Ambitious in scope and innovative in concept, this book offers an
overview and critique of the conventions surrounding artistic
creativity and intellectual endeavor since the outset of "the
broader modernity," which the author sees as beginning with the
decline of feudalism and the Church.
As a work of intellectual history, it suggests that art and the
conventions associated with the artistic constitute a secular
institution that has supplanted pre-Reformation theology. From the
perspective of the "subject," modernity has entailed a heightened
sense of individuation, moral conflict, and pervasive loss and
disaster. Yet the pitfalls that have earmarked personal experience
have taken on positive value in an artistic enterprise that aspires
to be a salutary replacement for externally imposed theological
dogmas.
Beginning with Luther, Calvin, and Shakespeare and culminating with
the Kantian notion of the artist as an "original genius," the
author reconstructs the steps by which art and creative activity
were installed as the redemptive values of a modernity in which
human beings were forced to define knowledge and establish
authority according to their own devices. In the process, the
author reads passages from Plato, Proust, Donne, Locke, Berkeley,
Hume, Kleist, Rousseau, Melville, Wittgenstein, as well as
Benjamin, as well as the graphic works of Holbein, Durer, Mondrian,
and Rothko.
As a work of critical theory, "The Aesthetic Contract" posits an
alternative model to Kant's "original genius." The author explores
an understanding of art powered by the notion of the aesthetic
contract, in which artists and intellectuals choose to operate
within the parameters of certain explicit experiments until the
contractual clauses that delimit these endeavors lose their
currency or validity. As an intellectual analog to Rousseau's
social contract, the aesthetic contract has allowed the modern
artist to address issues of knowledge, authority, and experience
once thought to fall within the domain of arbitrary, remote, and
inaccessible agencies.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
