Download or read book Conversations on Art and Aesthetics written by Hans Maes and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-12 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is art? What counts as an aesthetic experience? Does art have to beautiful? Can one reasonably dispute about taste? What is the relation between aesthetic and moral evaluations? How to interpret a work of art? Can we learn anything from literature, film or opera? What is sentimentality? What is irony? How to think philosophically about architecture, dance, or sculpture? What makes something a great portrait? Is music representational or abstract? Why do we feel terrified when we watch a horror movie even though we know it to be fictional? In Conversations on Art and Aesthetics, Hans Maes discusses these and other key questions in aesthetics with ten world-leading philosophers of art: Noël Carroll, Gregory Currie, Arthur Danto, Cynthia Freeland, Paul Guyer, Carolyn Korsmeyer, Jerrold Levinson, Jenefer Robinson, Roger Scruton, and Kendall Walton. The exchanges are direct, open, and sharp, and give a clear account of these thinkers' core ideas and intellectual development. They also offer new insights into, and a deeper understanding of, contemporary issues in the philosophy of art.
Download or read book The Aesthetics of Art written by Liza Renia Papi and published by Cognella Academic Publishing. This book was released on 2021-07-26 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book What to Read and Why written by Francine Prose and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2018-07-03 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this brilliant collection, the follow-up to her New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer, the distinguished novelist, literary critic, and essayist celebrates the pleasures of reading and pays homage to the works and writers she admires above all others, from Jane Austen and Charles Dickens to Jennifer Egan and Roberto Bolaño. In an age defined by hyper-connectivity and constant stimulation, Francine Prose makes a compelling case for the solitary act of reading and the great enjoyment it brings. Inspiring and illuminating, What to Read and Why includes selections culled from Prose’s previous essays, reviews, and introductions, combined with new, never-before-published pieces that focus on her favorite works of fiction and nonfiction, on works by masters of the short story, and even on books by photographers like Diane Arbus. Prose considers why the works of literary masters such as Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Jane Austen have endured, and shares intriguing insights about modern authors whose words stimulate our minds and enlarge our lives, including Roberto Bolaño, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Jennifer Egan, and Mohsin Hamid. Prose implores us to read Mavis Gallant for her marvelously rich and compact sentences, and her meticulously rendered characters who reveal our flawed and complex human nature; Edward St. Aubyn for his elegance and sophisticated humor; and Mark Strand for his gift for depicting unlikely transformations. Here, too, are original pieces in which Prose explores the craft of writing: "On Clarity" and "What Makes a Short Story." Written with her sharp critical analysis, wit, and enthusiasm, What to Read and Why is a celebration of literature that will give readers a new appreciation for the power and beauty of the written word.
Download or read book The Aesthetics of the Total Artwork written by Anke K. Finger and published by Johns Hopkins University Press. This book was released on 2011-01-31 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Aesthetics of the Total Artwork, artists, curators, and scholars from many countries and fields offer new ways of understanding the history and contemporary importance of the idea of the total artwork, or Gesamtkunstwerk. The term "Gesamtkunstwerk" was introduced in the romantic period. It describes the desire for and practice of combining various art forms into a whole, such as performances that combine text, visual arts, music, dance, and architecture. Richard Wagner was one of the early theorists of the concept, inspiring many modernist artists; yet, due to his ideological significance for the Third Reich, the concept has frequently been associated with totalitarianism since the Second World War. Nonetheless, artistic practice has continued to incorporate all-inclusive tendencies, even while avoiding the term “total artwork.” The contributors to this volume challenge us to think again about the total artwork, daring to suggest that it is alive and well, that it informs current art in ways that are deep, meaningful, contentious, and provocative. The essays come from authors steeped in literary culture, the world of art, philosophy, and music theory. Such diverse perspectives can only stimulate debate in the academy and beyond about the history of the Gesamtkunstwerk and open up paths that may be followed in its future.
Download or read book Life as Art written by Zachary Simpson and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2012-09-27 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Life as Art brings the resources of contemporary aesthetics since Nietzsche to bear on the problems of how one integrates the aesthetic emphases of meaning, liberation, and creativity into one’s daily life. By linking together the aesthetic and ethical accounts of critical theorists, phenomenologists, and existentialists into a coherent view on the artful life, Life as Art shows the ways in which much of contemporary Continental theory has been concerned with alternative ways of constructing one’s own life. Seen as a unified phenomenon, life as art signifies an active attempt to create a life which bears the resistance, openness, and creativity found in artworks.
Download or read book The Aesthetic Imperative written by Peter Sloterdijk and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-03-15 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Situated Aesthetics written by Riccardo Manzotti and published by Andrews UK Limited. This book was released on 2012-02-29 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on externalist approaches to art. It is the first fruit of a workshop held in Milan in September 2009, where leading scholars in the emerging field of psychology of art compared their different approaches using a neutral language and discussing freely their goals. The event threw up common grounds for future research activities. First, there is a considerable interest in using cognitive and neural inspired techniques to help art historians, museum curators, art archiving, art preservation. Secondly, cognitive scientists and neuroscientists are rather open to using art as a special way of accessing the structures of the mind. Third, there are artists who explicitly draw inspiration out of current research on various aspects of the mind. Fourth, during the workshop, a converging methodological paradigm emerged around which more specific efforts could be encouraged.
Download or read book Aesthetics of Discomfort written by Frederick Luis Aldama and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2016-02-02 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes and defends the centrality of discomfort for consumers of various arts--literature, architecture, visual art, music, dance, and cinema.
Download or read book The Transfiguration of the Commonplace written by Arthur C. Danto and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1981 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Danto argues that recent developments in art--in particular the production of works that cannot be told from ordinary things--make urgent the need for a new theory of art. He demonstrates the relationship between philosophy and art and the connections that hold between art, social institutions, and art history.
Download or read book Analyzing Art and Aesthetics written by Anne Collins Goodyear and published by Smithsonian Institution. This book was released on 2013-10-30 with total page 527 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This ninth volume of the Artefacts series explores how artists have responded to developments in science and technology, past and present. Rather than limiting the discussion to art alone, editors Anne Collins Goodyear and Margaret Weitekamp also asked contributors to consider aesthetics: the scholarly consideration of sensory responses to cultural objects. When considered as aesthetic objects, how do scientific instruments or technological innovations reflect and embody culturally grounded assessments about appearance, feel, and use? And when these objects become museum artifacts, what aesthetic factors affect their exhibition? Contributors found answers in the material objects themselves. This volume reconsiders how science, technology, art, and aesthetics impact one another.
Download or read book Puzzles about Art written by Margaret P. Battin and published by Bedford/St. Martin's. This book was released on 1989-03-15 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first casebook for use in courses in aesthetics, Puzzles about Art provides more than 180 real and hypothetical cases that illustrate important principles and theories in the philosophy of art. With 25 illustrations as well as concrete examples from legal cases, museum experiences, newspaper articles and various media, including painting, sculpture, photography, music, drama, and film, Puzzles about Art helps students understand specific problems in the visual arts.
Download or read book Aesthetics written by David Goldblatt and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-01 with total page 1159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aesthetics: A Reader in Philosophy of the Arts, fourth edition, contains a selection of ninety-six readings organized by individual art forms as well as a final section of readings in philosophical aesthetics that cover multiple art forms. Sections include topics that are familiar to students such as painting, photography and movies, architecture, music, literature, and performance, as well as contemporary subjects such as mass art, popular arts, the aesthetics of the everyday, and the natural environment. Essays are drawn from both the analytic and continental traditions, and multiple others that bridge this divide between these traditions. Throughout, readings are brief, accessible for undergraduates, and conceptually focused, allowing instructors many different syllabi possibilities using only this single volume. Key Additions to the Fourth Edition The fourth edition is expanded to include a total of ninety-six essays with nineteen new essays (nine of them written exclusively for this volume), updated organization into new sections, revised introductions to each section, an increased emphasis on contemporary topics, such as stand-up comedy, the architecture of museums, interactivity and video games, the ethics of sexiness, trans/gendered beauty, the aesthetics of junkyards and street art, pornography, and the inclusion of more diverse philosophical voices. Nevertheless, this edition does not neglect classic writers in the traditional aesthetics: Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Collingwood, Bell, and writers of similar status in aesthetics. The philosophers writing new chapters exclusively for this fourth edition are: • Sondra Bacharach on street art • Aili Bresnahan on appreciating dance • Hina Jamelle on digital architecture • Jason Leddington on magic • Sheila Lintott on stand-up comedy • Yuriko Saito on everyday aesthetics • Larry Shiner on art spectacle museums in the twenty-first century • Peg Brand Weiser on how beauty matters • Edward Winters on the feeling of being at home in vernacular architecture, as in such urban places as bars.
Download or read book Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art written by Janet Wolff and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-04-29 with total page 121 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1983, Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art provides a lucid account of two divergent tendencies in the study of aesthetics. At the one extreme, traditional aestheticians have assumed that art and literature are wholly independent, following only the laws and inspirations of artists and artistic movements, and that the question of aesthetic value is accordingly unproblematic. At the other extreme, some sociologists have treated works of art as no more than manifestations of the socio-economic circumstances which produce them, arguing that aesthetic value is therefore entirely relative matter. Janet Wolff shows how both the extreme positions are untenable, and argues convincingly that we must accept that the conceptions and criteria of aesthetic value are socially constructed and inevitably ideological, while stopping short of the reductionist alternative which fails to recognise the irreducible questions of pleasure and of aesthetic discourse. This book provides an invaluably clear guide both to old debates and to otherwise obscure modern controversies, which will be welcomed both by students and scholars in the sociology of art, in aesthetics, in art history, and in literary criticism.
Download or read book Art Scents written by Larry Shiner and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-11 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although the arts of incense and perfume making are among the oldest of human cultural practices, it is only in the last two decades that the use of odors in the creation of art has begun to attract attention under the rubrics of 'olfactory art' or 'scent art.' Contemporary olfactory art ranges from gallery and museum installations and the use of scents in music, film, and drama, to the ambient scenting of stores and the use of scents in cuisine. All these practices raise aesthetic and ethical issues, but there is a long-standing philosophical tradition, most notably articulated in the work of Kant and Hegel, which argues that the sense of smell lacks the cognitive capacity to be a vehicle for either serious art or reflective aesthetic experience. This neglect and denigration of the aesthetic potential of smell was further reinforced by Darwin's and Freud's views of the human sense of smell as a near useless evolutionary vestige. Smell has thus been widely neglected within the philosophy of art. Larry Shiner's wide-ranging book counters this tendency, aiming to reinvigorate an interest in smell as an aesthetic experience. He begins by countering the classic arguments against the aesthetic potential of smell with both philosophical arguments and evidence from neuroscience, psychology, anthropology, history, linguistics, and literature. He then draws on this empirical evidence to explore the range of aesthetic issues that arise in each of the major areas of the olfactory arts, whether those issues arise from the use of scents with theater and music, sculpture and installation, architecture and urban design, or avant-garde cuisine. Shiner gives special attention to the art status of perfumes and to the ethical issues that arise from scenting the body, the ambient scenting of buildings, and the use of scents in fast food. Shiner's book provides both philosophers and other academic readers with not only a comprehensive overview of the aesthetic issues raised by the emergence of the olfactory arts, but also shows the way forward for further studies of the aesthetics of smell.
Download or read book Introducing Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art written by Darren Hudson Hick and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-08-24 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Place in garden, lawn, to beautify landscape.' When Don Featherstone's plastic pink flamingos were first advertised in the 1957 Sears catalogue, these were the instructions. The flamingos are placed on the cover of this book for another reason: to start us asking questions. That's where philosophy always begins. Introducing Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art is written to introduce students to a broad array of questions that have occupied philosophers since antiquity, and which continue to bother us today-questions like: - Is there something special about something's being art? Can a mass-produced plastic bird have that special something? - If someone likes plastic pink flamingos, does that mean they have bad taste? Is bad taste a bad thing? - Do Featherstone's pink flamingos mean anything? If so, does that depend on what Featherstone meant in designing them? Each chapter opens using a real world example - such as Marcel Duchamp's signed urinal, The Exorcist, and the ugliest animal in the world - to introduce and illustrate the issues under discussion. These case studies serve as touchstones throughout the chapter, keeping the concepts grounded and relatable. With its trademark conversational style, clear explanations, and wealth of supporting features, Introducing Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art is the ideal introduction to the major problems, issues, and debates in the field. Now expanded and revised for its second edition, Introducing Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art is designed to give readers the background and the tools necessary to begin asking and answering the most intriguing questions about art and beauty, even when those questions are about pink plastic flamingos.
Download or read book Aesthetics written by Theodor W. Adorno and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2017-11-10 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume of lectures on aesthetics, given by Adorno in the winter semester of 1958–9, formed the foundation for his later Aesthetic Theory, widely regarded as one of his greatest works. The lectures cover a wide range of topics, from an intense analysis of the work of Georg Lukács to a sustained reflection on the theory of aesthetic experience, from an examination of works by Plato, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard and Benjamin, to a discussion of the latest experiments of John Cage, attesting to the virtuosity and breadth of Adorno's engagement. All the while, Adorno remains deeply connected to his surrounding context, offering us a window onto the artistic, intellectual and political confrontations that shaped life in post-war Germany. This volume will appeal to a broad range of students and scholars in the humanities and social sciences, as well as anyone interested in the development of critical theory.
Download or read book Notes Toward a Conditional Art written by Robert Irwin and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 2011 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Devoted to the writings of this seminal post-war American artist. Fully half of these writings, which span a period from the mid-1960s through the 1990s, are published here for the very first time"--Dust jacket.
