The Insistence of Art

The Insistence of Art PDF Author: Paul A. Kottman
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823275817
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 395

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Book Description
Philosophers working on aesthetics have paid considerable attention to art and artists of the early modern period. Yet early modern artistic practices scarcely figure in recent work on the emergence of aesthetics as a branch of philosophy over the course the eighteenth century. This book addresses that gap, elaborating the extent to which artworks and practices of the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries were accompanied by an immense range of discussions about the arts and their relation to one another. Rather than take art as a stand-in for or reflection of some other historical event or social phenomenon, this book treats art as a phenomenon in itself. The contributors suggest ways in which artworks and practices of the early modern period make aesthetic experience central to philosophical reflection, while also showing art’s need for philosophy.

The Insistence of Art

The Insistence of Art PDF Author: Paul A. Kottman
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823275817
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 395

Get Book Here

Book Description
Philosophers working on aesthetics have paid considerable attention to art and artists of the early modern period. Yet early modern artistic practices scarcely figure in recent work on the emergence of aesthetics as a branch of philosophy over the course the eighteenth century. This book addresses that gap, elaborating the extent to which artworks and practices of the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries were accompanied by an immense range of discussions about the arts and their relation to one another. Rather than take art as a stand-in for or reflection of some other historical event or social phenomenon, this book treats art as a phenomenon in itself. The contributors suggest ways in which artworks and practices of the early modern period make aesthetic experience central to philosophical reflection, while also showing art’s need for philosophy.

Modernism and the Aesthetics of Violence

Modernism and the Aesthetics of Violence PDF Author: Paul Sheehan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107355621
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
The notion that violence can give rise to art - and that art can serve as an agent of violence - is a dominant feature of modernist literature. In this study Paul Sheehan traces the modernist fascination with violence to the middle decades of the nineteenth century, when certain French and English writers sought to celebrate dissident sexualities and stylized criminality. Sheehan presents a panoramic view of how the aesthetics of transgression gradually mutates into an infatuation with destruction and upheaval, identifying the First World War as the event through which the modernist aesthetic of violence crystallizes. By engaging with exemplary modernists such as Joyce, Conrad, Eliot and Pound, as well as lesser-known writers including Gautier, Sacher-Masoch, Wyndham Lewis and others, Sheehan shows how artworks, so often associated with creative well-being and communicative self-expression, can be reoriented toward violent and bellicose ends.

Aesthetics After Modernism

Aesthetics After Modernism PDF Author: Diarmuid Costello
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197756395
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
"Aesthetics after Modernism argues for the ongoing relevance of aesthetics to art after modernism. In it, I show that even what are typically taken to be the hardest of hard cases engage us in recognisably aesthetic ways and, as such, remain amenable to aesthetic analysis. Why, if that is true, do so many art theorists, critics and sometimes even artists appear to think otherwise? I trace the artworld's rejection of aesthetic theory to Clement Greenberg's success in co-opting the discourse of aesthetics, notably Kant's aesthetics, to underwrite his own formalism about modernist art. Not only has this led to Kant being tarred with the brush of Greenbergian formalism; it has also led critics and theorists of later art to miss the resources of the aesthetic tradition, perhaps especially Kant, for capturing what is distinctive about our cognitive relation to the kinds of art that interest them. There is a tendency simply to assume that Kant's aesthetics cannot speak to the more conceptual aspects of our interactions with art. I trace the legacy of Greenberg's modernism and formalism for later art criticism and theory, before offering an interpretation of Kant's theory of art that seeks to show otherwise. I take Conceptual Art as my test case: here is a form of art that often claims to forgo sensible properties altogether. But if Kant's aesthetics can accommodate to our cognitive relation to art with no sensible features relevant to its appreciation as art then it should in principle withstand the challenge of any form of art"--

Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity

Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity PDF Author: Allison Pease
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521780766
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
How did explicit sexual representation become acceptable in the twentieth century as art rather than pornography? Allison Pease answers this question by tracing the relationship between aesthetics and obscenity from the 1700s onwards, highlighting the way in which early twentieth-century writers incorporated a sexually explicit discourse into their work. Pease explores how artists such as Swinburne, Aubrey Beardsley, James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence were responsible for shifting the boundaries between aesthetics and pornography that first became of intellectual interest in the eighteenth century and reinforced class distinctions. Her analysis of canonical works, such as Joyce's Ulysses and Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, is framed by a wide-ranging examination of the changing conceptions of aesthetics from Shaftesbury, Hutcheson and Kant to F. R. Leavis, I. A. Richards and T. S. Eliot. Based on extensive archival work, the book includes examples of period art and illustrations which eloquently demonstrate the shift in public taste and tolerance.

After the Beautiful

After the Beautiful PDF Author: Robert B. Pippin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022607952X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
In his Berlin lectures on fine art, Hegel argued that art involves a unique form of aesthetic intelligibility—the expression of a distinct collective self-understanding that develops through historical time. Hegel’s approach to art has been influential in a number of different contexts, but in a twist of historical irony Hegel would die just before the most radical artistic revolution in history: modernism. In After the Beautiful, Robert B. Pippin, looking at modernist paintings by artists such as Édouard Manet and Paul Cézanne through Hegel’s lens, does what Hegel never had the chance to do. While Hegel could never engage modernist painting, he did have an understanding of modernity, and in it, art—he famously asserted—was “a thing of the past,” no longer an important vehicle of self-understanding and no longer an indispensable expression of human meaning. Pippin offers a sophisticated exploration of Hegel’s position and its implications. He also shows that had Hegel known how the social institutions of his day would ultimately fail to achieve his own version of genuine equality, a mutuality of recognition, he would have had to explore a different, new role for art in modernity. After laying this groundwork, Pippin goes on to illuminate the dimensions of Hegel’s aesthetic approach in the path-breaking works of Manet, the “grandfather of modernism,” drawing on art historians T. J. Clark and Michael Fried to do so. He concludes with a look at Cézanne, the “father of modernism,” this time as his works illuminate the relationship between Hegel and the philosopher who would challenge Hegel’s account of both modernity and art—Martin Heidegger. Elegantly inter-weaving philosophy and art history, After the Beautiful is a stunning reassessment of the modernist project. It gets at the core of the significance of modernism itself and what it means in general for art to have a history. Ultimately, it is a testament, via Hegel, to the distinctive philosophical achievements of modernist art in the unsettled, tumultuous era we have inherited.

Art and Aesthetics After Adorno

Art and Aesthetics After Adorno PDF Author: J. M. Bernstein
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780823253098
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Theodor Adorno's Aesthetic Theory (1970) offers one of the most powerful and comprehensive critiques of art and of the discipline of aesthetics ever written. The work offers a deeply critical engagement with the history and philosophy of aesthetics and with the traditions of European art through the middle of the 20th century. It is coupled with ambitious claims about what aesthetic theory ought to be. But the cultural horizon of Adorno's Aesthetic Theory was the world of high modernism, and much has happened since then both in theory and in practice. Adorno's powerful vision of aesthetics calls for reconsideration in this light. Must his work be defended, updated, resisted, or simply left behind? This volume gathers new essays by leading philosophers, critics, and theorists writing in the wake of Adorno in order to address these questions. They hold in common a deep respect for the power of Adorno's aesthetic critique and a concern for the future of aesthetic theory in response to recent developments in aesthetics and its contexts.

Modernism at the Barricades

Modernism at the Barricades PDF Author: Stephen Eric Bronner
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 023115822X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
Stephen Eric Bronner reads the artistic and intellectual achievements of the modernist project's leading figures against larger social, political, and cultural trends and follows the rise of a flawed yet salient effort at liberation and its clash with modernity. Exploring both the political responsibility of the artist and the manipulation of authorial intention, Bronner reconfigures the modernist movement for contemporary progressive purposes and offers insight into the problems still complicating cultural politics. He ultimately reasserts the political dimension of developments often understood in purely aesthetic terms and confronts the self-indulgence and political irresponsibility of certain so-called modernists today.

Marginal Modernity:The Aesthetics of Dependency from Kierkegaard to Joyce

Marginal Modernity:The Aesthetics of Dependency from Kierkegaard to Joyce PDF Author: Leonard Lisi
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823245322
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
Two ways of understanding the aesthetic organization of literary works have come down to us from the late 18th century and dominate discussions of European modernism today: the aesthetics of autonomy, associated with the self-sufficient work of art, and the aesthetics of fragmentation, practiced by the avant-gardes. In this revisionary study, Leonardo Lisi argues that these models rest on assumptions about the nature of truth and existence that cannot be treated as exhaustive of modern experience. Lisi traces an alternative aesthetics of dependency that provides a different formal structure, philosophical foundation, and historical condition for modernist texts. Taking Europe's Scandinavian periphery as his point of departure, Lisi examines how Kierkegaard and Ibsen imagined a response to the changing conditions of modernity different from those at the European core, one that subsequently influenced James, Hofmannsthal, Rilke, and Joyce. Combining close readings with a broader revision of the nature and genealogy of modernism, Marginal Modernity challenges what we understand by modernist aesthetics, their origins, and their implications for how we conceive our relation to the modern world.

Angels of Modernism

Angels of Modernism PDF Author: S. Hobson
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230349641
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
The angel can be viewed as a signal reference to modernist attempts to accommodate religious languages to self-consciously modern cultures. This book uses the angel to explore the relations between modernist literature and early twentieth-century debates over the secular and/or religious character of the modern age.

Art History After Modernism

Art History After Modernism PDF Author: Hans Belting
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226041841
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
"Art history after modernism" does not only mean that art looks different today; it also means that our discourse on art has taken a different direction, if it is safe to say it has taken a direction at all. So begins Hans Belting's brilliant, iconoclastic reconsideration of art and art history at the end of the millennium, which builds upon his earlier and highly successful volume, The End of the History of Art?. "Known for his striking and original theories about the nature of art," according to the Economist, Belting here examines how art is made, viewed, and interpreted today. Arguing that contemporary art has burst out of the frame that art history had built for it, Belting calls for an entirely new approach to thinking and writing about art. He moves effortlessly between contemporary issues—the rise of global and minority art and its consequences for Western art history, installation and video art, and the troubled institution of the art museum—and questions central to art history's definition of itself, such as the distinction between high and low culture, art criticism versus art history, and the invention of modernism in art history. Forty-eight black and white images illustrate the text, perfectly reflecting the state of contemporary art. With Art History after Modernism, Belting retains his place as one of the most original thinkers working in the visual arts today.