In this collection of specially-commissioned chapters, a team of experts discuss the extent to which art can be explained purely in terms of aesthetic categories.
Author: Owen Hulatt
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 9781441132307
Category: Philosophy
Page: 256
View: 337
Whether art can be wholly autonomous has been repeatedly challenged in the modern history of aesthetics. In this collection of specially-commissioned chapters, a team of experts discuss the extent to which art can be explained purely in terms of aesthetic categories. Covering examples from Philosophy, Music and Art History and drawing on continental and analytic sources, this volume clarifies the relationship between artworks and extra-aesthetic considerations, including historic, cultural or economic factors. It presents a comprehensive overview of the question of aesthetic autonomy, exploring its relevance to both philosophy and the comprehension of specific artworks themselves. By closely examining how the creation of artworks, and our judgements of these artworks, relate to society and history, Aesthetic and Artistic Autonomy provides an insightful and sustained discussion of a major question in aesthetic philosophy.
On the one hand, I will show that it is necessary to exclude aesthetic autonomy from the philosophical study of art. We cannot justly identify and appreciate art on account of aesthetic form only. It will be shown that this problem is ...
Author: Owen Hulatt
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 9781441196521
Category: Art
Page: 243
View: 530
Whether art can be wholly autonomous has been repeatedly challenged in the modern history of aesthetics. In this collection of specially-commissioned chapters, a team of experts discuss the extent to which art can be explained purely in terms of aesthetic categories. Covering examples from Philosophy, Music and Art History and drawing on continental and analytic sources, this volume clarifies the relationship between artworks and extra-aesthetic considerations, including historic, cultural or economic factors. It presents a comprehensive overview of the question of aesthetic autonomy, exploring its relevance to both philosophy and the comprehension of specific artworks themselves. By closely examining how the creation of artworks, and our judgements of these artworks, relate to society and history, Aesthetic and Artistic Autonomy provides an insightful and sustained discussion of a major question in aesthetic philosophy.
1 Peter Kivy, “What Really Happened in the Eighteenth Century: The 'Modern System' Reexamined (Again),” British Journal of Aesthetics 52, no. 1 (2012): 61. 2 Regarding the grand narrative, see Nicholas Wolterstorff, Art Rethought: The ...
Author: Karl Axelsson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781000077285
Category: Philosophy
Page: 302
View: 801
This volume re-examines traditional interpretations of the rise of modern aesthetics in eighteenth-century Britain and Germany. It provides a new account that connects aesthetic experience with morality, science, and political society. In doing so, it challenges long-standing teleological narratives that emphasize disinterestedness and the separation of aesthetics from moral, cognitive, and political interests. The chapters are divided into three thematic parts. The chapters in Part I demonstrate the heteronomy of eighteenth-century British aesthetics. They chart the evolution of aesthetic concepts and discuss the ethical and political significance of the aesthetic theories of several key figures: namely, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, David Hume, and Adam Smith. Part II explores the ways in which eighteenth-century German, and German-oriented, thinkers examine aesthetic experience and moral concerns, and relate to the work of their British counterparts. The chapters here cover the work of Kant, Moses Mendelssohn, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, and Madame de Staël. Finally, Part III explores the interrelation of science, aesthetics, and a new model of society in the work of Goethe, Johann Wilhelm Ritter, Friedrich Hölderlin, and William Hazlitt, among others. This volume develops unique discussions of the rise of aesthetic autonomy in the eighteenth century. In bringing together well-known scholars working on British and German eighteenth-century aesthetics, philosophy, and literature, it will appeal to scholars and advanced students in a range of disciplines who are interested in this topic.
In Adorno's Theory of Philosophical and Aesthetic Truth, Owen Hulatt undertakes an original reading of Theodor W. Adorno's epistemology and its material underpinnings, deepening our understanding of his theories of truth, art, and the ...
Author: Owen Hulatt
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231542203
Category: Philosophy
Page: 272
View: 577
In Adorno's Theory of Philosophical and Aesthetic Truth, Owen Hulatt undertakes an original reading of Theodor W. Adorno's epistemology and its material underpinnings, deepening our understanding of his theories of truth, art, and the nonidentical. Hulatt's novel interpretation casts Adorno's theory of philosophical and aesthetic truth as substantially unified, supporting the thinker's claim that both philosophy and art are capable of being true. For Adorno, truth is produced when rhetorical "texture" combines with cognitive "performance," leading to the breakdown of concepts that mediate the experience of the consciousness. Both philosophy and art manifest these features, although philosophy enacts these conceptual issues directly, while art does so obliquely. Hulatt builds a robust argument for Adorno's claim that concepts ineluctably misconstrue their objects. He also puts the still influential thinker into conversation with Hegel, Husserl, Frazer, Sohn-Rethel, Benjamin, Strawson, Dahlhaus, Habermas, and Caillois, among many others.
Kant deals primarily with the “autonomy of aesthetic judgment,” which holds that the experience and judgment of beauty (including art) are free from moral, rational, and empirical interests. For Kant, as for Schiller, the work of art is ...
Author: Gül Bilge Han
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781108491778
Category: Literary Criticism
Page: 212
View: 670
Wallace Stevens and the Poetics of Modernist Autonomy presents a rethinking of modernist claims to autonomy by focusing on the work of Wallace Stevens, one of the most renowned poets of the twentieth century. By showing how multiple socio-political currents underlie and motivate Stevens' version of autonomy, the book challenges the commonly received accounts of the term as art and literature's escape from the world. It provides new and close readings of Stevens' work including poems from different stages of the poet's career. It re-energizes a tradition of historicist readings of Stevens from the 1980s and 1990s. The study of Stevens' work in this book is developed in constant dialogue with current studies in modernism and aesthetic theory, particularly those offered by Jacques Rancire and Alain Badiou. The book explores the question of autonomy in Stevens' exploration of the aesthetic and social domains, and the vexed issue of his poetry's relation to philosophical thinking.
By illuminating the motives of artists including Stanley Brouwn, Charlotte Posenenske, David Hammons, Lutz Bacher and Agnes Martin among others, this book offers a unique perspective on where and how the needs of the artist and the needs of ...
Author: Sven Lütticken
Publisher:
ISBN: 3956791940
Category: Aesthetics
Page: 184
View: 908
Martin Herberts timely new collection of essays considers various artists who have withdrawn from the art world or adopted an antagonistic position toward its mechanisms. Today, a large part of the artists role in our massively professionalized art world is being present. Herbert provides a counterargument for this proactive concept of self-marketing, examining the consequential nature of retreat, whether in protest, as a deliberate conceptual act or out of necessity. By illuminating the motives of artists including Stanley Brouwn, Charlotte Posenenske, David Hammons, Lutz Bacher and Agnes Martin among others, this book offers a unique perspective on where and how the needs of the artist and the needs of the art world diverge. Martin Herbert is a writer and critic living in Berlin. He is associate editor of ArtReview and writes for international art journals. Previous books include The Uncertainty Principle (2014) by Sternberg Press and Mark Wallinger (2011).
Our conception of creative autonomy, based on our interviews and ethnography, involves two main components to it, which we call aesthetic or artistic autonomy, and professional autonomy. We deal with aesthetic autonomy in the following ...
Author: David Hesmondhalgh
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9780415572606
Category: Business & Economics
Page: 265
View: 906
What is it like to work in the media? Are media jobs more âe~creativeâe(tm) than those in other sectors? To answer these questions, this book explores the creative industries, using a combination of original research and a synthesis of existing studies. Through its close analysis of key issues âe" such as tensions between commerce and creativity, the conditions and experiences of workers, alienation, autonomy, self-realization, emotional and affective labour, self-exploitation, and how possible it might be to produce âe~good workâe(tm) Creative Labour makes a major contribution to our understanding of the media, of work, and of social and cultural change. In addition, the book undertakes an extensive exploration of the creative industries, spanning numerous sectors including television, music and journalism. This book provides a comprehensive and accessible account of life in the creative industries in the twenty-first century. It is a major piece of research and a valuable study aid for both undergraduate and postgraduate students of subjects including business and management studies, sociology of work, sociology of culture, and media and communications.
TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Autonomy is a powerful idea. In aesthetics, the basic meaning of 'autonomy' can be summarized as the idea that art or literature constitutes an independent sphere of activity that defines its own rules and adheres ...
Author: Luke Roman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780199675630
Category: Art
Page: 380
View: 270
Luke Roman offers a major new approach to the study of ancient Roman poetry. In the modern interpretation of art and literature, autonomy is a central concern where 'aesthetic autonomy' refers to the idea that art (literature, music, visual art) belongs to a realm of its own, separate from ordinary activities and everyday concerns. While scholars have often insisted that aesthetic autonomy is a distinctly modern concept and cannot be applied to other historicalperiods, the book argues that poets in ancient Rome employed a distinctive 'rhetoric of autonomy' -- they represented their poetry as different from other cultural products and independent of theordinary logic of social relations.
This volume re-examines traditional interpretations of the rise of modern aesthetics in eighteenth-century Britain and Germany. It provides a new account that connects aesthetic experience with morality, science, and political society.
Author: Karl Axelsson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781000077247
Category: Philosophy
Page: 302
View: 314
This volume re-examines traditional interpretations of the rise of modern aesthetics in eighteenth-century Britain and Germany. It provides a new account that connects aesthetic experience with morality, science, and political society. In doing so, it challenges long-standing teleological narratives that emphasize disinterestedness and the separation of aesthetics from moral, cognitive, and political interests. The chapters are divided into three thematic parts. The chapters in Part I demonstrate the heteronomy of eighteenth-century British aesthetics. They chart the evolution of aesthetic concepts and discuss the ethical and political significance of the aesthetic theories of several key figures: namely, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, David Hume, and Adam Smith. Part II explores the ways in which eighteenth-century German, and German-oriented, thinkers examine aesthetic experience and moral concerns, and relate to the work of their British counterparts. The chapters here cover the work of Kant, Moses Mendelssohn, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, and Madame de Staël. Finally, Part III explores the interrelation of science, aesthetics, and a new model of society in the work of Goethe, Johann Wilhelm Ritter, Friedrich Hölderlin, and William Hazlitt, among others. This volume develops unique discussions of the rise of aesthetic autonomy in the eighteenth century. In bringing together well-known scholars working on British and German eighteenth-century aesthetics, philosophy, and literature, it will appeal to scholars and advanced students in a range of disciplines who are interested in this topic.
This is “Gaga Aesthetics”: aesthetics that no longer follows clear fields of activity, where “fine art” is but one area of critical activity.
Author: Adam Geczy
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 9781350102705
Category: Philosophy
Page: 224
View: 527
Pop art has traditionally been the most visible visual art within popular culture because its main transgression is easy to understand: the infiltration of the “low” into the “high”. The same cannot be said of contemporary art of the 21st century, where the term “Gaga Aesthetics” characterizes the condition of popular culture being extensively imbricated in high culture, and vice-versa. Taking Adorno and Horkheimer's "The Culture Industry" and Adorno's Aesthetic Theory as key touchstones, this book explores the dialectic of high and low that forms the foundation of Adornian aesthetics and the extent to which it still applied, and the extent to which it has radically shifted, thereby 'upending tradition'. In the tradition of philosophical aesthetics that Adorno began with Lukács, this explores the ever-urgent notion that high culture has become deeply enmeshed with popular culture. This is “Gaga Aesthetics”: aesthetics that no longer follows clear fields of activity, where “fine art” is but one area of critical activity. Indeed, Adorno's concepts of alienation and the tragic, which inform his reading of the modernist experiment, are now no longer confined to art. Rather, stirring examples can be found in phenomena such as fashion and music video. In addition to dealing with Lady Gaga herself, this book traverses examples ranging from Madonna's Madam X to Moschino and Vetements, to deliberate on the strategies of subversion in the culture industry.
Adorno's primary aesthetic interest is in the “autonomous” art that emerged from earlier See also drawing, painting, and printmaking; music and song; cognitive value of art; ex- pression; picture perception; representation. functional ...
Author: Stephen Davies
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 9781405169226
Category: Philosophy
Page: 640
View: 578
In this extensively revised and updated edition, 168 alphabetically arranged articles provide comprehensive treatment of the main topics and writers in this area of aesthetics. Written by prominent scholars covering a wide-range of key topics in aesthetics and the philosophy of art Features revised and expanded entries from the first edition, as well as new chapters on recent developments in aesthetics and a larger number of essays on non-Western thought about art Unique to this edition are six overview essays on the history of aesthetics in the West from antiquity to modern times
This book by Sebastian Olma takes a fresh look at this question by summoning three heroes of the aesthetic revolution to confront the challenges faced by artistic practice today.
Author: Sebastian Olma
Publisher:
ISBN: 9080179396
Category:
Page: 112
View: 986
What does it mean to speak of artistic autonomy at a time when art is fully commercialised and aesthetics has become the guiding principle of economic production and policymaking? This book by Sebastian Olma takes a fresh look at this question by summoning three heroes of the aesthetic revolution to confront the challenges faced by artistic practice today. Turning Kant into a campaigner for the Anthropocene, Schiller into a creative entrepreneur, and Schelling into a political activist, Olma lays the groundwork for a critique that identifies "the contemporary" itself as contemporary art's greatest challenge in the struggle to reinvent its autonomy and regain its relevance to society.
autonomy of art and, for that reason, prevented from providing an effective form of art critique, that is, ... that emphatically celebrate an 'anti-aesthetic,' and that one-sidedly indict or eschew auratic aesthetic autonomy . . .
Author: Michael Kelly
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231152921
Category: Philosophy
Page: 242
View: 128
This title examines the motivations for the critiques that have been applied to the idea of aesthetics and argues that theorists and artists now hunger for a new kind of aesthetics, one better calibrated to contemporary art and its moral and political demands. The book shows how, for decades, aesthetic critiques have often concerned art's treatment of beauty or the autonomy of art. Collectively, these critiques have generated an anti-aesthetic stance that is now prevalent in the contemporary art world.
In addition, I want to stress gender and racial contradictions ignored in Adorno's aesthetic theory. In the West, the autonomous status of artistic practice is based on not only unjust divisions of labor but also on the racist and ...
Author: Ewa Płonowska Ziarek
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231161480
Category: Literary Criticism
Page: 265
View: 244
Ewa Ziarek fully articulates a feminist aesthetics, focusing on the struggle for freedom in women's literary and political modernism and the devastating impact of racist violence and sexism. She examines the contradiction between women's transformative literary and political practices and the oppressive realities of racist violence and sexism, and she situates these tensions within the entrenched opposition between revolt and melancholia in studies of modernity and within the friction between material injuries and experimental aesthetic forms. Ziarek's political and aesthetic investigations concern the exclusion and destruction of women in politics and literary production and the transformation of this oppression into the inaugural possibilities of writing and action. Her study is one of the first to combine an in-depth engagement with philosophical aesthetics, especially the work of Theodor W. Adorno, with women's literary modernism, particularly the writing of Virginia Woolf and Nella Larsen, along with feminist theories on the politics of race and gender. By bringing seemingly apolitical, gender-neutral debates about modernism's experimental forms together with an analysis of violence and destroyed materialities, Ziarek challenges both the anti-aesthetic subordination of modern literature to its political uses and the appreciation of art's emancipatory potential at the expense of feminist and anti-racist political struggles.
... of life as art is an attempt to 'de-differentiate the category of the aesthetic from its enforced autonomy within ... as Pater's model of 'radical subjective autonomy'42 – the elevation of aesthetic 'being' above artistic 'doing'.
Author: Andrew Eastham
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 9780826443984
Category: Literary Criticism
Page: 257
View: 969
An original theoretical reading of the emergence of British literary modernity, beginning with Victorian Aestheticism and tracing its afterlives into the 21st Century. >
art singularities A. Aesthetic modernism (aesthetic ontology): a negation of the received social dependencies constitutive of academic art; an affirmation of aesthetic qualities as means/media of artistic autonomy.
Author: Peter Osborne
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 9781781684788
Category: Art
Page: 288
View: 522
A new reading of the philosophy of contemporary art by the author of The Politics of Time. Contemporary art is the object of inflated and widely divergent claims. What kind of discourse can help us give it a critical sense? Anywhere or Not At All is a major philosophical intervention in art theory that challenges the terms of established positions through a new approach at once philosophical, historical, social and art-critical. Setting out the claim that ‘contemporary art is postconceptual art’, the book elaborates a series of conceptual constructions and interpretations of works by Navjot Altaf, the Atlas Group, Amar Kanwar, Sol LeWitt, Gordon Matta-Clark, Gerhard Richter and Robert Smithson, among others. It concludes with new accounts of the institutional and existential complexities of ‘art space’ and ‘art time’. Anywhere or Not At All maps out the conceptual coordinates for an art that is both critical and contemporary in the era of global capitalism.
This book traces the emergence of atradition of writing it calls the 'art of hunger', from the origins of modernism to the end of the twentieth century.
Author: Alys Moody
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780198828891
Category:
Page: 256
View: 447
Hunger is one of the governing metaphors for literature in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, writers and critics repeatedly describe writing as a process of starvation, as in the familiar type of the starving artist, and high art as therejection of 'culinary' pleasures. The Art of Hunger: Aesthetic Autonomy and the Afterlives of Modernism argues that this metaphor offers a way of describing the contradictions of aesthetic autonomy in modernist literature and its late-twentieth-century heirs. This book traces the emergence of atradition of writing it calls the 'art of hunger', from the origins of modernism to the end of the twentieth century. It focuses particularly on three authors who redeploy the modernist art of hunger as a response to key moments in the history of modernist aesthetic autonomy's delegitimization:Samuel Beckett in post-Vichy France; Paul Auster in post-1968 Paris and New York; and J. M. Coetzee in late apartheid South Africa. Combining historical analysis of these literary fields with close readings of individual texts, and drawing extensively on new archival research, this book offers a counter-history of modernism's post-World War II reception and a new theory of aesthetic autonomy as a practice of unfreedom.
This volume contains a selection of essays presented at the international conference on Cultural Crises in Art and Literature, held in Groningen in November 2002, in a special session on the question of the autonomy of the arts.
Author: Barend van Heusden
Publisher: Peeters Pub & Booksellers
ISBN: 904291579X
Category: Art
Page: 144
View: 460
This volume contains a selection of essays presented at the international conference on Cultural Crises in Art and Literature, held in Groningen in November 2002, in a special session on the question of the autonomy of the arts. Do we witness, in western culture, the end of the autonomy of the arts as it has been conceptualized and institutionalized since the eighteenth century? Indeed, developments of quite a different nature seem to have contributed to a blurring of boundaries between art and non-art, art and the market, art and politics or ethics, as well as between the arts themselves, and between 'high' and 'low' art. Although this volume does not pretend to map this complex process in its entirety - partly because it is impossible to step out of one's own history - it is meant as a contribution to the elucidation of the process itself, offering some challenging explanations as to the heat of the current debate.
While examples of this kind of writing can be found in the works of Blanchot and Beckett, the demands that such texts place on readers only confirm the challenges and the possibilities that literary autonomy poses to thought.
Author: William S. Allen
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 9780823269303
Category: Philosophy
Page: 338
View: 310
Maurice Blanchot and Theodor W. Adorno are among the most difficult but also the most profound thinkers in twentieth-century aesthetics. While their methods and perspectives differ widely, they share a concern with the negativity of the artwork conceived in terms of either its experience and possibility or its critical expression. Such negativity is neither nihilistic nor pessimistic but concerns the status of the artwork and its autonomy in relation to its context or its experience. For both Blanchot and Adorno negativity is the key to understanding the status of the artwork in post-Kantian aesthetics and, although it indicates how art expresses critical possibilities, albeit negatively, it also shows that art bears an irreducible ambiguity such that its meaning can always negate itself. This ambiguity takes on an added material significance when considered in relation to language as the negativity of the work becomes aesthetic in the further sense of being both sensible and experimental, and in doing so the language of the literary work becomes a form of thinking that enables materiality to be thought in its ambiguity. In a series of rich and compelling readings, William S. Allen shows how an original and rigorous mode of thinking arises within Blanchot’s early writings and how Adorno’s aesthetics depends on a relation between language and materiality that has been widely overlooked. Furthermore, by reconsidering the problem of the autonomous work of art in terms of literature, a central issue in modernist aesthetics is given a greater critical and material relevance as a mode of thinking that is abstract and concrete, rigorous and ambiguous. While examples of this kind of writing can be found in the works of Blanchot and Beckett, the demands that such texts place on readers only confirm the challenges and the possibilities that literary autonomy poses to thought.
Literature, Autonomy and Commitment not only offers an historical-conceptual reconstruction of the Romantic paradigm and the theoretical impasse it has created, but also sketches the outline of a new paradigm, called 'the relational ...
Author: Aukje van Rooden
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 9781501344756
Category: Literary Criticism
Page: 168
View: 379
It is often argued that a new form of committed literature is needed. Embracing the 18th-century Romantic idea of aesthetic autonomy, literature is believed to have turned its back to everyday social and political reality. One of the central questions occupying contemporary literary debates is therefore whether literary autonomy is essential to modern literature ('autonomism') or should be abandoned ('anti-autonomism'). Aukje van Rooden argues that the debate between autonomists and anti-autonomists cannot be anything but a fruitless tug-of-war, because it is based on a distorted historical picture. In order to make sense of the social relevance of contemporary literature, a new theoretical paradigm has to be formulated. Literature, Autonomy and Commitment not only offers an historical-conceptual reconstruction of the Romantic paradigm and the theoretical impasse it has created, but also sketches the outline of a new paradigm, called 'the relational paradigm', based on the relational ontologies developed in 20th- and 21st-century philosophy.