The Aesthetic Contract

The Aesthetic Contract PDF Author: Henry Sussman
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804728430
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
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, Dürer, 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.

The Aesthetic Contract

The Aesthetic Contract PDF Author: Henry Sussman
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804728430
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Get Book Here

Book Description
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, Dürer, 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.

The Mask of Art

The Mask of Art PDF Author: Clyde Taylor
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253211927
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
Taylor exposes the concept of 'art' as a tool of ethnocentricity and radical ideology. He challenges the history of aesthetics as a recent invention of privileged Western consumerism and questions the myth of its ancient Greek origin.

Social Contract, Masochist Contract

Social Contract, Masochist Contract PDF Author: Fayçal Falaky
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438449917
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
Theorization of sensual desire was not uncommon in the eighteenth century; like many materialists of the French Enlightenment, Jean-Jacques Rousseau rejected imperatives founded on metaphysical suppositions and viewed the senses as the only valid source of philosophical knowledge. In Social Contract, Masochist Contract, Fayçal Falaky demonstrates that what distinguishes Rousseau is that the foundational measure on which he bases his materialist philosophy is a sexual instinct endowed, paradoxically, with the same sublime, self-abnegating attributes historically associated with Christian, metaphysical desire. To understand the aesthetics of Rousseau's masochism is, Falaky argues, to understand how ideals of Christian morality and spiritual ennoblement survived the Enlightenment, and how God died, only to be repackaged in new fetishes. Whether it is the imperious mistress of his erotic fantasies, the Arcadian nature of his philosophical reveries, or the sublime Law designed to elevate the citizen from enslaving appetite, Rousseau's fetishes herald the new regulative Ideals of the modern secular state.

The Plant Contract

The Plant Contract PDF Author: Prudence Gibson
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004360549
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
The Plant Contract argues that visual and performance art can help change our perception of the vegetal world, and can return us to nature and thought. Via an investigation into the wasteland, robotany, feminist plants, and nature rights, this phytology-love story investigates how contemporary art is mediating the effects of plant-blindness, caused by human disassociation from the natural world. It is also a gesture of respect for the genius of vegetal life, where new science proves plants can learn, communicate, remember, make decisions, and associate. Art is a litmus test for how climate change affects human perception. This book responds to that test by expressing plant-philosophy to a wider public, through an interrogation of plant-art.

The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics

The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics PDF Author: Jerrold Levinson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780199279456
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 844

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Book Description
'The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics' has assembled 48 brand-new essays, making this a comprehensive guide available to the theory, application, history, and future of the field.

Creative Industries

Creative Industries PDF Author: Richard E. Caves
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674001640
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 472

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Book Description
"To explain the logic of these arrangements, the author draws on the analytical resources of industrial economics and the theory of contracts. He addresses the winner-take-all character of many creative activities that brings wealth and renown to some artists while dooming others to frustration; why the "option" form of contract is so prevalent; and why even savvy producers get sucked into making "ten-ton turkeys," such as Heaven's Gate."--BOOK JACKET.

The Aesthetic Contract

The Aesthetic Contract PDF Author: Henry Sussman
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780804728423
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
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, Dürer, 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.

Symbolic Misery, Volume 1

Symbolic Misery, Volume 1 PDF Author: Bernard Stiegler
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 9780745652641
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In this important new book, the leading cultural theorist and philosopher Bernard Stiegler re-examines the relationship between politics and aesthetics in our contemporary hyperindustrial age. Stiegler argues that our epoch is characterized by the seizure of the symbolic by industrial technology, where aesthetics has become both theatre and weapon in an economic war. This has resulted in a ‘symbolic misery’ where conditioning substitutes for experience. In today’s control societies, aesthetic weapons play an essential role: audiovisual and digital technologies have become a means of controlling the conscious and unconscious rhythms of bodies and souls, of modulating the rhythms of consciousness and life. The notion of an aesthetic engagement, capable of founding a new communal sensibility and a genuine aesthetic community, has largely collapsed today. This is because the overwhelming majority of the population is now totally subjected to the aesthetic conditioning of marketing and therefore estranged from any experience of aesthetic inquiry. That part of the population that continues to experiment aesthetically has turned its back on those who live in the misery of this conditioning. Stiegler appeals to the art world to develop a political understanding of its role. In this volume he pays particular attention to cinema which occupies a unique position in the temporal war that is the cause of symbolic misery: at once industrial technology and art, cinema is the aesthetic experience that can combat conditioning on its own territory. This highly original work - the first in Stiegler’s Symbolic Misery series - will be of particular interest to students in film studies, media and cultural studies, literature and philosophy and will consolidate Stiegler’s reputation as one of the most original cultural theorists of our time.

Toni Morrison and Literary Tradition

Toni Morrison and Literary Tradition PDF Author: Justine Baillie
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441183108
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
Covering her essays, short stories and dramatic works as well as her novels, this is a comprehensive study of Morrison's place in contemporary American culture.

Aesthetics of Appearing

Aesthetics of Appearing PDF Author: Martin Seel
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804743815
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
This book proposes that aesthetics begin not with concepts of being or semblance, but with a concept of appearing. Seel examines the existential and cultural meaning of aesthetic experience. In doing so, he brings aesthetics and philosophy of art together again, which in continental as well as analytical thinking have been more and more separated in the recent decades.