Download or read book Desire and Excess written by Jonah Siegel and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this fascinating look at the creative power of institutions, Jonah Siegel explores the rise of the modern idea of the artist in the nineteenth century, a period that also witnessed the emergence of the museum and the professional critic. Treating these developments as interrelated, he analyzes both visual material and literary texts to portray a culture in which art came to be thought of in powerful new ways. Ultimately, Siegel shows that artistic controversies commonly associated with the self-consciously radical movements of modernism and postmodernism have their roots in a dynamic era unfairly characterized as staid, self-satisfied, and stable. The nineteenth century has been called the Age of the Museum, and yet critics, art theorists, and poets during this period grappled with the question of whether the proliferation of museums might lead to the death of Art itself. Did the assembly and display of works of art help the viewer to understand them or did it numb the senses? How was the contemporary artist to respond to the vast storehouses of art from disparate nations and periods that came to proliferate in this era? Siegel presents a lively discussion of the shock experienced by neoclassical artists troubled by remains of antiquity that were trivial or even obscene, as well as the anxious aesthetic reveries of nineteenth-century art lovers overwhelmed by the quantity of objects quickly crowding museums and exhibition halls. In so doing, he illuminates the fruitful crises provoked when the longing for admired art is suddenly satisfied. Drawing upon neoclassical art and theory, biographies of early nineteenth-century writers including Keats and Scott, and the writings of art critics such as Hazlitt, Ruskin, and Wilde, this book reproduces a cultural matrix that brings to life the artistic passions and anxieties of an entire era.
Download or read book Perverse Desire and the Ambiguous Icon written by Allen S. Weiss and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1994-10-28 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Perverse Desire and the Ambiguous Icon analyzes the limits of the applicability of psychoanalytic theory to aesthetic discourse, and in doing so expands the range of non-normative paradigms of spectatorial identification and sexual identity. These considerations are based on the epistemological premises that the ideal seldom coincides with the empirical, and that identification is always partial, fragmented, heterogeneous, mixed, such that total identification would be tantamount to delirium. The imagination is but the ephemera of partial objects torn from culture and history, the transgression by fragmentation of a contemporary cosmos all too unified and all too controlled to admit the most singular, and idiosyncratic, phantasms of our desires. Thus we must posit an aesthetics where theory and interpretation are juxtaposed to, or traced above, the effects of the passions, where a muscular contraction or spasm is worth as much as a concept. It is here, at the fragile limit between iconophilia and iconoclasm, that the ironies and exigencies of poetic justice reside.
Download or read book Consumed written by Savannah Schroll and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "We are women driven by consumption and the insatiable desire for bigger, for better, for more. It's a response programmed into our psyches even before we're fully cognizant of media culture, and it's transforming the natural course of civilization, history, and ultimately humanity. It's invisible to us because it's indivisible from our identities. This collection is not about goods alone, but everything we crave--lost time, gluttony, hedonism, addiction-- anything related to the pleasures, pain, joys and evils of wasting, buying, imbibing, or ingesting--even accumulating. The authors and artists here have complete creative freedom within the multiple definitions of consumption and all its lusty, ravenous, and sweaty implications. The authors and artists in this anthology are exclusively women whose work has appeared online. They are sprinkled throughout the United States and England. I sought to incorporate each particular contributor's work because they have a style or voice that is individually arresting but also works beautifully within the whole. With this anthology, I hope to amplify their unique talents and bring satisfied smiles to hungry hedonists everywhere."--Editor's statement on publisher's website, viewed 1/10/2006.
Download or read book The Aesthetics of Desire and Surprise written by Jadranka Skorin-Kapov and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2015-10-08 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Aesthetics of Desire and Surprise: Phenomenology and Speculation covers issues central to contemporary continental philosophy (desire, expectations, excess, rupture, transcendence, immanence, surprise). The proposed term desire||surprise captures the phenomenological-speculative character of the pair not yet and no longer. Non-obvious parallels between different thinkers are drawn, and the argumentation is organized around philosophical figures relevant in the sequence desire – excess –pause (rupture, break) – recuperation (surprise). The works of Levinas, Žižek, Bataille, Blanchot, Foucault, and Ricoeur are interpreted and positioned according to the proposed template of desire - excess - pause. The consideration of limit experiences involves authors fascinated by transgression, and the question of whether excess is immanent or transcendent. This discussion considers works by Nietzsche, Deleuze, Žižek, and Foucault. The analysis of surprise and the beginning of recovery after the pause considers works by Fink, Merleau-Ponty, Nancy, Lyotard, Dufrenne, Bachelard, and Seel. The provocative argument elaborated in this work is that surprise starts with indifference. Furthermore, the argument is that surprise begins where the concept reaches its ending, hence that the limit of speculative thinking at its ending is the limit of aesthetics at its beginning. The work of Hegel, Schelling and Jaspers are discussed in order to argue for the beginning of aesthetics there where knowledge ends. Philosophical thematic is contextualized via sections on artists such as Duchamp and Mondrian, and on some films, provoking interest of aestheticians working in art history and cultural studies departments.
Download or read book Love in Excess Second Edition written by Eliza Haywood and published by Broadview Press. This book was released on 2000-06-12 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eliza Haywood (1693-1756) was one of the most successful writers of her time; indeed, the two most popular English novels in the early eighteenth-century were Robinson Crusoe and Haywood’s first novel, Love in Excess. As this edition enables modern readers to discover, its enormous success is easy to understand. Love in Excess is a well crafted novel in which the claims of love and ambition are pursued through multiple storylines until the heroine engineers a melodramatic conclusion. Haywood’s frankness about female sexuality may explain the later neglect of Love in Excess. (In contrast, her accomplished domestic novel, The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, has remained available.) Love in Excess and its reception provide a lively and valuable record of the challenge that female desire posed to social decorum. For the second Broadview edition, the appendix of eighteenth-century responses to Haywood has been considerably expanded.
Download or read book The Aesthetics of Excess written by Allen S. Weiss and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1989-07-03 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates the reciprocal and often transgressive relations between rhetorical figures and libidinal activity. The works of Nietzsche, Artaud, Bataille, Klossowski, and Sade are reconsidered in light of the modernist and postmodernist problematics of simulacra, fascination, sublimation and desublimation, perversion, deconstruction, and libidinal economies. Reading across the boundaries of philosophy, art history, comparative literature, film studies, and psychoanalytic theory, this work reveals the manner in which theoretical discourse is imbued with passional motivations, and, conversely, shows how the passions are structured according to logical and rhetorical figures. In offering specific rereadings of several key figures of our modernist tradition, this work helps identify the sources of the 'postmodern condition.' It thus provides a theoretical foundation for contemporary art and literary criticism—especially of those works to be found at the margins of our culture.
Download or read book Desire and Governance written by Anne Louise McKendry and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature written by Joshua Scodel and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2002-03-24 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines how English writers from the Elizabethan period to the Restoration transformed and contested the ancient ideal of the virtuous mean. As early modern authors learned at grammar school and university, Aristotle and other classical thinkers praised "golden means" balanced between extremes: courage, for example, as opposed to cowardice or recklessness. By uncovering the enormous variety of English responses to this ethical doctrine, Joshua Scodel revises our understanding of the vital interaction between classical thought and early modern literary culture. Scodel argues that English authors used the ancient schema of means and extremes in innovative and contentious ways hitherto ignored by scholars. Through close readings of diverse writers and genres, he shows that conflicting representations of means and extremes figured prominently in the emergence of a self-consciously modern English culture. Donne, for example, reshaped the classical mean to promote individual freedom, while Bacon held extremism necessary for human empowerment. Imagining a modern rival to ancient Rome, georgics from Spenser to Cowley exhorted England to embody the mean or lauded extreme paths to national greatness. Drinking poetry from Jonson to Rochester expressed opposing visions of convivial moderation and drunken excess, while erotic writing from Sidney to Dryden and Behn pitted extreme passion against the traditional mean of conjugal moderation. Challenging his predecessors in various genres, Milton celebrated golden means of restrained pleasure and self-respect. Throughout this groundbreaking study, Scodel suggests how early modern treatments of means and extremes resonate in present-day cultural debates.
Download or read book Temptation written by Daniel Akst and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2011-12-27 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: " This elegantly written and useful book . . . describes how, for millennia, human beings have struggled to rein in desire." -USA Today At a time when the fallout from reckless spending and unrestrained consumption is fueling a national malaise, Daniel Akst delivers a witty and comprehensive investigation of the central problem of our time: how to save ourselves from what we want. Temptation reminds us that while more calories, sex, and intoxicants are readily available than ever before, crucial social constraints have eroded, creating a world that sorely tests the limits of human willpower. Referencing history, literature, psychology, philosophy, and economics, Akst draws a vivid picture of the many-sided problem of desire-and delivers a blueprint for how we can steer shrewdly away from a campaign of self-destruction.
Download or read book Fulfilled written by Ashley Bigham and published by Applied Research & Design. This book was released on 2021-11 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on the eponymous symposium and exhibition, Fulfilled: Architecture, Excess, and Desire considers the role of architecture in a culture shaped by the excessive manufacturing and assuagement of desire. Until the term became synonymous with Amazon warehouses, the concept of fulfillment described the achievement of a desire--sometimes tangible, often psychological or spiritual. With the rapid growth of e-commerce, our understanding of fulfillment has evolved to reflect a seemingly endless cycle of desire and gratification--one whose continuity hinges on our willingness to overlook the cultural, economic, and environmental impacts of our ever-increasing expectation of quick and efficient fulfillment. A closer look at fulfillment reveals a social, typological, formal, aesthetic, and economic practice constructed collectively through both digital and physical interactions. It is a cultural practice which evolves like a language, both universally transferable and contextually specific. As a symposium, exhibition, and now publication, this project aims to draw out these new arrangements, sticky relationships, and material byproducts of cultural production and to ask again the age-old question, "What does it mean to be fulfilled?" This book examines the architecture of fulfillment through three lenses: logistical, material, and cultural fulfillment. Each reveals the new forms of architectural practice and research that are possible, typical, and even surreptitiously encouraged in the age of Amazon. Fulfillment networks are not invisible systems; they are tangible objects--warehouses, suburban houses, parking lots, cardboard boxes, shopping malls, mechanical systems, shipping containers--with which architects necessarily interact. From political mapping and questions of labor to digital and physical storage typologies, contemporary architects learn from and work critically within the architecture of fulfillment. Their interests and approaches include the material and environmental shortcomings of global logistics and the formal, representational, and cultural potentials of a culture of excess. This book highlights architecture's unique capacity to offer methodologies for confronting an increasingly ambiguous, alienating world and produce new knowledge and unexpected solutions that go beyond the dichotomies of rural and urban territories.
Download or read book Visions of Excess written by Georges Bataille and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 1985 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book We Have Met the Enemy written by Daniel Akst and published by Scribe Publications. This book was released on 2011-01-31 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do you save yourself from your destructive desires? All this freedom is making us ill. Perhaps half of all deaths are caused by overeating, smoking, drinking too much, failing to exercise, and other behaviours we indulge in against our better judgement. Why do so many of us embark knowingly on the long march to slow-motion suicide? In this brilliant and irreverent search for answers, Daniel Akst delves deep into overconsumption, overspending, procrastination, expletive-laden anger, promiscuity, and most of the other homely transgressions that bedevil us in a world of freedom, prosperity, and technological empowerment. He draws a vivid picture of the many-sided problem of desire — and delivers a blueprint for how we can steer more directly toward the wants we most want for ourselves.
Download or read book Sensual Excess written by Amber Jamilla Musser and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2018-11-06 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reimagines black and brown sensuality to develop new modes of knowledge production In Sensual Excess, Amber Jamilla Musser imagines epistemologies of sensuality that emerge from fleshiness. To do so, she works against the framing of black and brown bodies as sexualized, objectified, and abject, and offers multiple ways of thinking with and through sensation and aesthetics. Each chapter draws our attention to particular aspects of pornotropic capture that black and brown bodies must always negotiate. Though these technologies differ according to the nature of their encounters with white supremacy, together they add to our understanding of the ways that structures of domination produce violence and work to contain bodies and pleasures within certain legible parameters. To do so, Sensual Excess analyzes moments of brown jouissance that exceed these constraints. These ruptures illuminate multiple epistemologies of selfhood and sensuality that offer frameworks for minoritarian knowledge production which is designed to enable one to sit with uncertainty. Through examinations of installations and performances like Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, Kara Walker’s A Subtlety, Patty Chang’s In Love and Nao Bustamante’s Neapolitan, Musser unpacks the relationships between racialized sexuality and consumption to interrogate foundational concepts in psychoanalytic theory, critical race studies, feminism, and queer theory. In so doing, Sensual Excess offers a project of knowledge production focused not on mastery, but on sensing and imagining otherwise, whatever and wherever that might be.
Download or read book The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic written by Mario Perniola and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-06-02 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic, Mario Perniola puts forth the radical argument that we are shifting away from organic sexuality, based on desire and pleasure, and moving towards a more neutral inorganic and artificial sexuality, a sexuality always available but indifferent to beauty, age or form. Perniola takes the reader on a tour of Western philosophy, from Descartes, Kant and Hegel to Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Sartre, to reframe our understanding of personal experience and the aesthetic world around us. In order to realize the sex appeal of the inorganic Perniola argues that we must become 'things that feel', we must think ourselves closer to the inorganic, creating an alliance between senses and things. Examples from contemporary culture that, for Perniola, are emblems of the sex appeal of the inorganic, include progressive rock music, fashion, deconstructive architecture and the novels of Georges Perec.
Download or read book Shoes Outside the Door written by Michael Downing and published by Counterpoint LLC. This book was released on 2001 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of the people who established the first Buddhist monastery outside of Asia.
Download or read book Explorations of Desire Excess and Containment in Schubert s Songs written by Kimberly Michelle White-Jacobsen and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Success of Excess written by Irina Averkieff and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2015-11-15 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Success of Excess is the story of the evolution of extraordinary art icon, Bill Bowers-a chronological perspective of his life and work over the last six decades set in the geopolitical milieu of these important artistic periods in America. Bill Bowers grew up feeling out of step with the interests and concerns of his peers in Wichita Falls, Texas. He had no desire to become a farmer or a father and instead felt drawn to the outré world of science fiction films of the 1950s. In high school, he listened to the music of his generation on the radio-particularly, The Seeds, a garage band from Los Angeles. After graduation, he moved to LA, just to hear a live performance of the group at the Whiskey A Go-Go on the Sunset Strip. Inspired by the music and fashion on the Strip, Bill began making wearable items for the youth of the 1960s-hippies and Bohemians and later, rockers and punks. He immersed himself in the culture of full-time pleasure-seekers in the dance clubs. When that scene became uncomfortable, due to police crackdowns and the closure of many clubs, Bill and his friends moved north to the mellower more sensual vibe of San Francisco. The mecca of quirkiness embraced Bill and he quickly became and indispensible member of the Cockettes-a group of street performers who morphed into an avant-garde theatrical group that still influences artists to this day. Living in community with all manner people exploring consciousness and creativity, often enhanced by various drugs, freed Bill completely from conventional pursuits. The theatrical costumes he made for the Cockettes led him to sew dimensional clothing that appealed to rock stars and a larger audience of fashionistas. He moved to New York to support the Cockettes performance there, but after their disastrous debut and their subsequent return to the City, Bill stayed to hang around with the East Coast designers, musicians, and actors he had met. His clothing caught the attention of the mainstream and was shown in the windows of Bonwit Teller and Bergdorf Goodman. With support of designer Norma Kamali, he landed a six-page spread in Italian Vogue, and his work was sought out by rockers, such as Alice Cooper and Led Zeppellin. The pressure of success and freezing temperatures in New York inspired Bill's move back to San Francisco. When he returned, he also began taking photographs of the kinky, glam, gay culture of San Francisco, resulting in his first solo photography exhibition in 1976. Eventually, photography would become an essential component of his mixed media pieces. External and personal pressures forced another move away from San Francisco. This time Bill chose Key West, Florida where he had a few friends and the lifestyle was attuned to sun, fun, beaches, bars, parties and porn. Bill hooked up with a writer/entrepreneur and they began a book project of fictionalized "confessions" and staged photos of S and M activities. This drew interest from a New York publisher, but never materialized due to the new plague of HIV/AIDs that curtailed public and private interest in the topic. Within a decade the purposelessness of life in Key West had lost its allure, so Bill began another exodus to San Francisco. However, passing through New Orleans during the Southern Decadence gay Mardi Gras delayed his journey. All the attractions in that city may have kept him there indefinitely, but three years later Bill was diagnosed with HIV. The impact of that medical issue was life changing for Bill-it brought a commitment to re-embrace his true self as an artist and to use his gifts to inspire others. He returned to reside permanently in San Francisco, the center of all medical innovation focusing on his disease, as well as the support and understanding of the surrounding community. Since that day, Bill Bowers' life has not had a dull moment. His creative output is breathtaking and his drive to make art and to share his vision with the world is relentless.
