The Philistine Controversy

The Philistine Controversy PDF Author: Dave Beech
Publisher: Verso
ISBN: 9781859848425
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
Dave Beech and John Roberts develop what they call a 'counter-intuitive' notion of the philistine, with insights on cultural division and exclusion.

The Philistine Controversy

The Philistine Controversy PDF Author: Dave Beech
Publisher: Verso
ISBN: 9781859848425
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
Dave Beech and John Roberts develop what they call a 'counter-intuitive' notion of the philistine, with insights on cultural division and exclusion.

Against Art and Culture

Against Art and Culture PDF Author: Liam Dee
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 981107092X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Offering a negative definition of art in relation to the concept of culture, this book establishes the concept of ‘art/culture’ to describe the unity of these two fields around named-labour, idealised creative subjectivity and surplus signification. Contending a conceptual and social reality of a combined ‘art/culture’ , this book demonstrates that the failure to appreciate the dynamic totality of art and culture by its purported negators is due to almost all existing critiques of art and culture being defences of a ‘true’ art or culture against ‘inauthentic’ manifestations, and art thus ultimately restricting creativity to the service of the bourgeois commodity regime. While the evidence that art/culture enables commodification has long been available, the deduction that art/culture itself is fundamentally of the world of commodification has failed to gain traction. By applying a nuanced analysis of both commodification and the larger systems of ideological power, the book considers how the ‘surplus’ of art/culture is used to legitimate the bourgeois status quo rather than unravel it. It also examines possibilities for a post-art/culture world based on both existing practices that challenge art/culture identity as well as speculations on the integration of play and aesthetics into general social life. An out-and-out negation of art and culture, this book offers a unique contribution to the cultural critique landscape.

The New Philistines

The New Philistines PDF Author: Sohrab Ahmari
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
ISBN: 1785901591
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 66

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Book Description
Contemporary art is obsessed with the politics of identity. Visit any contemporary gallery, museum or theatre, and chances are the art on offer will be principally concerned with race, gender, sexuality, power and privilege. The quest for truth, freedom and the sacred has been thrust aside to make room for identity politics. Mystery, individuality and beauty are out; radical feminism, racial grievance and queer theory are in. The result is a drearily predictable culture and the narrowing of the space for creative self-expression and honest criticism. Sohrab Ahmari's book is a passionate cri de coeur against this state of affairs. The New Philistines takes readers deep inside a cultural scene where all manner of ugly, inept art is celebrated so long as it toes the ideological line, and where the artistic glories of the Western world are revised and disfigured to fit the rigid doctrines of identity politics. The degree of politicisation means that art no longer performs its historical function, as a mirror and repository of the human spirit - something that should alarm not just art lovers but anyone who cares about the future of liberal civilisation.

Exemplarity and Mediocrity

Exemplarity and Mediocrity PDF Author: Paul Fleming
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804769982
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Following Hegel's analysis of art's increasing difficulty to both engage and extricate itself from prosaic reality, Paul Fleming investigates the strategies employed by German literature from 1750 to 1850 for increasingly attuning itself to quotidian life—common heroes, everyday life, non-extraordinary events—while also avoiding all notions of mediocrity. He focuses on three sites of this tension: the average audience (Lessing), the average artist (Goethe and Schiller), and the everyday, or average life (Grillparzer and Stifter). The book's title, Exemplarity and Mediocrity, describes both a disjunctive and a conjunctive relation. Read disjunctively, modern art must display the "exemplary originality" (Kant) that only genius can provide and is thus fundamentally opposed to mediocrity as that which does not stand out or lacks distinctiveness; in the conjunctive sense, modern art turns to non-exceptional life in order to transform it—without forsaking its commonness—thereby producing exemplary forms of mediocrity that both represent the non-exceptional and, insofar as they stand outside the group they represent, are something other than mediocre.

Literary Criticism

Literary Criticism PDF Author: Joseph North
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674967739
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright -- Contents -- Preface -- Introduction -- 1. The Critical Revolution Turns Right -- 2. The Scholarly Turn -- 3. The Historicist/Contextualist Paradigm -- 4. The Critical Unconscious -- Conclusion: The Future of Criticism -- Appendix: The Critical Paradigm and T.S. Eliot -- Notes -- Acknowledgments -- Index

African Somaesthetics: Cultures, Feminisms, Politics

African Somaesthetics: Cultures, Feminisms, Politics PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004442960
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
In African Somaesthetics: Cultures, Feminisms, Politics, Catherine F. Botha brings together original research on the body in African cultures, specifically interrogating the possibilities of the contribution of a somaesthetic approach in the context of colonization, decolonization, and globalization in Africa. The innovative contributions that consider the somaesthetic dimensions of experience in the context of Africa (centred broadly around the themes of politics, feminisms, and cultures) reflect a diversity of perspectives and positions. The book is a first of its kind in gathering together novel and focused analyses of the body as conceived of from an African perspective.

After Taste. Critique of insufficient reason

After Taste. Critique of insufficient reason PDF Author: Slavko Kacunko
Publisher: Slavko Kacunko
ISBN: 3000692134
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 865

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Book Description
After Taste is an inquiry into a field of study dedicated to the reconsideration, reconstruction and rehabilitation of the concept of Taste. Taste is the category, whose systematic, historical and actual dimensions have traditionally been located in a variety of disciplines. The actuality and potential of the study is based on a variety of collected facts from readings and experiences, which materialize in the following features: One concept (figurative Taste), two thinking traditions (analytic and synthetic/continental) and three interrelated dimensions (systematic, historic and actual) are presented in three volumes. As such, the study presents a salient comprehensive companion for wider readership of humanities approaching conceptions of Taste for the first time. Moreover, After Taste is intended for anyone who hopes to make a further contribution to the subject. Since its appearance and apparently short triumph some 250 years ago, the concept of non-literary Taste remained the linchpin of aesthetic theory and practice, but also a category outreaching aesthetics. Taste as the personal unity of the production, theory and criticism of art and literature, which was still largely taken as a given in the eighteenth century, has meanwhile given way to a highly-differentiated art world, in which aesthetic discourse is placed in such a way that it can seemingly no longer have a conceptual or linguistic effect on general opinion making. The critical role of “Taste judges”, ratings and rankings in the feuilleton, politics and social media on the one hand and the responding search for new canons on the other have had a huge impact on the academic and popular discourse today. However, Taste’s impact on society is in fact all-encompassing and yet, without getting even close to the “magnetic North” of the academic compass. After Taste fills the gaps of systematic research by a comprehensive tracing of the emergence of the doctrines, discourses and disciplinary dimensions of Taste up to the peak of its systematic and historical trajectory in the eighteenth century and onwards into the present day. The guiding goal is a post-disciplinary rehabilitation of the contested category as a preparation for its productive usage in emerging academic and popular contexts. Three intertwined research hypotheses form the guiding goal of an overall study of the agencies of Taste, its institutionalizations and expert cultures: The (1) first part provides a missing systematic perspective on the concept of Taste as a key factor for understanding the human faculties, value theories and practices of valuating. The (2) second part traces the events at the peak of Taste’s systematic and historical trajectories up until the late eighteenth century and verifies the historiographical hypothesis about the instrumentality of Taste for the production, reception and distribution of culture. The (3) third part reconstructs the major moments in which the contested concept of Taste experiences its post-disciplinary rehabilitation, in preparation for its future productive usage in the academic and popular discourses and practices. It shows how the category of Taste became the foundation, legitimation and the catalyst for the emerging division of labour, faculties and disciplines, confirming the hypothesis of the immense impact and actuality of Taste in the contemporary world.

Art and Form

Art and Form PDF Author: Sam Rose
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271084286
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 410

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Book Description
This important new study reevaluates British art writing and the rise of formalism in the visual arts from 1900 to 1939. Taking Roger Fry as his starting point, Sam Rose rethinks how ideas about form influenced modernist culture and the movement’s significance to art history today. In the context of modernism, formalist critics are often thought to be interested in art rather than life, a stance exemplified in their support for abstract works that exclude the world outside. But through careful attention to early twentieth-century connoisseurship, aesthetics, art education, design, and art in colonial Nigeria and India, Rose builds an expanded account of form based on its engagement with the social world. Art and Form thus opens discussions on a range of urgent topics in art writing, from its history and the constructions of high and low culture to the idea of global modernism. Rose demonstrates the true breadth of formalism and shows how it lends a new richness to thought about art and visual culture in the early to mid-twentieth century. Accessibly written and analytically sophisticated, Art and Form opens exciting new paths of inquiry into the meaning and lasting importance of formalism and its ties to modernism. It will be invaluable for scholars and enthusiasts of art history and visual culture.

Culture as Capital

Culture as Capital PDF Author: Slavko Kacunko
Publisher: Logos Verlag Berlin GmbH
ISBN: 3832538992
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 383

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Book Description
By following and reproducing the cultural turn, the rhetoric of cultural mix and hybridism is disseminated today primarily in its crossing of trade barriers. Cultures reduced to their exchange value function as capital - an accumulative, speculative and, ultimately, financial affair. In some of its media and site-(un)specific manifestations, process art - which aims to encompass both old and new media art - seems to resist this pressure, despite, nonetheless, not being protected from regulations and incorporations. In the present collection of his recent essays, Slavko Kacunko discusses the process art by crossing the disciplines of art history and comparative media-, visual- and -cultural studies. As a first approximation, several historiographical remarks on closed-circuit video installations underline their importance as a core category of process art. In the second part, the problems of process art, seen as a threshold of art history, are further examined in another retroanalytical step, in which concepts and objects related to `mirror', `frame' and `immediacy' are analyzed as the triple delimitation of visual culture studies. In the third part, previously outlined manifestations of what is termed the `post-visual condition' are summarized and projected to the `coreless core' of the emerging art and research related to the coreless beings par excellence, the bacteria.

Anywhere or Not at All

Anywhere or Not at All PDF Author: Peter Osborne
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1781680949
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
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. But what kind of discourse can open it up effectively to critical analysis? 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. Developing the position that “contemporary art is postconceptual art,” the book progresses through a dual series of conceptual constructions and interpretations of particular works to assess the art from a number of perspectives: contemporaneity and its global context; art against aesthetic; the Romantic pre-history of conceptual art; the multiplicity of modernisms; transcategoriality; conceptual abstraction; photographic ontology; digitalization; and the institutional and existential complexities of art-space and art-time. Anywhere or Not at All maps out the conceptual space for an art that is both critical and contemporary in the era of global capitalism. Winner of the 2014 Annual Book Prize of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (USA)