What is the future of conceptualism? What expressions can it take in the 21st century? Is there a new role for aesthetic experience in art and, if so, what is that role exactly? Aesthetics, Philosophy and Martin Creed uses one of this generation’s most important and influential artists to address themes crucial to contemporary aesthetics. Working in an impressive variety of artistic media, Creed represents a strikingly innovative take on conceptualism. Through his ingenious and thought-provoking work, a team of international philosophers, jurists and art historians illustrate how Creed epitomizes several questions central to philosophical aesthetics today and provides a glimpse of the future both of art and aesthetic discourse. They discuss key concepts for Creed’s work, including immediacy (in his photographs of smiling people), compositional order (in his geometric paintings), simplicity (in Work No. 218, a sheet paper crumpled into a ball) and shamelessness (in his videos of vomiting people). By bringing a working artist into the heart of academic discussions, Aesthetics, Philosophy and Martin Creed highlights the relevance of philosophical discussions of art to understanding art today.

What is the future of conceptualism? What expressions can it take in the 21st century? Is there a new role for aesthetic experience in art and, if so, what is that role exactly? Aesthetics, Philosophy and Martin Creed uses one of this generation’s most important and influential artists to address themes crucial to contemporary aesthetics. Working in an impressive variety of artistic media, Creed represents a strikingly innovative take on conceptualism. Through his ingenious and thought-provoking work, a team of international philosophers, jurists and art historians illustrate how Creed epitomizes several questions central to philosophical aesthetics today and provides a glimpse of the future both of art and aesthetic discourse. They discuss key concepts for Creed’s work, including immediacy (in his photographs of smiling people), compositional order (in his geometric paintings), simplicity (in Work No. 218, a sheet paper crumpled into a ball) and shamelessness (in his videos of vomiting people). By bringing a working artist into the heart of academic discussions, Aesthetics, Philosophy and Martin Creed highlights the relevance of philosophical discussions of art to understanding art today.

This book proposes to investigate the arts from the inside, namely to consider, first and foremost, what artists do to create their works in order to proceed fruitfully in the direction of their evaluation and explanation. To this end, it develops a philosophical inquiry that examines the ground zero of the arts, their common foundations, namely the rules for artistic creation, the processes that involve artists in their activities, the forms that they can or cannot achieve. This proposal and its outline for a rule-based ontology of the arts addresses four themes: the relationship between human nature and artistic practices, the features of art-making, the conception of artworks as structures, and the social nature of the arts.