Author: Shelton Waldrep
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780816634170
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 203
Book Description
By printing the title "Professor of Aesthetics" on his visiting cards, Oscar Wilde announced yet another transformation-and perhaps the most significant of his career, proclaiming his belief that he could redesign not just his image but his very self. Shelton Waldrep explores the cultural influences at play in Wilde's life and work and his influence on the writing and performance of the twentieth century, particularly on the lives and careers of some of its most aestheticized performers: Truman Capote, Andy Warhol, David Hockney, and David Bowie. As Waldrep reveals, Wilde's fusing of art with commerce foresaw the coming century's cultural producers who would blend works of both "high art" and mass-market appeal. Whether as a gay man or as a postmodern performance artist ahead of his time, Wilde ultimately emerges here as the embodiment of the twentieth-century media-savvy artist who is both subject and object of the aesthetic and economic systems in which he is enmeshed. Shelton Waldrep is associate professor of English at the University of Southern Maine. He is the coauthor of Inside the Mouse: Work and Play at Disney World (1995) and editor of The Seventies: The Age of Glitter in Popular Culture (2000).
The Aesthetics of Self-invention
Author: Shelton Waldrep
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780816634170
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 203
Book Description
By printing the title "Professor of Aesthetics" on his visiting cards, Oscar Wilde announced yet another transformation-and perhaps the most significant of his career, proclaiming his belief that he could redesign not just his image but his very self. Shelton Waldrep explores the cultural influences at play in Wilde's life and work and his influence on the writing and performance of the twentieth century, particularly on the lives and careers of some of its most aestheticized performers: Truman Capote, Andy Warhol, David Hockney, and David Bowie. As Waldrep reveals, Wilde's fusing of art with commerce foresaw the coming century's cultural producers who would blend works of both "high art" and mass-market appeal. Whether as a gay man or as a postmodern performance artist ahead of his time, Wilde ultimately emerges here as the embodiment of the twentieth-century media-savvy artist who is both subject and object of the aesthetic and economic systems in which he is enmeshed. Shelton Waldrep is associate professor of English at the University of Southern Maine. He is the coauthor of Inside the Mouse: Work and Play at Disney World (1995) and editor of The Seventies: The Age of Glitter in Popular Culture (2000).
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780816634170
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 203
Book Description
By printing the title "Professor of Aesthetics" on his visiting cards, Oscar Wilde announced yet another transformation-and perhaps the most significant of his career, proclaiming his belief that he could redesign not just his image but his very self. Shelton Waldrep explores the cultural influences at play in Wilde's life and work and his influence on the writing and performance of the twentieth century, particularly on the lives and careers of some of its most aestheticized performers: Truman Capote, Andy Warhol, David Hockney, and David Bowie. As Waldrep reveals, Wilde's fusing of art with commerce foresaw the coming century's cultural producers who would blend works of both "high art" and mass-market appeal. Whether as a gay man or as a postmodern performance artist ahead of his time, Wilde ultimately emerges here as the embodiment of the twentieth-century media-savvy artist who is both subject and object of the aesthetic and economic systems in which he is enmeshed. Shelton Waldrep is associate professor of English at the University of Southern Maine. He is the coauthor of Inside the Mouse: Work and Play at Disney World (1995) and editor of The Seventies: The Age of Glitter in Popular Culture (2000).
The Aesthetics of Self-invention
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781452935256
Category : Aesthetics, British
Languages : en
Pages : 203
Book Description
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781452935256
Category : Aesthetics, British
Languages : en
Pages : 203
Book Description
The Invention of Creativity
Author: Andreas Reckwitz
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745697070
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 300
Book Description
Contemporary society has seen an unprecedented rise in both the demand and the desire to be creative, to bring something new into the world. Once the reserve of artistic subcultures, creativity has now become a universal model for culture and an imperative in many parts of society. In this new book, cultural sociologist Andreas Reckwitz investigates how the ideal of creativity has grown into a major social force, from the art of the avant-garde and postmodernism to the ‘creative industries’ and the innovation economy, the psychology of creativity and self-growth, the media representation of creative stars, and the urban design of ‘creative cities’. Where creativity is often assumed to be a force for good, Reckwitz looks critically at how this imperative has developed from the 1970s to the present day. Though we may well perceive creativity as the realization of some natural and innate potential within us, it has rather to be understood within the structures of a very specific culture of the new in late modern society. The Invention of Creativity is a bold and refreshing counter to conventional wisdom that shows how our age is defined by radical and restrictive processes of social aestheticization. It will be of great interest to those working in a variety of disciplines, from cultural and social theory to art history and aesthetics.
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745697070
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 300
Book Description
Contemporary society has seen an unprecedented rise in both the demand and the desire to be creative, to bring something new into the world. Once the reserve of artistic subcultures, creativity has now become a universal model for culture and an imperative in many parts of society. In this new book, cultural sociologist Andreas Reckwitz investigates how the ideal of creativity has grown into a major social force, from the art of the avant-garde and postmodernism to the ‘creative industries’ and the innovation economy, the psychology of creativity and self-growth, the media representation of creative stars, and the urban design of ‘creative cities’. Where creativity is often assumed to be a force for good, Reckwitz looks critically at how this imperative has developed from the 1970s to the present day. Though we may well perceive creativity as the realization of some natural and innate potential within us, it has rather to be understood within the structures of a very specific culture of the new in late modern society. The Invention of Creativity is a bold and refreshing counter to conventional wisdom that shows how our age is defined by radical and restrictive processes of social aestheticization. It will be of great interest to those working in a variety of disciplines, from cultural and social theory to art history and aesthetics.
The Aesthetic Imperative
Author: Peter Sloterdijk
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 074569988X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 344
Book Description
In this wide-ranging book, renowned philosopher and cultural theorist Peter Sloterdijk examines art in all its rich and varied forms: from music to architecture, light to movement, and design to typography. Moving between the visible and the invisible, the audible and the inaudible, his analyses span the centuries, from ancient civilizations to contemporary Hollywood. With great verve and insight he considers the key issues that have faced thinkers from Aristotle to Adorno, looking at art in its relation to ethics, metaphysics, society, politics, anthropology and the subject. Sloterdijk explores a variety of topics, from the Greco-Roman invention of postcards to the rise of the capitalist art market, from the black boxes and white cubes of modernism to the growth of museums and memorial culture. In doing so, he extends his characteristic method of defamiliarization to transform the way we look at works of art and artistic movements. His bold and original approach leads us away from the well-trodden paths of conventional art history to develop a theory of aesthetics which rejects strict categorization, emphasizing instead the crucial importance of individual subjectivity as a counter to the latent dangers of collective culture. This sustained reflection, at once playful, serious and provocative, goes to the very heart of Sloterdijk’s enduring philosophical preoccupation with the aesthetic. It will be essential reading for students and scholars of philosophy and aesthetics and will appeal to anyone interested in culture and the arts more generally.
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 074569988X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 344
Book Description
In this wide-ranging book, renowned philosopher and cultural theorist Peter Sloterdijk examines art in all its rich and varied forms: from music to architecture, light to movement, and design to typography. Moving between the visible and the invisible, the audible and the inaudible, his analyses span the centuries, from ancient civilizations to contemporary Hollywood. With great verve and insight he considers the key issues that have faced thinkers from Aristotle to Adorno, looking at art in its relation to ethics, metaphysics, society, politics, anthropology and the subject. Sloterdijk explores a variety of topics, from the Greco-Roman invention of postcards to the rise of the capitalist art market, from the black boxes and white cubes of modernism to the growth of museums and memorial culture. In doing so, he extends his characteristic method of defamiliarization to transform the way we look at works of art and artistic movements. His bold and original approach leads us away from the well-trodden paths of conventional art history to develop a theory of aesthetics which rejects strict categorization, emphasizing instead the crucial importance of individual subjectivity as a counter to the latent dangers of collective culture. This sustained reflection, at once playful, serious and provocative, goes to the very heart of Sloterdijk’s enduring philosophical preoccupation with the aesthetic. It will be essential reading for students and scholars of philosophy and aesthetics and will appeal to anyone interested in culture and the arts more generally.
The Invention of the Self
Author: Andrew Spira
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
ISBN: 1350091057
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 425
Book Description
This book is an examination of personal identity, exploring both who we think we are, and how we construct the sense of ourselves through art. It proposes that the notion of personal identity is a psycho-social construction that has evolved over many centuries. While this idea has been widely discussed in recent years, Andrew Spira approaches it from a completely new point of view. Rather than relying on the thinking subject's attempts to identify itself consciously and verbally, it focuses on the traces that the self-sense has unconsciously left in the fabric of its environment in the form of non-verbal cultural conventions. Covering a millennium of western European cultural history, it amounts to an 'anthropology of personal identity in the West'. Following a broadly chronological path, Spira traces the self-sense from its emergence from the collectivity of the medieval Church to its consummation in the individualistic concept of artistic genius in the nineteenth century. In doing so, it aims to bridge a gap that exists between cultural history and philosophy. Regarding cultural history (especially art history), it elicits significances from its material that have been thoroughly overlooked. Regarding philosophy, it highlights the crucial role that material culture plays in the formation of philosophical ideas. It argues that the sense of personal self is as much revealed by cultural conventions - and as a cultural convention - as it is observable to the mind as an object of philosophical enquiry.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
ISBN: 1350091057
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 425
Book Description
This book is an examination of personal identity, exploring both who we think we are, and how we construct the sense of ourselves through art. It proposes that the notion of personal identity is a psycho-social construction that has evolved over many centuries. While this idea has been widely discussed in recent years, Andrew Spira approaches it from a completely new point of view. Rather than relying on the thinking subject's attempts to identify itself consciously and verbally, it focuses on the traces that the self-sense has unconsciously left in the fabric of its environment in the form of non-verbal cultural conventions. Covering a millennium of western European cultural history, it amounts to an 'anthropology of personal identity in the West'. Following a broadly chronological path, Spira traces the self-sense from its emergence from the collectivity of the medieval Church to its consummation in the individualistic concept of artistic genius in the nineteenth century. In doing so, it aims to bridge a gap that exists between cultural history and philosophy. Regarding cultural history (especially art history), it elicits significances from its material that have been thoroughly overlooked. Regarding philosophy, it highlights the crucial role that material culture plays in the formation of philosophical ideas. It argues that the sense of personal self is as much revealed by cultural conventions - and as a cultural convention - as it is observable to the mind as an object of philosophical enquiry.
The Invention of Northern Aesthetics in 18th-Century English Literature
Author: Yvonne Bezrucka
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527512886
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 278
Book Description
Free, romantic, and individualistic, Britain’s self-image in the eighteenth century constructs itself in opposition to the dominant power of a southern European aesthetics. Offering a fresh understanding of how the British intelligentsia created a ‘Northern’ aesthetics to challenge the European yoke, this book explores the roots of British Romanticism and a newly created past. Literature, the arts, architecture, and gardening all contributed to the creation of this national, ‘enlightened’, Northern cultural environment, with its emphasis on a home-grown legal tradition, on a heroic Celtic past, and on the imagined democracy of King Arthur and his Roundtable of Knights as a prophetic precursor of Constitutional Monarchy. Set against the European Grand Tour, the British turned to the Domestic, Picturesque Anti-Grand-Tour, and alongside a classical literary heritage championed British authors and British empiricism, against continental religion that sanctioned an authoritarian politics that the Gothic Novel mocks. However, if empiricism and common law were vital to this emerging tradition, so too was the other driving force of Britain’s medieval inheritance, the fantasy world of mythic heroes and a celebration of what would come to be known as the ‘fairy way of writing’.
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527512886
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 278
Book Description
Free, romantic, and individualistic, Britain’s self-image in the eighteenth century constructs itself in opposition to the dominant power of a southern European aesthetics. Offering a fresh understanding of how the British intelligentsia created a ‘Northern’ aesthetics to challenge the European yoke, this book explores the roots of British Romanticism and a newly created past. Literature, the arts, architecture, and gardening all contributed to the creation of this national, ‘enlightened’, Northern cultural environment, with its emphasis on a home-grown legal tradition, on a heroic Celtic past, and on the imagined democracy of King Arthur and his Roundtable of Knights as a prophetic precursor of Constitutional Monarchy. Set against the European Grand Tour, the British turned to the Domestic, Picturesque Anti-Grand-Tour, and alongside a classical literary heritage championed British authors and British empiricism, against continental religion that sanctioned an authoritarian politics that the Gothic Novel mocks. However, if empiricism and common law were vital to this emerging tradition, so too was the other driving force of Britain’s medieval inheritance, the fantasy world of mythic heroes and a celebration of what would come to be known as the ‘fairy way of writing’.
Homo Aestheticus
Author: Luc Ferry
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226244594
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 300
Book Description
Can subjective, individual taste be reconciled with an objective, universal standard? In Homo Aestheticus, Luc Ferry argues that this central problem of aesthetic theory is fundamentally related to the political problem of democratic individualism. Ferry's treatise begins in the mid-1600s with the simultaneous invention of the notions of taste (the essence of art as subjective pleasure) and modern democracy (the idea of the State as a consensus among individuals). He explores the differences between subjectivity and individuality by examining aesthetic theory as developed first by Kant's predecessors and then by Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and proponents of the avant-garde. Ferry discerns two "moments" of the avant-garde aesthetic: the hyperindividualistic iconoclasm of creating something entirely new, and the hyperrealistic striving to achieve an extraordinary truth. The tension between these two, Ferry argues, preserves an essential element of the Enlightenment concern for reconciling the subjective and the objective—a problem that is at once aesthetic, ethical, and political. Rejecting postmodern proposals for either a radical break with or return to tradition, Ferry embraces a postmodernism that recasts Enlightenment notions of value as a new intersubjectivity. His original analysis of the growth and decline of the twentieth-century avant-garde movement sheds new light on the connections between aesthetics, ethics, and political theory.
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226244594
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 300
Book Description
Can subjective, individual taste be reconciled with an objective, universal standard? In Homo Aestheticus, Luc Ferry argues that this central problem of aesthetic theory is fundamentally related to the political problem of democratic individualism. Ferry's treatise begins in the mid-1600s with the simultaneous invention of the notions of taste (the essence of art as subjective pleasure) and modern democracy (the idea of the State as a consensus among individuals). He explores the differences between subjectivity and individuality by examining aesthetic theory as developed first by Kant's predecessors and then by Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and proponents of the avant-garde. Ferry discerns two "moments" of the avant-garde aesthetic: the hyperindividualistic iconoclasm of creating something entirely new, and the hyperrealistic striving to achieve an extraordinary truth. The tension between these two, Ferry argues, preserves an essential element of the Enlightenment concern for reconciling the subjective and the objective—a problem that is at once aesthetic, ethical, and political. Rejecting postmodern proposals for either a radical break with or return to tradition, Ferry embraces a postmodernism that recasts Enlightenment notions of value as a new intersubjectivity. His original analysis of the growth and decline of the twentieth-century avant-garde movement sheds new light on the connections between aesthetics, ethics, and political theory.
Winckelmann and the Invention of Antiquity
Author: Katherine Harloe
Publisher:
ISBN: 0199695849
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 302
Book Description
This volume provides a new perspective on the emergence of the modern study of antiquity, Altertumswissenschaft, in eighteenth-century Germany through an exploration of debates that arose over the work of the art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann between his death in 1768 and the end of the century. Winckelmann's eloquent articulation of the cultural and aesthetic value of studying the ancient Greeks, his adumbration of a new method for studying ancient artworks, and his provision of a model of cultural-historical development in terms of a succession of period styles, influenced both the public and intra-disciplinary self-image of classics long into the twentieth century. Yet this area of Winckelmann's Nachleben has received relatively little attention compared with the proliferation of studies concerning his importance for late eighteenth-century German art and literature, for historians of sexuality, and his traditional status as a 'founder figure' within the academic disciplines of classical archaeology and the history of art. Harloe restores the figure of Winckelmann to classicists' understanding of the history of their own discipline and uses debates between important figures, such as Christian Gottlob Heyne, Friedrich August Wolf, and Johann Gottfried Herder, to cast fresh light upon the emergence of the modern paradigm of classics as Altertumswissenschaft: the multi-disciplinary, comprehensive, and historicizing study of the ancient world.
Publisher:
ISBN: 0199695849
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 302
Book Description
This volume provides a new perspective on the emergence of the modern study of antiquity, Altertumswissenschaft, in eighteenth-century Germany through an exploration of debates that arose over the work of the art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann between his death in 1768 and the end of the century. Winckelmann's eloquent articulation of the cultural and aesthetic value of studying the ancient Greeks, his adumbration of a new method for studying ancient artworks, and his provision of a model of cultural-historical development in terms of a succession of period styles, influenced both the public and intra-disciplinary self-image of classics long into the twentieth century. Yet this area of Winckelmann's Nachleben has received relatively little attention compared with the proliferation of studies concerning his importance for late eighteenth-century German art and literature, for historians of sexuality, and his traditional status as a 'founder figure' within the academic disciplines of classical archaeology and the history of art. Harloe restores the figure of Winckelmann to classicists' understanding of the history of their own discipline and uses debates between important figures, such as Christian Gottlob Heyne, Friedrich August Wolf, and Johann Gottfried Herder, to cast fresh light upon the emergence of the modern paradigm of classics as Altertumswissenschaft: the multi-disciplinary, comprehensive, and historicizing study of the ancient world.
Isaac Babel and the Self-Invention of Odessan Modernism
Author: Rebecca Jane Stanton
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810166151
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 220
Book Description
In what marks an exciting new critical direction, Rebecca Stanton contends that the city of Odessa—as a canonical literary image and as a kaleidoscopic cultural milieu—shaped the narrative strategies developed by Isaac Babel and his contemporaries of the Revolutionary generation. Modeling themselves on the tricksters and rogues of Odessa lore, Babel and his fellow Odessans Valentin Kataev and Yury Olesha manipulated their literary personae through complex, playful, and often subversive negotiations of the boundary between autobiography and fiction. In so doing, they cannily took up a place prepared for them in the Russian canon and fostered modes of storytelling that both reflected and resisted the aesthetics of Socialist Realism. Stanton concludes with a rereading of Babel’s “autobiographical” stories and examines their legacy in post-Thaw works by Kataev, Olesha, and Konstantin Paustovsky.
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810166151
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 220
Book Description
In what marks an exciting new critical direction, Rebecca Stanton contends that the city of Odessa—as a canonical literary image and as a kaleidoscopic cultural milieu—shaped the narrative strategies developed by Isaac Babel and his contemporaries of the Revolutionary generation. Modeling themselves on the tricksters and rogues of Odessa lore, Babel and his fellow Odessans Valentin Kataev and Yury Olesha manipulated their literary personae through complex, playful, and often subversive negotiations of the boundary between autobiography and fiction. In so doing, they cannily took up a place prepared for them in the Russian canon and fostered modes of storytelling that both reflected and resisted the aesthetics of Socialist Realism. Stanton concludes with a rereading of Babel’s “autobiographical” stories and examines their legacy in post-Thaw works by Kataev, Olesha, and Konstantin Paustovsky.
The Founding of Aesthetics in the German Enlightenment
Author: Stefanie Buchenau
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107311179
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 281
Book Description
When, in 1735, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten added a new discipline to the philosophical system, he not only founded modern aesthetics but also contributed to shaping the modern concept of art or 'fine art'. In The Founding of Aesthetics in the German Enlightenment, Stefanie Buchenau offers a rich analysis and reconstruction of the origins of this new discipline in its wider context of German Enlightenment philosophy. Present-day scholars commonly regard Baumgarten's views as an imperfect prefiguration of Kantian and post-Kantian aesthetics, but Buchenau argues that Baumgarten defended a consistent and original project which must be viewed in the context of the modern debate on the art of invention. Her book offers new perspectives on Kantian aesthetics and beauty in art and science.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107311179
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 281
Book Description
When, in 1735, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten added a new discipline to the philosophical system, he not only founded modern aesthetics but also contributed to shaping the modern concept of art or 'fine art'. In The Founding of Aesthetics in the German Enlightenment, Stefanie Buchenau offers a rich analysis and reconstruction of the origins of this new discipline in its wider context of German Enlightenment philosophy. Present-day scholars commonly regard Baumgarten's views as an imperfect prefiguration of Kantian and post-Kantian aesthetics, but Buchenau argues that Baumgarten defended a consistent and original project which must be viewed in the context of the modern debate on the art of invention. Her book offers new perspectives on Kantian aesthetics and beauty in art and science.