staging ground for an extended inquiry into the challenges of making freedom a reality within the history of humankind. This book locates the abilities we exercise as capable human beings at the heart of a sustained analysis and reflection on the place of the idea of justice in a hermeneutics for which every expectation regarding rights, liberties, and opportunities must be a hope for humanity as a whole. The vision of a reconciled humanity that for Ricoeur figures in a philosophy of the will provides an initial touchstone for a hermeneutics of liberation rooted in a philosophical anthropology for which the pathetique of human misery is its non- or pre-philosophical source. By setting the idea of the humanity in each of us against the backdrop of the necessity of preserving the tension between the space of our experiences and the horizons of our expectations, the book identifies the ethical and political dimensions of the idea of justice's federating force with the imperative of respect. Paul Ricoeur's Philosophical Anthropology as Hermeneutics of Liberation will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in hermeneutics, phenomenology, ethics, political theory, and aesthetics.

This book explores the ethical and psychological dilemmas connected to the lived experiences of love, uniquely proposing an ethical framework that can be applied in loving relationships. The book provides an introduction to the study of ethics, moral psychology, and ancient philosophy. Examining key themes of love, such as unconditional love, romantic love, anger, desperation, and fairness, this book offers the reader a way to exercise and strengthen their personal critical thinking on ethical dilemmas, especially in relation to loving feelings. The author believes that ethics is the heart of love in the same way as logic is the brain of reasoning; we do not need ethics to love but we can love in a much healthier way if we train our ethical skills to love. After laying the theoretical framework for the book, chapters are organized into themes relating to ethical problems and begin with an exemplary piece from Greek and Latin literature. Using these writings as a starting point, Susi Ferrarello discusses whether it is possible to have a sound ethical theory of love, especially in cases relating to justice, despair, and rage, and demonstrates how this framework can be applied in new and established relationships. Filled with case studies throughout, spiritual exercises are listed at the end of chapters to help the reader increase their understanding of love and their ethical choices surrounding emotional dilemmas. This interdisciplinary book is essential reading for undergraduate and graduate students who take classes on ethics, marriage and family therapy, psychology, philosophy, classics, ancient philosophy, and politics, as well as those interested in the ethics of love and emotional decision-making.

The Dardenne Brothers' Cinematic Parables examines the work of Belgian filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, who have been celebrated for their powerfully affecting social realist films. Though the Dardenne brothers' films rarely mention religion or God, they have received wide recognition for their moral complexity and spiritual resonance. This book brings the Dardennes' filmography into consideration with theological aesthetics, Christian ethics, phenomenological film theory, and continental philosophy. The author explores the brothers' nine major films-beginning with The Promise (1996) and culminating in Young Ahmed (2019)-through the hermeneutics of philosopher Paul Ricoeur. By using Ricoeur's description of "parable" as a "narrative-metaphor" which generates an existential limit-experience, Joel Mayward crafts an innovative Ricoeurian hermeneutic for making theological interpretations of cinema. Drawing upon resources from three disciplinary spheres-theology, philosophy, and film studies-in a dynamic interweaving approach, Mayward proposes that the Dardennes create postsecular cinematic parables which evoke theological and ethical responses in audiences' imaginations through the brothers' distinctive filmmaking style, what is termed "transcendent realism." The book ultimately demonstrates how the Dardenne brothers are truly doing, not merely depicting, theology and ethics through the cinematic form-it presents film as theology, what Mayward refers to as "theocinematics." This is valuable reading for scholars of theology, philosophy, and film studies, as well as film critics and cinephiles interested in the cinema of the Dardenne brothers.

Improvisation informs a vast array of human activity, from creative practices in art, dance, music, and literature to everyday conversation and the relationships to natural and built environments that surround and sustain us. The two volumes of the Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies gather scholarship on improvisation from an immense range of perspectives, with contributions from more than sixty scholars working in architecture, anthropology, art history, computer science, cognitive science, cultural studies, dance, economics, education, ethnomusicology, film, gender studies, history, linguistics, literary theory, musicology, neuroscience, new media, organizational science, performance studies, philosophy, popular music studies, psychology, science and technology studies, sociology, and sound art, among others.

Dag Petersson offers a comprehensive critique of the philosophy that has dominated 200 years of modern thought, politics, economy, and culture. The basic question is this: why does dialectical metaphysics fail to keep what it promises? What is it about dialectics, that makes it fall into irreducibly distinct variations of itself, when all it promises is to synthesize, to reconcile and make whole what is fragmented and alien to itself? An undisciplined creativity intrinsic to completing reason comes to light through analyses of how dialectical systems begin. Every dialectical philosophy must account for its own birth, and it is at this point, when it also articulates its promise of universal synthesis, that the book discovers a desire for light-writing, or photography. Only the most immediate element - light - can mediate the necessary self-determination of thought at its origin. Light must begin to write. A philosophical critique of dialectics is therefore also a point of departure for a new aesthetic ontology of photography.

This study offers the first comprehensive account of Emerson's philosophy since his philosophical rehabilitation began in the late 1970s. It builds on the historical reconstruction proposed in the author's previous book, Emerson's Metaphysics, and like that study draws on the entire Emerson corpus-the poetry and sermons included. The aim here is expository. The overall though not exclusive emphasis is on identity, as the first term of Emerson's metaphysics of identity and flowing or metamorphosis. This metaphysics, or general conception of the nature of reality, is what grounds his epistemology and ethics, as well as his esthetic, religious, and political thought. Acknowledging its primacy enables a general account like this to avoid the anti-realist overemphasis on epistemology and language that has often characterized rehabilitation readings of his philosophy. After an initial chapter on Emerson's metaphysics, the subsequent chapters devoted to the other branches of his thought also begin with their "necessary foundation" in identity, which is the law of things and the law of mind alike. Perception of identity in metamorphosis is what characterizes the philosopher, the poet, the scientist, the reformer, and the man of faith and virtue. Identity of mind and world is felt in what Emerson calls the moral sentiment. Identity is Emerson's answer to the Sphinx-riddle of life experienced as a puzzling succession of facts and events.

This book uses an examination of the annual Turner Prize to defend the view that the evaluation of artworks is a reason-based activity, notwithstanding the lack of any agreed criteria for judging excellence in art. It undertakes an empirical investigation of actual critical practice as evident within published commentaries on the Prize in order to examine and test theories of critical evaluation, including the ideas of Noel Carroll, Frank Sibley, Kendall Walton and Suzanne Langer. Case studies of work by Turner Prize winners such as Steve McQueen, Martin Creed, Tomma Abts are used to explore definitions of art and concepts of artistic value and meaning. The book will be of interest to academics in the fields of aesthetics, contemporary art and cultural studies, but also to practitioners working in the arts, media and education.

Literature and Understanding investigates the cognitive gain from literature by focussing on a reader's close analysis of a literary text. It examines the meaning of 'literature', outlines the most prominent positions in the literary cognitivism debate, explores the practice of close reading from a philosophical perspective, provides a fresh account of what we mean by 'understanding' and in so doing opens up a new area of research in the philosophy of literature. This book provides a different reply to the challenge that we can't learn anything worthwhile from reading literary fiction. It makes the innovative case that reading literary fiction as literature rather than as fiction stimulates five relevant senses of understanding. The book uses examples of irony, metaphor, play with perspective and ambiguity to illustrate this contention. Before arguing that these five senses of understanding bridge the gap between our understanding of a literary text and our understanding of the world beyond that text. The book will be of great interest for researchers, scholars and post-graduate students in the fields of aesthetics, literary theory, literature in education and pedagogy.

Peter Sloterdijk is an internationally renowned philosopher and thinker whose work is now seen as increasingly relevant to our contemporary world situation and the multiple crises that punctuate it, including those within ethical, political, economic, technological, and ecological realms. This volume focuses upon one of his central ideas, anthropotechnics. Broadly speaking, anthropotechnics refers to the technological constitution of the human as its fundamental mode of existence, which is characterized by the ability to create dwelling places that 'immunize' human beings from exterior threats while at the same time instituting practices and exercises that call on humanity to transcend itself 'ascetically'. The essays included in this volume enter a critical dialogue with Sloterdijk and his many philosophical interlocutors in order to interrogate the many implications of anthropotechnics in relation to some of the most pressing issues of our time, including and especially the question of the future of humanity in relation to globalism and modernization, climate change, the post-secular, neoliberalism, and artificial intelligence. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.

This book examines the contribution of mass-produced original painting to the psychology of art, psychological aesthetics, and art criticism. Mass-produced paintings are an inexpensive, accessible, ubiquitous, and hand-painted popular art by anonymous artists or teams. Sold in an array of outlets, ranging from flea markets to shopping centers to cruise ships, they decorate hotels, offices, and homes. Addressed is their neglect in current scholarship in favor of a nearly exclusive investigation of the high arts and their audiences, as represented by museum paintings. Lindauer contextualizes his analysis by tracing the historical origins of this type of painting, popular art in general, and their evolutionary trajectory, exploring issues including: the impact of art and artists' creativity on viewers; the overemphasis on originality and name recognition; what is art and who can be called an artist; and the extension of aesthetics to include an everyday kind. The book concludes with directions for future research in the popular and traditional arts, the psychology of art, and, more broadly, the ties that transcend barriers between science, the arts, and the humanities. It will appeal to students and scholars from across the fields of psychology, sociology, philosophy, art history, and cultural, media and communication studies.