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Books > Arts & Architecture > The arts: general issues > Theory of art
Artworld Metaphysics turns a critical eye upon aspects of the
artworld, and articulates some of the problems, principles, and
norms implicit in the actual practices of artistic creation,
interpretation, evaluation, and commodification. Aesthetic theory
is treated as descriptive and explanatory, rather than normative: a
theory that relates to artworld realities as a semantic theory
relates to the fragments of natural language it seeks to describe.
Robert Kraut examines emotional expression, correct interpretation
and objectivity in the context of artworld practice, the relevance
of jazz to aesthetic theory, and the goals of ontology (artworld
and otherwise). He also considers the relation between art and
language, the confusions of postmodern relativism, and the relation
between artistic/critical practice and aesthetic theory.
There is a blind spot in recent accounts of the history, theory and
aesthetics of optical media: namely, the field of the
three-dimensional, or trans-plane, image. It has been widely used
in the 20th century for very different practices - military,
scientific and medical visualization - precisely because it can
provide more spatial information. And now in the 21st century,
television and film are employing the method even more. Appearing
for the first time in English, Jens Schroeter's comprehensive study
of the aesthetics of the 3D image is a major scholarly addition to
this evolving field. Citing case studies from the history of both
technology and the arts, this wide-ranging and authoritative book
charts the development in the theory and practice of
three-dimensional images. Discussing and analyzing the
transformation of the socio-cultural and technological milieu,
Schroeter has produced a work of scholarship that combines
impressive historical scope with contemporary theoretical
arguments.
Art + Archive provides an in-depth analysis of the connection
between art and the archive at the turn of the twenty-first
century. The book examines how the archive emerged in art writing
in the mid-1990s and how its subsequent ubiquity can be understood
in light of wider social, technological, philosophical and
art-historical conditions and concerns. Deftly combining writing on
archives from different disciplines with artistic practices, the
book clarifies the function and meaning of one of the most
persistent artworld buzzwords of recent years, shedding light on
the conceptual and historical implications of the so-called
archival turn in contemporary art. -- .
Projections of Memory is an exploration of a body of innovative
cinematic works that utilize their extraordinary scope to construct
monuments to the imagination that promise profound transformations
of vision, selfhood, and experience. This form of cinema acts as a
nexus through which currents from the other arts can
interpenetrate. By examining the strategies of these projects in
relation to one another and to the larger historical forces that
shape them-tracing the shifts and permutations of their forms and
aspirations-Projections of Memory remaps film history around some
of its most ambitious achievements and helps to clarify the stakes
of cinema as a twentieth-century art form.
Leonardo da Vinci's arguments for the supremacy of painting over
the arts of poetry, music, and sculpture address issues that have
been relevant to debates over the nature of representation since
the time Plato discussed imitation until today, maintains Claire
Farago in this wide-ranging critical analysis of the first
important modern contribution to the comparison of the arts. This
study systematically examines 46 passages compiled in the
mid-sixteenth century from eighteen of Leonardo's notebooks and
their relationship to the artist's holograph writings on painting,
providing a critical transcription newly made from the Codex
Vaticanus Urbinas 1270 and a new English translation with extensive
notes that take into account Leonardo's scientific terminology, the
highly contrived form of his rhetorical argumentation, and the role
played by his original editors.
Immersion is the new orthodoxy. Within the production, curation and
critique of sound art, as well as within the broader fields of
sound studies and auditory culture, the immersive is routinely
celebrated as an experiential quality of sound, the value of which
is inherent yet strengthened through dubious metaphysical
oppositions to the visual. Yet even within the visual arts an
acoustic condition grounded in Marshall McLuhan's metaphorical
notion of acoustic space underwrites predispositions towards
immersion. This broad conception of an acoustic condition in
contemporary art identifies the envelopment of audiences and
spectators who no longer perceive from a distance but immanently
experience immersive artworks and environments. Immanence and
Immersion takes a critical approach to the figures of immersion and
interiority describing an acoustic condition in contemporary art.
It is argued that a price paid for this predisposition towards
immersion is often the conceptual potency and efficacy of the work
undertaken, resulting in arguments that compound the
marginalisation and disempowerment of practices and discourses
concerned with the sonic. The variously phenomenological,
correlational and mystical positions that support the predominance
of the immersive are subject to critique before suggesting that a
stronger distinction between the often confused concepts of
immersion and the immanence might serve as a means of breaking with
the figure of immersion and the circle of interiority towards
attaining greater conceptual potency and epistemological efficacy
within the sonic arts.
In De Gustibus Peter Kivy deals with a question that has never been
fully addressed by philosophers of art: why do we argue about art?
We argue about the 'facts' of the world either to influence
people's behaviour or simply to get them to see what we take to be
the truth about the world. We argue over ethical matters, if we are
ethical 'realists,' because we think we are arguing about 'facts'
in the world. And we argue about ethics, if we are 'emotivists,' or
are now what are called 'expressionists,' which is to say, people
who think matters of ethics are simply matters of 'attitude,' to
influence the behaviour of others. But why should we argue about
works of art? There are no 'actions' we wish to motivate. Whether I
think Bach is greater than Beethoven and you think the opposite,
why should it matter to either of us to convince the other? This is
a question that philosophers have never faced. Kivy claims here
that we argue over taste because we think, mistakenly or not, that
we are arguing over matters of fact.
The "THINKING: Bioengineering of Science and Art" is to discuss
about philosophical aspects of thinking at the context of Science
and Art. External representations provide evidence that the
fundamental process of thinking exists in both animal subjects and
humans. However, the diversity and complexity of thinking in humans
is astonishing because humans have been permitted to integrate
scientific accounts into their accounts and create excellent
illustrations for the effects of this integration. The book
necessarily begins with the origins of human thinking and human
thinking into self and others, body, and life. Multiple factors
tend to modify the pattern of thinking. They all will come into
play by this book that brings thinking into different disciplines:
humanities, natural sciences, social sciences, formal sciences, and
applied sciences. The thinking demands full processing of
information, and therefore, the book considers the economy of
thinking as well. The book thoroughly intends to explore thinking
beyond the boundaries. Specifically, several chapters are devoted
to discipline this exploration either by artistic thinking alone or
by art and mathematics-aided engineering of complexities. In this
manner, the book models variations on thinking at the individual
and systems levels and accumulates a list of solutions, each good
for specific scenarios and maximal outcomes.
In 2009, Susan Boyle's debut roused Simon Cowell from his grumbling
slumber on the television show "Britain's Got Talent" and viewers
across the world rallied to the side of the unemployed, older woman
with the voice of a trained Broadway star. In Mismatched Women,
author Jennifer Fleeger argues that the shock produced when Boyle
began to sing belies cultural assumptions about how particular
female bodies are supposed to sound. Boyle is not an anomaly, but
instead belongs to a lineage of women whose voices do not "match"
their bodies by conventional expectations, from George Du Maurier's
literary Trilby to Metropolitan Opera singer Marion Talley, from
Snow White and Sleeping Beauty to Kate Smith and Deanna Durbin.
Mismatched Women tells a new story about female representation in
film by theorizing a figure regularly dismissed as an aberration.
The mismatched woman is a stumbling block for both sound and
feminist theory, argues Fleeger, because she has been synchronized
yet seems to have been put together incorrectly, as if her body
could not possibly house the voice that the camera insists belongs
to her. Fleeger broadens the traditionally cinematic context of
feminist psychoanalytic film theory to account for literary,
animated, televisual, and virtual influences. This approach bridges
gaps between disciplinary frameworks, showing that studies of
literature, film, media, opera, and popular music pose common
questions about authenticity, vocal and visual realism,
circulation, and reproduction. The book analyzes the importance of
the mismatched female voice in historical debates over the
emergence of new media and unravels the complexity of female
representation in moments of technological change.
Hegel gave lecture series on aesthetics or the philosophy of art in
various university terms, but never published a book of his own on
this topic. His student, H. G. Hotho, compiled auditors'
transcripts from these separate lecture series and produced from
them the three volumes on aesthetics in the standard edition of
Hegel's collected works. Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert has now
published one of these transcripts, the Hotho transcript of the
1823 lecture series, and accompanied it with a very extensive
introductory essay treating many issues pertinent to a proper
understanding of Hegel's views on art. She persuasively argues that
the evidence shows Hegel never finalized his views on the
philosophy of art, but modified them in significant ways from one
lecture series to the next. In addition, she makes the case that
Hotho's compilation not only concealed this circumstance, by the
harmony he created out of diverse source materials, but also
imposed some of his own views on aesthetics, views that differ from
Hegel's and that the ongoing interpretation of the aesthetics part
of Hegel's philosophy has unfortunately taken to be Hegel's own.
This translation of the German volume, which contains the first
publication of the Hotho transcript and Gethmann-Siefert's essay,
makes these important materials accessible to the English reader,
materials that should put the English-speaking world's future
understanding and interpretation of Hegel's philosophy of art on a
sounder footing.
Locating a shared interest in the philosophy of "art for art's
sake" in aestheticism and "modernismo," this study examines the
changing role of art and artist during the turn-of-the-century
period, offering a consideration of the multiple dichotomies of art
and life, aesthetics and economics, production and consumption, and
center and periphery.
This book explores the relationship between ekphrasis and memory in
the novel. Drawing on A la recherche du temps perdu, Leonid Bilmes
considers how Vladimir Nabokov, W. G. Sebald, Ben Lerner, Ali Smith
and Lydia Davis have employed and reshaped Proust's way of
depicting the recollected past. In Ada, Austerlitz, 10:04, How to
Be Both and The End of the Story, memory images are variously
transposed into intermedial descriptions that inform the narrator's
story, just as they serve to shape the reader's own remembrance of
each of these narratives. Ekphrasis in the novel after Proust,
Bilmes argues, acts as a distinct site within the text where past
and present, self and other, image and text, seeing and hearing,
are ever on the brink of reconciliation. The book surveys a wide
field of critical inquiry, encompassing classical theorizations of
ekphrasis, philosophical explorations of memory and visuality, as
well as seminal studies of image-text relations by, among others,
W. J. T. Mitchell, Jean-Luc Nancy and Liliane Louvel. Bilmes's
compelling dialogue with theory and literature evinces the
underexplored bond between ekphrasis and memory in the contemporary
novel.
This book addresses a topic of increasing importance to artists,
art historians and scholars of cultural studies, migration studies
and international relations: migration as a profoundly transforming
force that has remodelled artistic and art institutional practices
across the world. It explores contemporary art's critical
engagement with migration and globalisation as a key source for
improving our understanding of how these processes transform
identities, cultures, institutions and geopolitics. The author
explores three interwoven issues of enduring interest: identity and
belonging, institutional visibility and recognition of migrant
artists, and the interrelations between aesthetics and politics,
including the balancing of aesthetics, politics and ethics in
representations of forced migration. -- .
Linda Nochlin's seminal essay on women artists is widely
acknowledged as the first real attempt at a feminist history of
art. Nochlin refused to handle the question of why there had been
no 'great women artists' on its own, corrupted, terms. Instead, she
dismantled the very concept of 'greatness', unravelling the basic
assumptions that had centred a male-coded 'genius' in the study of
art. With unparalleled insight and startling wit, Nochlin laid bare
the acceptance of a white male viewpoint in art historical thought
as not merely a moral failure, but an intellectual one. Freedom, as
she sees it, requires women to risk entirely demolishing the art
world's institutions, and rebuilding them anew - in other words, to
leap into the unknown. In this stand-alone anniversary edition,
Nochlin's essay is published alongside its reappraisal, 'Thirty
Years After'. Written in an era of thriving feminist theory, as
well as queer theory, race and postcolonial studies, 'Thirty Years
After' is a striking reflection on the emergence of a whole new
canon. With reference to Joan Mitchell, Louise Bourgeois, Cindy
Sherman and many more, Nochlin diagnoses the state of women and art
with unmatched precision and verve. 'Why Have There Been No Great
Women Artists?' has become a slogan and rallying cry that resonates
across culture and society; Dior even adopted it in their 2018
collections. In the 2020s, at a time when 'certain patriarchal
values are making a comeback', Nochlin's message could not be more
urgent: as she herself put it in 2015, 'there is still a long way
to go'. With 14 illustrations
Digital technology has transformed the way that we visualise the
natural world, the art we create and the stories we tell about our
environments. Exploring contemporary digital art and literature
through an ecocritical lens, Digital Vision and the Ecological
Aesthetic (1968 - 2018) demonstrates the many ways in which
critical ideas of the sublime, the pastoral and the picturesque
have been renewed and shaped in digital media, from electronic
literature to music and the visual arts. The book goes on to
explore the ecological implications of these new forms of cultural
representation in the digital age and in so doing makes a profound
contribution to our understanding of digital art practice in the
21st century.
Problematic assumptions which see humans as special and easily
defined as standing apart from animals, plants, and microbiota,
both consciously and unconsciously underpin scientific
investigation, arts practice, curation, education, and research
across the social sciences and humanities. This is the case
particularly in those traditions emerging from European and
Enlightenment philosophies. Posthumanism disrupts these traditional
humanist outlooks and interrogates their profound shaping of how we
see ourselves, our place in the world, and our role in its
protection. In Posthumanism in Practice, artists, researchers,
educators, and curators set out how they have developed and
responded to posthumanist ideas across their work in the arts,
sciences, and humanities, and provide examples and insights to
support the exploration of posthumanism in how we can think,
create, and live. In capturing these ideas, Posthumanism in
Practice shows how posthumanist thought can move beyond theory,
inform action, and produce new artefacts, effects, and methods that
are more relevant and more useful for the incoming realities for
all life in the 21st century.
How do we conceptualize the relationship between suffering, art,
and aesthetics from within the broader framework of social,
cultural, and political thought today? This book brings together a
range of intellectuals from the social sciences and humanities to
speak to theoretical debates around the questions of suffering in
art and suffering and art.
In Bourdieu in Question: New Directions in French Sociology of Art,
Jeffrey A. Halley and Daglind E. Sonolet offer to English-speaking
audiences an account of the very lively Francophone debates over
Pierre Bourdieu's work in the domain of the arts and culture, and
present other directions and perspectives taken by major French
researchers who extend or differ from his point of view, and who
were marginalized by the Bourdieusian moment. Three generations of
research are presented: contemporaries of Bourdieu, the next
generation, and recent research. Themes include the art market and
value, cultural politics, the reception of artworks, theory and the
concept of the artwork, autonomy in art, ethnography and culture,
and the critique of Bourdieu on literature. Contributors are:
Howard S. Becker, Martine Burgos, Marie Buscatto, Jean-Louis
Fabiani, Laurent Fleury, Florent Gaudez, Jeffrey A. Halley,
Nathalie Heinich, Yvon Lamy, Jacques Leenhardt, Cecile Leonardi,
Clara Levy, Pierre-Michel Menger, Raymonde Moulin, Jean-Claude
Passeron, Emmanuel Pedler, Bruno Pequignot, Alain Quemin, Cherry
Schrecker, Daglind E. Sonolet.
The recent rise of 'new nature writing' has renewed the question of
how a landscape can be written. This book intervenes in this debate
by proposing innovative methodologies for writing place that
recognize and make use of the contradictions, fractures and
coincidences found in a modern landscape. In doing so, it develops
original readings of modernist artists and writers who were
associated with the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset, including Vanessa
Bell, Paul Nash, Eric Benfield and Mary Butts. Their work is set
alongside embodied practices of leisure and labour such as sea
bathing, beachcombing, quarrying, tourism and scientific fieldwork,
as well as the material and geological features of the environment
with which such activities are allied. By showing the Isle of
Purbeck to be a site where versions of modernity were actively
generated and contested, the book contributes to a reassessment of
the significance of rural locations for English modernism.
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