Art and Artworks

Esta historia de la relación entre arte y comunismo a través de los escritos de sus principales exponentes abarca el periodo comprendido entre la Revolución de Octubre y el fin del estalinismo e incluye una amplia selección de escritos teóricos, directivas políticas, manifiestos, etc., muchos de ellos inéditos hasta ahora en castellano. El volumen comienza con ejemplos de la relación entre las vanguardias artísticas y el Partido Comunista; continúa con las diferentes formulaciones de la cultura socialista ante la estabilización del (...) Estado Soviético, la extensión internacional del movimiento comunista y la consolidación comercial e institucional del arte moderno. Termina con escritos elaborados en el contexto de la muerte de Stalin que aún pretenden mantener fidelidad a los postulados anteriores, pero tan deliberadamente vagos, que indican importantes revisiones a la cultura socialista precedente. (shrink)

This book examines the artistic policies of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) during the early post-war years (1944-1951), after the defeat of Fascism in Europe and the outbreak of the Cold War. It brings together theoretical debates on artists’ political engagement and an extensive critical apparatus, providing the reader with an historical framework for wider reflections on the relationship between art and politics.

Los valores fascistas calaron, de un modo u otro, en todas las manifestaciones del arte italiano de entreguerras. Sin embargo, no todas las manifestaciones del arte fascista fueron el resultado de nacionalismo exacerbado, provincialismo y aislacionismo. Los conceptos de ‘romanità’, ‘italianità’, ‘latinità, o ‘mediterraneità’, que caracterizaban la producción cultural italiana de esos años, actuaron originalmente como matriz de estilos diferentes y susceptibles de diversas interpretaciones.

Este artículo examina el papel del grupo de artistas abstractos Forma 1 en relación con la política cultural del Partido Comunista Italiano durante la posguerra, como ejemplo de los intentos de superar la dicotomía establecida en Italia entre arte abstracto y realismo socialista y producir una alternativa a la confrontación entre ambos discursos estéticos. Mientras los artistas realistas socialistas subrayaban la necesidad de expresar contenidos políticos explícitos con un estilo que asegurase su máxima legibilidad para una audiencia de masas, los (...) artistas de Forma 1 argumentaban que la abstracción significaba una crítica de la representación pictórica que podía contribuir a la crítica de la ideología burguesa, armonizando de este modo el marxismo con los desarrollos artísticos más avanzados. El PCI, por su parte, basaba su política artística en amplias alianzas de artistas e intelectuales antifascistas, que cada vez eran más difíciles de mantener en el clima de creciente confrontación política y cultural que siguió a la II Guerra Mundial. (shrink)

Este artículo ofrece una introducción histórica a la teoría y la práctica situacionista en conexión con la arquitectura funcionalista, las economías urbanas, ejemplos de acción política contracultural y su reincorporación a las lógicas de organización tecnocrática de las ciudades. Ello permite definir, desde una perspectiva histórica, algunas claves interpretativas de los rasgos ideológicos y económicos fundamentales de los sistemas urbanos contemporáneos, lo cual, a su vez puede establecer un contexto desde el que reflexionar sobre las posibilidades actuales de un urbanismo (...) socialmente comprometido. (shrink)

Games occupy a unique and valuable place in our lives. Game designers do not simply create worlds; they design temporary selves. Game designers set what our motivations are in the game and what our abilities will be. Thus: games are the art form of agency. By working in the artistic medium of agency, games can offer a distinctive aesthetic value. They support aesthetic experiences of deciding and doing. -/- And the fact that we play games shows something remarkable about us. (...) Our agency is more fluid than we might have thought. In playing a game, we take on temporary ends; we submerge ourselves temporarily in an alternate agency. Games turn out to be a vessel for communicating different modes of agency, for writing them down and storing them. Games create an archive of agencies. And playing games is how we familiarize ourselves with different modes of agency, which helps us develop our capacity to fluidly change our own style of agency. (shrink)

It is a common experience to be surprised by an artwork. In this paper, I examine how and why this obvious fact matters for philosophical aesthetics. Following recent works in psychology and philosophers such as Davidson or Scheffler, we will see that surprise qualifies as an emotion of a special kind, essentially “cognitive” or “epistemic” in its nature and functioning. After some preliminary considerations, I wish to hold two general claims: the first one will be that surprise is somehow related (...) to aesthetic appreciation, because it is often the ground to judge of a work’s value. The second point will be that a functional analysis of surprise provides support for cognitivist accounts of aesthetics. If this picture is right, surprise would generally play an important part in aesthetic experience and should also be seen as a paradigm to study the cognitive powers of art. (shrink)

This paper attempts to revive interest in the speech act theory of literature by looking into Monroe C. Beardsley's account in particular. Beardsley's view in this respect has received, surprisingly, less attention than deserved. I first offer a reconstruction of Beardsley's account and then use it to correct some notable misconceptions. Next, I show that the reformulation reveals a hitherto unnoticed discrepancy in Beardsley's position and that this can be explained away by a weak version of intentionalism that Beardsley himself (...) actually tolerates. Finally, I assess the real difficulty of Beardsley's theory and its relevance today. (shrink)

he relationship between decadence and aesthetics is an intimate and complex one. Both the stock figure of the aesthete and the aestheticism of ‘art for art’s sake’ are classic decadent tropes with obvious sources in figures such as Théophile Gautier, Walter Pater, Joris-Karl Huysmans. Yet the links between aesthetics and decadence are more conflicted than might first appear: historically, aesthetics has served both as a site for the theorisation of decadence and as the basis of an attempt to stem it. (...) The purpose of this chapter is to examine these intricate ties. (shrink)

The Necessity of Origins is the thesis that, necessarily, if a material object wholly originates from some particular material, then it could not have wholly originated from any significantly non-overlapping material. Several philosophers have argued for this thesis using as a premise a principle that we call ‘Single Origin Necessity’. However, we argue that Single Origin Necessity is false. So any arguments for The Necessity of Origins that rely on Single Origin Necessity are unsound. We also argue that the Necessity (...) of Origins itself is false. Our arguments rely on a thesis in the ontology of art that we find plausible: Multi-Work Materialism. It is the thesis that works of art that have multiple concrete manifestations are co-located with those manifestations. (shrink)

Nelson Goodman notoriously distinguished between autographic works, whose instances should be identified by taking history of production into account, and allographic works, whose instances can be identified independently of history of production. Scholars such as Jerrold Levinson, Flint Schier, and Gregory Currie have criticized Goodman’s autographic/allographic distinction arguing that all works are such that their instances should be identified by taking history of production into account. I will address this objection by exploiting David Davies’ distinction between e-instances and p-instances of (...) a work, thereby restating the autographic/allographic distinction. Then, I will show that this way of restating this distinction leads us to effective accounts of relevant related phenomena such as forgery, plagiarism, and digital technologies. Finally, I will show the theoretical advantages of my account of the autographic/allographic distinction in comparison with an alternative account recently proposed by Jason D’Cruz and P.D. Magnus. (shrink)

This collection of writings on aesthetics includes selections from Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Mikhail Bakhtin, Sigmund Freud, Martin Heidegger, Amy Mullin, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Frederich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling. This collection may still be available as a print-on-demand title at the Ryerson University bookstore.

This out-of-print, two-volume, photocopy packet, in the area of "Surrealism and the Politics of the Particular" includes readings on language, meaning, and surrealism from Adorno, Benjamin, McCumber, Breton, Heidegger, Freud, Kristeva, Ricouer, and Bataille.

This is a critical discussion of Nick Zangwill’s Aesthetic Creation Theory of Art, as he has presented the theory in his book Aesthetic Creation. The discussion focuses on two questions: first, whether the notion of art implied by Zangwill’s theory is at once too wide and too narrow; second, whether Zangwill is right about the persistence conditions of works of art.

An analysis of three pictorial works by Ugo Nespolo is put forward: "Barbe posticce" (1977); "Guardar Manzoni" (1974); "Il museo: Fontana" (1975). It is claimed that such works embody meditations on the concept and the varieties of representation, that they prompt critical reflections on the role of museums in art-making, and that they suggest an alternative route to that of the 'dematerialization' of the art object for the understanding of contemporary art.

In this text we intend to analyze Bill Viola’s video installation Nantes Triptych (1992) as an example of the richness which lies in the liminal spaces between arts. We defend the thesis that the utilization of the traditional pictorial structure of the triptych in this particular work, along with the powerful audiovisual material, renders a kairological event available to the viewer. This temporal experience makes possible an existential experience when in front of this video installation. To discuss this assumption we (...) will use classical art theory texts about the triptychs, as well as, among others, Deleuze’s texts about time image and the triptych structure, Agamben’s concept of kairos, the concept of kairological artwork coined by David Chan and the philosophy of temporality developed by Merleau-Ponty. (shrink)

The traditional conception of art is about sensual beauty and refined taste; modern art on the other hand has introduced an entirely unexpected dimension to the visual arts, namely that of ‘revelatory narrative’. Classical art aspires to present works which can be appreciated as sensually beautiful; modern art, when it succeeds, presents us instead with the unsettling narrative. This radical difference in artistic purpose is something relatively new, and not yet fully appreciated or understood.

The late vision theorist David Marr identified three levels of explanation that he argued needed to be addressed in order to understand vision : (i) the psychological, functional or computational level of processes; (ii) the physical or neurological which is the level of explanation employed by Zeki; and (iii) the algorithmic – the level of implementation. For Zeki’s purpose of drawing upon vision-theory in order to better understand art and aesthetics, there is no need to focus on the third level. (...) I would argue however that in order to draw upon brain science to understand art, the first two levels of explanation are necessary. (shrink)

Si no me falla la memoria, fue el dibujante Álvaro Barrios quien afirmó que el trabajo del artista contemporáneo colombiano se desarrolla según una agenda de trabajo. Si miramos algunos fenómenos del arte último en Colombia, podemos señalar que su agenda está determinada por el intento de comprensión de los procesos de la violencia en el país, a partir de una amplia gama de aproximaciones al concepto de memoria que ha tenido resonancia en las disciplinas humanísticas, las investigaciones académicas, el (...) uso político del concepto por parte de la legislación estatal, y una gran diversidad de eventos artísticos. Desde el ámbito del arte, exposiciones como Destierro y reparación (2008), Tapices de Mampuján (2010), La guerra que no hemos visto (2009) o La piel de la memoria (2011), han discutido sobre la violencia en Colombia desde la aproximación a los procesos de comprensión de la memoria y nuestro pasado reciente. Así, la imbricación de violencia y memoria se manifiesta en la visión del pasado y en los efectos que este puede desplegar sobre el presente, en tanto se ha considerado, incluso, a la memoria como una instancia de reconciliación social. (shrink)

La obra de Yosman Botero siempre ha orbitado entre paradojas. Desde los mismos lugares suplementarios de su obra, como los títulos de sus series Full of Emptiness (2013), Immaterial matter (2014) y Postcolombino (2016) se plantea una encrucijada tanto de la “supervivencia de las imágenes” del arte como de su capacidad comunicativa de la realidad: ya sea esta la experiencia del arte o la realidad social colombiana, o lo que sea que entendemos por “lo real”, tan cara a las propuestas (...) simulacionistas y posapropiacionistas de las décadas del setenta y ochenta. Y digo paradojas porque aquí se juega en los terrenos de una intención inexpresiva ante los procesos de creación de la imagen: Opie, Haring, Negret, Davies, Los Simpsons, Velásquez, o el conflicto colombiano, no son más que el mundo al que Yosman Botero se refiere; pero es un mundo sometido a los procesos de reproducción y mediación cultural, y reflejado en las imágenes. (shrink)

A brief overview of the current status of the scholarship on Heidegger and contemporary art and of the contributions included in the special issue.

Modern art has yet to be properly explained and given its own distinctive and authentic philosophy. It is almost always portrayed – openly or subliminally – as if it were somehow striving for much the same objectives as classical art, though perhaps by very different means. This has the effect of making modern artworks look slightly ridiculous in comparison with the grandeur of their classical counterparts, at the same time as making it an uphill struggle to try to argue the (...) case for their supposed value. (shrink)

Art is about the exploration of the strange and disturbing; it is not about classical fine crafting. Artists use artworks to exteriorise their inner landscapes, thereby allowing others to experience their take on life, at least vicariously. It is this exteriorisation which is ‘art’, not the aesthetic features of the individual artworks themselves, which is properly the domain of crafting and design. Aesthetics cannot explain the work of many major modern contemporary artists, because it fails to locate the underlying unifying (...) ideas. Jeff Koons qualifies as an artist not because of his production of standalone objects, but because behind these objects is a distinctive and unusual mentality and mindset which gives meaning to them. This is where the art of Jeff Koons is to be located. His work is contrasted with that of Andy Warhol and Damien Hirst, in order to further illustrate and clarify the conception of art employed in this study. (shrink)

One of the difficulties standing in the way of a straightforward understanding of art is caused by the confusion that arises at a very basic level between the purposes and functions of various types of crafted material. In fact, there are only three major types – covering all eventualities – and being able to differentiate between them very much helps to pinpoint exactly what the special nature of ‘art’ is.

‘Art’ still needs a practical, useful definition, not of the academic variety, but rather of the plain and simple sort that you can usefully take with you into a gallery, and apply directly to what you see. People want to know, with a basic clarity, what it is they are looking at, and how to judge the good from the bad. Because if you don’t know what ‘art’ is, and you think it’s all about ‘classical fine crafting’, then you are (...) missing out on a very special type of experience, and an entire realm of imaginative possibilities. As it turns out, the best way to think of ‘art’ – taking a huge hint from the concept of ‘arthouse cinema’ - is not about delighting in solemn, stolid museum pieces, and developing a deferential love of the classical: it is all about an exploration - through various available media - of the strange, the disturbing, and the darkly fascinating. The great thing about art is that it offers a safe and enjoyable environment in which to contemplate all kinds of darkness, without having to submit to this negativity in life itself. (shrink)

Capitalism—as Marx has shown and Schumpeter has reminded us—has always promoted creative destruction practices. What in fact helps capitalism survive is the constant renewal of its products, modes of production, and needs through its own self-destructiveness. Capitalist destruction is a clearing out, a maneuver, a revaluation, and the presupposition for creation, all at once. It is a unification, the embracing of multiple and seemingly incompatible activities whose common component mainly consists in positivity: in their ability to reverse, to beautify destruction (...) and its products. Capitalism's destructiveness gains its “literal meaning” in real space—interestingly involving biological metaphors into its analysis. It then presents itself as regeneration, as a natural, organic condition, and—in its purest manifestation—as life itself. At the antipode of capitalist creative destructions stands yet again a destructive practice, negatively charged and described by an allegoric, historic, frightening name:“vandalism.”. (shrink)

Modern contemporary art remains a mystery because most people – including art critics and even artists themselves – are unable to see beyond the imprisoning confines of classical fine art. Everything is judged in terms of beauty and technical skill, when it should be viewed from a quite different perspective, namely that of the imaginative world that the modern artwork is a part of. Successful and authentic modern art is about creating worlds of the imagination - like a film, or (...) a novel - only this time using different media. Modern artworks are like lobby cards and film stills to imaginative worlds, and they should not be seen as aesthetic ends-in-themselves. And for an artwork to be authentically artistic, as opposed to merely crafted, it must invoke a ‘strange and disturbing’ imaginative world, not a variant of the world we currently inhabit, as that world is the world of crafted and aesthetic objects. (shrink)

This article examines the fourteen conditions constituting Levinson and Alperson’s taxonomy of conditions for temporal arts. It claims that some of the conditions and several of the lists of arts exemplifying them need revision. It recommends adding a new condition concerned with the effects of the passage of time on gardens, environmental sculpture, and outdoor installations. The article concludes that gardens may be a model for understanding and appreciating other arts sharing the same bi-(multi-) modality.

The genre to which an artwork belongs affects how it is to be interpreted and evaluated. An account of genre and of the criteria for genre membership should explain these interpretative and evaluative effects. Contrary to conceptions of genres as categories distinguished by the features of the works that belong to them, I argue that these effects are to be explained by conceiving of genres as categories distinguished by certain of the purposes that the works belonging to them are intended (...) to serve. (shrink)

What follows here is not a definition of art by decree. Nor is this some kind of art manifesto. We are not saying this is how art should be, or could be, but how it is, if you let go of the prison of aesthetics, and follow an infinitely more interesting conceptual trail. This is about uncovering and identifying an approach to art which avoids the triviality of sensory-based aesthetic theory and moves instead towards exploring the experiential worlds that art (...) presents us with. And this approach is not about diminishing the sensory enjoyment of artworks, but about placing them in a much richer context, where they can work a far greater magic. (shrink)

Katy Deepwell calls for a vital and visible "new" feminist criticism in 1997 amidst a pessimistic overview of the state of feminist art and criticism in Britain, Canada, and the U.S. As an update to this review, I note that Deepwell took decisive and effective action on her pessimism and for the past twenty years (as of this writing in July 2017) created an online feminist journal--n.paradoxa: international feminist art journal--that has published over 550 articles by 400 writers and artists (...) from more than 80 countries. After 40 issues, the journal has come to an end. What a success story! (shrink)

Most artworks—or at least most among those standardly subject to philosophical scrutiny—appear to be singular, stand-alone works. However, some artworks (indeed, perhaps a good many) are by contrast best viewed in terms of some larger grouping or ordering of artworks. i.e., as a series. The operative art-theoretic notion of series in which I am interested here is that of an individual and distinct artwork that is itself non-trivially composed of a non-trivial sequence of artworks (e.g., Walter de Maria’s Statement Series, (...) Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colors)—as opposed to an art-historically informative or art critically productive thematically, stylistically, or formally unified ordering or grouping of individual and distinct artworks within an artist’s larger body of work (e.g., Kiki Smith’s Blue Print series, Dan Flavin’s Monuments to V. Tatlin series, Jeff Koons’ Made in Heaven series, Robert Rauschenberg’s Tribute 21 series). Given this, my aim is simply to sketch a minimal descriptive and classificatory framework for serial art within which certain informative distinctions may be made and further philosophical enquiry may productively take place. (shrink)

Abstract: For art to be art it has to present the viewer with a distinctly out-of-the-ordinary perspective on everyday reality. Art is to be clearly differentiated from all forms of decorative craft, which are essentially concerned only with aesthetic experiences. Art is essentially about finding ways, through the manipulation and orchestration of presentational media – such as painting, sculpture, literature, film, and performance – to bring to life strange and unusual perceptions. All these media are quasi-theatrical and poetic in nature, (...) in that they are essentially gestural, referential, and symbolic, and they present material in a condensed and allusive form. Andy Warhol’s work is an example of the theatrical manipulation of presentational media to create a strange and unusual universe. (shrink)

I argue for the possibility of a proprioceptive art in addition to, for example, visual or auditory arts, where aspects of some martial arts will serve as examples of that art form. My argument is inspired by a thought of Ted Shawn’s, one of the pioneers of American modern dance: "Dance is the only art wherein we ourselves are the stuff in which it is made.” In a first step, I point out that in some practices of martial arts (in (...) the paper I will introduce “hyongs” & “katas”), we are, too, the stuff these performances are made of. Second, I show that we, as martial arts practitioners, are not in the first place visual or auditorial observers (as common in painting or music or ballet) but introspective, proprioceptive perceivers of our bodies and their movements. (As a corollary we get that we are, in such a case, necessarily our exclusive audience.) In an third crucial step, I show that the martial arts practices referred to, hyongs & katas, and especially the proprioceptive aspects thereof, can indeed count as art. Thus, proprioceptive art is possible because some practices of some martial arts are actual existing examples of that art form. (shrink)

The noise factor is the ratio of signal to noise of an input signal to that of the output signal. Noise can block or interfere with the meaning of a message in both human and electronic communication. But in Information Theory, noise is still considered to be information. By refining the definition of noise as that which addresses us outside of our preferred comfort zone, Joseph Nechvatal's Immersion Into Noise investigates multiple aspects of cultural noise by applying the audio understanding (...) of noise to the visual, architectural and cognitive domains. Nechvatal expands and extends our understanding of the function of cultural noise by taking the reader through the immersive and phenomenal aspects of noise into algorithmic and network contexts, beginning with his experience in the Abside of the Grotte de Lascaux. -/- Immersion Into Noise is intended as a conceptual handbook useful for the development of a personal-political-visionary art of noise. On a planet that is increasingly technologically linked and globally mediated, how might noises break and re-connect in distinctive and productive ways within practices located in the world of art and thought? Joseph Nechvatal explores this intriguing question in Immersion Into Noise. (shrink)

This book is the outcome of a series of lectures on art-related topics which Margolis gave in various places, including Finland, Russia, Japan and the USA, from 1995 through 1997. Mainly these lectures vividly distill views which Margolis has developed more fully elsewhere. Also, as his readers know, Margolis has an unusually allencompassing and closely integrated series of views on almost all of the main issues concerning both art and philosophy generally. Thus the task of a reviewer of this book (...) is the difficult one of somehow coming to terms and finding something useful to say (in a brief compass) on the full sweep of Margolis's philosophy as encapsulated by these lectures. (shrink)

I explore the interrelations between the ontological and aesthetic issues raised by ready-mades such as Duchamp’s Fountain. I outline a hylomorphic metaphysics which has two central features. First, hylomorphically complex objects have matter to which they are not identical. Secondly, when such objects are artefacts (including artworks), it is essential to them that they are the products of creative work on their matter. Against this background, I suggest that ready-mades are of aesthetic interest because they pose a dilemma. Is there (...) really an object, a sculpture, that is distinct from its matter, a urinal, which object is created merely by the artist’s choice of the urinal? Or are we dealing with a case in which an artist passes off something, a urinal, as if it were a sculpture, even though it is not one? (shrink)

While pluralism in ontology of art improves on various monistic views, through its eclectic approach it lost a lot of their simplicity, parsimony, unity and intuitiveness. The dualistic theory presented in this paper offers an alternative – it shares the advantages of the monistic views while retaining the wide scope of pluralism, and thus should be preferred for methodological reasons. On this view all artworks are at the same time abstract universals which are called recipes, and particular physical objects – (...) realisations. The fact that various artworks seem to differ in their ontology is due to certain fairly consistent culturally determined biases which cause people to prioritise the above compounds differently in cases of different arts. Thus the diversity of arts should not be considered on the level of ontology, as the pluralists would hold, but epistemology, or even further – socially determined phenomena concerning customary perception of various artworks. (shrink)

Jenny Saville is a leading contemporary painter of female nudes. This paper explores her work in light of theories of gender and embodied agency. Recent work on the phenomenology of embodiment draws a distinction between the body image and the body schema. The body image is your representation of your own body, including your visual image of it and your emotional attitudes towards it. The body schema is comprised of your proprioceptive knowledge, your corporeally encoded memories, and your corporeal proficiency (...) with respect to various environments and activities. Saville is concerned with body image issues, and I discuss how she reconfigures representational practices with respect to feminine body images. However, the most exciting potential for feminist analysis of the state of the female nude derives from the concept of the body schema, for this concept endows the human body with subjectivity and agency. My key question, then, is by what pictorial means and to what extent Saville succeeds in representing agentic womanhood. I argue that interpreting Saville’s paintings from the standpoint of the body schema demonstrates the radicality of her remaking of the female nude and the rapport between her imagery and feminist values. (shrink)

I propose a minimal account of authorship that specifies the fundamental nature of the author-relation and its minimal domain composition in terms of a three-place causal-intentional relation holding between agents and sort-relative works. I contrast my account with the minimal account tacitly held by most authorship theories, which is a two-place relation holding between agents and works simpliciter. I claim that only my view can ground productive and informative principled distincitons between collective production and collective authorship.

I sketch here an intuitive picture of repeatable artworks as created types, which are individuated in part by historical paths (re)production. Although attractive, this view has been rejected by a number of authors on the basis of general claims about abstract objects. On consideration, however, these general claims are overgeneralizations, which whilst true of some abstracta, are not true of all abstract objects, and in particular, are not true of created types. The intuitive picture of repeatable artworks as created types (...) is, then, left in place. (shrink)

On the whole, neither those who hold that pornography can never be art nor their opponents specify what they actually mean by ‘art’, even though it seems natural that their conclusions should vary depending on how the concept is understood. This paper offers a ‘definitional crossword’ and confronts some definitions of pornography with the currently most well-established definitions of art. My discussion shows that following any of the modern definitions entails that at least some pornography not only can be, but (...) actually is, art. (shrink)

"The concluding chapter, penned by C. E. Emmer, both revisits and greatly expands upon disputations within the contested territory of kitsch as term and tool in cultural turf-war arsenals. Focusing on debates surrounding two visual responses to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, Dennis Madalone's 2003 music video for the patriotic anthem 'America We Stand As One' and Jenny Ryan's 'plushie' sculpture, 'Soft 9/11,' Emmer utilizes these debates to reveal the coexisting and competing attitudes towards ostensibly kitschy objects and (...) the contentiousness of deploying kitsch as a term in these debates. The buzzing activity of the internet provides much of the raw material for his arguments. Through his close reading of both the works themselves and the public response to them, Emmer once more focuses attention on the competing and overlapping attitudes towards kitsch and the way in which it and its semantic cousins remain a viable and valuable resource with which to police the borders that surround the artworld. Ultimately, his contribution further grounds a wider premise operative in this collection--namely, that a simple and rigid dichotomy of kitsch and (high) art does not and indeed cannot capture the elusive and mercurial nature of kitsch." --from the editor's introduction. (shrink)

This paper aims at propounding possible relations between the concepts of time and art in Martin Heidegger’s thinking. Time and art which hold a central place in different periods of Heidegger’s thinking in line with his fundamental question of Being are considered together mainly through the analysis of artwork’s temporal characteristics. The temporality of the artwork in question is investigated specifically in terms of its basic elements of earth and world and with its relation to authenticity. In this respect, it (...) is argued that the work of art bears a temporality of its own and an attempt is made to show how this is realized with the experience of art. (shrink)