This is the first book to gather together R. K. Elliott's important essays on aesthetics. These essays put forward a number of common themes that together constitute a unified approach to aesthetics. A theory of imagination is developed and ideas concerning the practice of art criticism are explored before the relevance of aesthetics for ethics is discussed. Throughout his writing Elliott combines analytic rigour with sympathy for ideas in continental philosophy. He values subjectivity but his analytic stance prevents this from falling into mere personal opinion; he is also able to show how art and aesthetic theory is of complex relevance to broader areas of experience such as education, freedom, and moral action. In the course of his discussion Elliott offers an in-depth analysis of Kant's Critique of Judgement, Clive Bell's aesthetic theory, and the relevance of Wittgenstein for aesthetics. Study of Elliott's essays presented in this book powerfully illuminates the unifying role of imagination and the aesthetic in human experience.

This is the first book dedicated to Husserl's aesthetics. Paul Crowther pieces together Husserl's ideas of phantasy and image and presents them as a unified and innovative account of aesthetic consciousness. He also shows how Husserl's ideas can be developed to solve problems in aesthetics, especially those related to visual art, literature, theatre, and nature. After outlining the major components of Husserl's phenomenological method, Crowther addresses the scope and structure of Husserl's notion of aesthetic consciousness. For Husserl, aesthetic consciousness in all its forms involves phantasy-where items or states of affairs are represented as if actually perceived or experienced, even though they are not, in fact, given in the present perceptual field. Husserl also makes some extraordinarily interesting links between aesthetic consciousness and nature, showing how natural things and environments become instigators of such consciousness when apprehended in the appropriate terms. This "unreality" of the object of aesthetic consciousness anticipates contemporary debates about pictorial representation and is also relevant to Husserl's accounts of literature and theatre. The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Consciousness and Phantasy will appeal to scholars and advanced students interested in aesthetics, philosophy of art, phenomenological aesthetics, and Husserl's philosophy.

This book shows that art involves an aesthetics of self-becoming, wherein we do not simply consume artistic meaning, but become empowered-by adapting ourselves to what creation in the different art forms makes possible. Paul Crowther argues that the great political task in aesthetics is no longer the creation of political art as such, but rather the winning back of art and aesthetics as central societal concerns. This involves the overcoming of neo-liberal treatments of art as mere commodity and misguided attitudes that dismiss it as the product of dead white European males. The book begins with a theory of self-consciousness which reveals the necessary role played by the aesthetic in personal identity. It then emphasises how art forms empower through processes of making and aesthetic effects that are unique to them individually. To show this, he considers the ontology of pictorial art, sculpture, installation and assemblage works, architecture, literature, cinema, and music. His arguments concerning these are supported, throughout, by in-depth discussions of specific artworks. The book's effect, overall is to reorientate aesthetics by showing how art empowers through its revelation of new possibilities of experience. The Aesthetics of Self-Becoming will appeal to philosophers of art and aesthetics, as well as scholars in art history, literary studies, film studies, and music theory who are interested in the book's central concerns.

There are as many meanings to drawing and painting as there are cultural contexts for them to exist in. But this is not the end of the story. Drawings and paintings are made, and in their making embody unique meanings that transform our perception of space-time and sense of finitude. These meanings have not been addressed by art history or visual studies hitherto, and have only been considered indirectly by philosophers (mainly in the phenomenological tradition). If these intrinsic meanings are explained and further developed, then the philosophy of art practice is significantly enhanced. The present work, accordingly, is a phenomenology of how the gestural and digital creation of visual imagery generates self-transformation through aesthetic space.

This book shows that art involves an aesthetics of self-becoming, wherein we do not simply consume artistic meaning, but become empowered-by adapting ourselves to what creation in the different art forms makes possible. Paul Crowther argues that the great political task in aesthetics is no longer the creation of political art as such, but rather the winning back of art and aesthetics as central societal concerns. This involves the overcoming of neo-liberal treatments of art as mere commodity and misguided attitudes that dismiss it as the product of dead white European males. The book begins with a theory of self-consciousness which reveals the necessary role played by the aesthetic in personal identity. It then emphasises how art forms empower through processes of making and aesthetic effects that are unique to them individually. To show this, he considers the ontology of pictorial art, sculpture, installation and assemblage works, architecture, literature, cinema, and music. His arguments concerning these are supported, throughout, by in-depth discussions of specific artworks. The book's effect, overall is to reorientate aesthetics by showing how art empowers through its revelation of new possibilities of experience. The Aesthetics of Self-Becoming will appeal to philosophers of art and aesthetics, as well as scholars in art history, literary studies, film studies, and music theory who are interested in the book's central concerns.

Is art created with computers really art? This book answers 'yes.' Computers can generate visual art with unique aesthetic effects based on innovations in computer technology and a Postmodern naturalization of technology wherein technology becomes something we live in as well as use. The present study establishes these claims by looking at digital art's historical emergence from the 1960s to the start of the present century. Paul Crowther, using a philosophical approach to art history, considers the first steps towards digital graphics, their development in terms of three-dimensional abstraction and figuration, and then the complexities of their interactive formats.

Traditional art is based on conventions of resemblance between the work and that which it is a representation "of". Abstract art, in contrast, either adopts alternative modes of visual representation or reconfigures mimetic convention. This book explores the relation of abstract art to nature (taking nature in the broadest sense-the world of recognisable objects, creatures, organisms, processes, and states of affairs). Abstract art takes many different forms, but there are shared key structural features centered on two basic relations to nature. The first abstracts from nature, to give selected aspects of it a new and extremely unfamiliar appearance. The second affirms a natural creativity that issues in new, autonomous forms that are not constrained by mimetic conventions. (Such creativity is often attributed to the power of the unconscious.) The book covers three categories: classical modernism (Mondrian, Malevich, Kandinsky, Arp, early American abstraction); post-war abstraction (Pollock, Still, Newman, Smithson, Noguchi, Arte Povera, Michaux, postmodern developments); and the broader historical and philosophical scope.

Meaning in the visual arts centers on how the physical work makes its content or presence visible. The art object is fundamental. Indeed, the different object forms of each visual medium allows our experience of space-time, and our relations to other people, to be aesthetically embodied in unique ways. Through these embodiments, visual art compensates for what is otherwise existentially lost, and becomes part of what makes life worth living. The present book shows this by discussing a range of visual art forms, namely pictorial representation, abstraction, sculpture and assemblage works, land art, architecture, photography, and varieties of digital art.

Traditional art is based on conventions of resemblance between the work and that which it is a representation "of". Abstract art, in contrast, either adopts alternative modes of visual representation or reconfigures mimetic convention. This book explores the relation of abstract art to nature (taking nature in the broadest sense-the world of recognisable objects, creatures, organisms, processes, and states of affairs). Abstract art takes many different forms, but there are shared key structural features centered on two basic relations to nature. The first abstracts from nature, to give selected aspects of it a new and extremely unfamiliar appearance. The second affirms a natural creativity that issues in new, autonomous forms that are not constrained by mimetic conventions. (Such creativity is often attributed to the power of the unconscious.) The book covers three categories: classical modernism (Mondrian, Malevich, Kandinsky, Arp, early American abstraction); post-war abstraction (Pollock, Still, Newman, Smithson, Noguchi, Arte Povera, Michaux, postmodern developments); and the broader historical and philosophical scope.

Formulating a new approach to philosophy which, instead of simply rejecting postmodern thought, tries to assimilate some of its main features, Paul Crowther identifies conceptual links between value, knowledge, personal identity and civilization understood as a process of cumulative advance.
To establish these links, Crowther deploys a mode of analytic philosophy influenced by Cassirer. This approach recontextualizes precisely those aspects of postmodernism which appear, superficially, to be fuel for the relativist fire. This method also enables him to illuminate some of the great practical dangers of the postmodern era - most notably the widespread inability or unwillingness to distinguish between signs and reality. Crowther renews analytic philosophy as a searching form of conceptual and cultural critique that pushes beyond the limits of postmodern thought.
Essential reading for advanced students and academics interested in Twentieth Century Philosophy, Philosophy After Postmodernism will also be of value to scholars working in the fields of Cultural Studies and Sociology.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203416384

Formulating a new approach to philosophy which, instead of simply rejecting postmodern thought, tries to assimilate some of its main features, Paul Crowther identifies conceptual links between value, knowledge, personal identity and civilization understood as a process of cumulative advance.
To establish these links, Crowther deploys a mode of analytic philosophy influenced by Cassirer. This approach recontextualizes precisely those aspects of postmodernism which appear, superficially, to be fuel for the relativist fire. This method also enables him to illuminate some of the great practical dangers of the postmodern era - most notably the widespread inability or unwillingness to distinguish between signs and reality. Crowther renews analytic philosophy as a searching form of conceptual and cultural critique that pushes beyond the limits of postmodern thought.
Essential reading for advanced students and academics interested in Twentieth Century Philosophy, Philosophy After Postmodernism will also be of value to scholars working in the fields of Cultural Studies and Sociology.

This is the first book to gather together R. K. Elliott's important essays on aesthetics. These essays put forward a number of common themes that together constitute a unified approach to aesthetics. A theory of imagination is developed and ideas concerning the practice of art criticism are explored before the relevance of aesthetics for ethics is discussed. Throughout his writing Elliott combines analytic rigour with sympathy for ideas in continental philosophy. He values subjectivity but his analytic stance prevents this from falling into mere personal opinion; he is also able to show how art and aesthetic theory is of complex relevance to broader areas of experience such as education, freedom, and moral action. In the course of his discussion Elliott offers an in-depth analysis of Kant's Critique of Judgement, Clive Bell's aesthetic theory, and the relevance of Wittgenstein for aesthetics. Study of Elliott's essays presented in this book powerfully illuminates the unifying role of imagination and the aesthetic in human experience.

Postmodernism in the visual arts is not just another 'ism.' It emerged in the 1960s as a transformation of artistic creativity inspired by Duchamp's idea that the artwork does not have to be physically made by its creator. Products of mass culture and technology can be used just as well as traditional media. This idea became influential because of a widespread naturalization of technology - where technology becomes something lived in as well as used. Postmodern art embodies this attitude. To explain why, Paul Crowther investigates topics such as eclecticism, the sublime, deconstruction in art and philosophy, and Paolozzi's Wittgenstein-inspired works.

Despite the wonders of the digital world, people still go in record numbers to view drawings and paintings in galleries. Why? What is the magic that pictures work on us? This book provides a provocative explanation, arguing that some pictures have special kinds of beauty and sublimity that offer aesthetic transcendence. They take us imaginatively beyond our finite limits and even invoke a sense of the divine. Such aesthetic transcendence forges a relationship with the ultimate and completes us psychologically. Philosophers and theologians sometimes account for this as an effect of art, but How Pictures Complete Us distinguishes itself by revealing how this experience is embodied in pictorial structures and styles. Through detailed discussions of artworks from the Renaissance through postmodern times, Paul Crowther reappraises the entire scope of beauty and the sublime in the context of both representational and abstract art, offering unexpected insights into familiar phenomena such as ideal beauty, pictorial perspective, and what pictures are in the first place.

Despite the wonders of the digital world, people still go in record numbers to view drawings and paintings in galleries. Why? What is the magic that pictures work on us? This book provides a provocative explanation, arguing that some pictures have special kinds of beauty and sublimity that offer aesthetic transcendence. They take us imaginatively beyond our finite limits and even invoke a sense of the divine. Such aesthetic transcendence forges a relationship with the ultimate and completes us psychologically. Philosophers and theologians sometimes account for this as an effect of art, but How Pictures Complete Us distinguishes itself by revealing how this experience is embodied in pictorial structures and styles. Through detailed discussions of artworks from the Renaissance through postmodern times, Paul Crowther reappraises the entire scope of beauty and the sublime in the context of both representational and abstract art, offering unexpected insights into familiar phenomena such as ideal beauty, pictorial perspective, and what pictures are in the first place.

Why are the visual arts so important and what is it that makes their forms significant? Countering recent interpretations of meaning that understand visual artworks on the model of literary texts, Crowther formulates a theory of the visual arts based on what their creation achieves both cognitively and aesthetically. He develops a phenomenology that emphasizes how visual art gives unique aesthetic expression to factors that are basic to perception. At the same time, he shows how various artistic media embody these factors in distinctive ways. Attentive to both the creation and reception of all major visual art forms (picturing, sculpture, architecture, and photography), "Phenomenology of the Visual Arts" also addresses complex idioms, including abstract, conceptual, and digital art.

There are as many meanings to drawing and painting as there are cultural contexts for them to exist in. But this is not the end of the story. Drawings and paintings are made, and in their making embody unique meanings that transform our perception of space-time and sense of finitude. These meanings have not been addressed by art history or visual studies hitherto, and have only been considered indirectly by philosophers (mainly in the phenomenological tradition). If these intrinsic meanings are explained and further developed, then the philosophy of art practice is significantly enhanced. The present work, accordingly, is a phenomenology of how the gestural and digital creation of visual imagery generates self-transformation through aesthetic space.

Meaning in the visual arts centers on how the physical work makes its content or presence visible. The art object is fundamental. Indeed, the different object forms of each visual medium allows our experience of space-time, and our relations to other people, to be aesthetically embodied in unique ways. Through these embodiments, visual art compensates for what is otherwise existentially lost, and becomes part of what makes life worth living. The present book shows this by discussing a range of visual art forms, namely pictorial representation, abstraction, sculpture and assemblage works, land art, architecture, photography, and varieties of digital art.

Is art created with computers really art? This book answers 'yes.' Computers can generate visual art with unique aesthetic effects based on innovations in computer technology and a Postmodern naturalization of technology wherein technology becomes something we live in as well as use. The present study establishes these claims by looking at digital art's historical emergence from the 1960s to the start of the present century. Paul Crowther, using a philosophical approach to art history, considers the first steps towards digital graphics, their development in terms of three-dimensional abstraction and figuration, and then the complexities of their interactive formats.

Modern businesses depend on data for their very survival, creating a need for sophisticated databases and database technologies to help store, organise and transport their valuable data. This updated and expanded, easy-to-read textbook/reference presents a comprehensive introduction to databases, opening with a concise history of databases and of data as an organisational asset. As relational database management systems are no longer the only database solution, the book takes a wider view of database technology, encompassing big data, NoSQL, object and object-relational, and in-memory databases. Presenting both theoretical and practical elements, the new edition also examines the issues of scalability, availability, performance and security encountered when building and running a database in the real world. Topics and features: Presents review and discussion questions at the end of each chapter, in addition to skill-building, hands-on exercises Provides new material on database adaptiveness, integration, and efficiency in relation to data growth Introduces a range of commercial databases and encourages the reader to experiment with these in an associated learning environment Reviews use of a variety of databases in business environments, including numerous examples Discusses areas for further research within this fast-moving domain With its learning-by-doing approach, supported by both theoretical and practical examples, this clearly-structured textbook will be of great value to advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of computer science, software engineering, and information technology. Practising database professionals and application developers will also find the book an ideal reference that addresses today's business needs.

Why are the visual arts so important and what is it that makes their forms significant? Countering recent interpretations of meaning that understand visual artworks on the model of literary texts, Crowther formulates a theory of the visual arts based on what their creation achieves both cognitively and aesthetically. He develops a phenomenology that emphasizes how visual art gives unique aesthetic expression to factors that are basic to perception. At the same time, he shows how various artistic media embody these factors in distinctive ways. Attentive to both the creation and reception of all major visual art forms (picturing, sculpture, architecture, and photography), "Phenomenology of the Visual Arts" also addresses complex idioms, including abstract, conceptual, and digital art.

This is the first sustained phenomenological approach to modern art, taking a new approach and drawing upon an unusual selection of thinkers. As a philosophical approach, phenomenology is concerned with structure in how phenomena are experienced. "The Phenomenology of Modern Art" uses phenomenological insights to explain the significance of style in modern art, most notably in Impressionism, Expressionism, Cezanne and Cubism, Duchampian conceptualism and abstract art. Paul Crowther explores this thematic in a new way, addressing specific visual artworks and tendencies in detail and introducing a new methodology - post-analytic phenomenology. It is this more critical, post-analytic orientation that allows the book to utilise some unexpected phenomenological resources. Gilles Deleuze, rarely associated with phenomenology, in fact employs an overriding phenomenological orientation in his focus on modern art. Crowther uses Deleuze's important phenomenological insights as a starting point and goes on to develop arguments found in two other thinkers, Nietzsche and Merleau-Ponty, as well as addressing those figures and tendencies in relation to whom twentieth-century critical appropriations of Kant have been most influential. Illustrated throughout, the book offers the first sustained phenomenological approach to modern art.

Why are visual artworks experienced as having intrinsic significance or normative depth? Why are some works of art better able to manifest this significance than others? In this 2002 book Paul Crowther argues that we can answer these questions only if we have a full analytic definition of visual art. Crowther's approach focuses on the pictorial image, broadly construed to include abstract work and recent conceptually-based idioms. The significance of art depends, however, essentially on the transhistorical nature of the pictorial image, the way in which its illuminative power is extended through historical transformation of the relevant artistic medium. Crowther argues against fashionable forms of cultural relativism, while at the same time showing why it is important that an appreciation of the history of art is integral to aesthetic judgment.

Recent theory has tended to understand the meaning of art primarily as a function of original contexts of production and reception or in its relation to fashionable notions of gender, multiculturalism, and "scopic regimes". These approaches, however, fail to negotiate adequately art's transhistorical and transcultural significance, a shortcoming that is particularly serious in relation to twentieth-century works because it confines their significance to contexts that are regulated by the specialist interests of a narrow managerial class of curators, critics, and historians. In this important book, Paul Crowther provides a radical reinterpretation of key phases and figures in twentieth-century art, focusing on the way artists and critics negotiate philosophically significant ideas.

Crowther begins by discussing how and why form is significant. Using Derrida's notion of "iterability" -- a sign's capacity to be used across different contexts -- he links this possibility to key reciprocal cognitive relations that are the structural basis of self-consciousness. He then argues that while such relations are necessarily involved in any pictorial work, they are especially manifest in aesthetically valuable representation, and even more so in those twentieth-century works that radically transform or abandon conventional modes of representation. The involvement of key reciprocal relations gives such works a transhistorical and transcultural significance. To show this, Crowther investigates the theory and practice of important artists such as Malevich, Pollock, Mondrian, and Newman, and major tendencies such as Futurism, Surrealism, and Conceptual Art. By linking them to reciprocal relations, heis able to illuminate a language of twentieth-century art that cuts across those boundaries set out by such conventional notions as modern, avant-garde, and postmodern.