During the past few decades, everyday aesthetics has established itself as a new branch of philosophical aesthetics alongside the more traditional philosophy of art. The Paths from Philosophy of Art to Everyday Aesthetics explores the intimate relations between these two branches of contemporary aesthetics. The essays collected in this volume discuss a wide range of topics from aesthetic intimacy to the nature of modernity and the essence of everydayness, which play important roles both in the philosophy of art and everyday (...) aesthetics. With these essays, the writers and editors of this volume wish to commemorate professor Arto Haapala on his 60th birthday. -/- This collection of articles is intended for scholars and students working in the fields of aesthetics, philosophy, and art studies. (shrink)

This article reconstructs Jean-François Lyotard’s theory of the sublime in contemporary art, focusing on his claim that such art ‘presents’ the unpresentable, and tracing its origins in Kant’s account of the sublime. I propose that Lyotard identifies a difficulty concerning Kant’s account: to understand why the disparate elements in the experience of the sublime should be synthesized to form that experience. Lyotard recasts this difficulty as a pragmatic problem for artistic practice – how to ‘testify’ to the absolute in a (...) non-absolute, sensibly perceivable object – that can be understood to drive avant-garde artistic experimentation. (shrink)

Cultural theories of art were developed to account for the arthood of nonaesthetic and nonimitative artworks. Historical theories such as those proposed by Jerrold Levinson, James Carney, and Noël Carroll fail to account for the arthood of first art and ethnological objects, as does the disjunctive theory of Stephen Davies. An institutional (artworld-based) theory, such as George Dickie’s 1977 version, can account for the arthood of art made within the context of an artworld. But what of objects that are art (...) now but were not made in an artworld context? I add a supplement to Dickie’s institutional theory: the concept of art by proxy. (shrink)

I offer a Darwinian perspective on the existence of aesthetic interests, tastes, preferences, and productions. It is distinguished from the approaches of Denis Dutton and Geoffrey Miller, drawing instead on Richard O. Prum's notion of biotic artworlds. The relevance of neuroaesthetics to the philosophy of art is defended.

Might architecture be reconceived as a form of performance? I draw upon Nelson Goodman’s writing on architecture—including his account of architectural notation—and David Davies’s performance theory, which claims that artworks should be considered not as products made by generative performances, but rather as the performances themselves. I tie the exemplification that Goodman identifies as the primary way architectural works ‘mean’ to the role of the architectural ‘score’, recast not as a mere ‘constraint’ but as integral to the creative processes by (...) which architecture establishes an ‘artistic statement’ and a distinctive ‘virtual’ realm. In so doing, I reconcile such a position with an aesthetics of reception, whereby the situated encounter with the physical building is seen as essential to the critical retrieval of any given architectural performance. I test this position against a late work by Sigurd Lewerentz, completed when he was in his eighties, and examine the extraordinary lengths necessitated by his idiosyncratic imperative not to cut any bricks, thereby articulating an artwork every bit as radical as contemporaneous works by conceptual artists. (shrink)

The phrase “the end of art” has a long association with Arthur C. Danto.1 Indeed, Danto popularized the idea and offered an explanation of this puzzling notion. How could there have been an end of art when it has robustly continued? For this question to make sense, the meaning of “end” is not in the sense of termination, finality, or death in a literal, physical sense. So in 1912 when Marius de Zayas pronounced “art is dead,” he must have thought (...) the historical circumstances warranted it and found the metaphor illuminating: “[Art’s] present movements are not at all indications of vitality; they are not even the convulsions of agony prior to death; they are the mechanical reflex actions of a corpse.”2 In less .. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Art's DetourA Clash of Aesthetic TheoriesS. K. Wertz (bio)Both John Dewey1 and Martin Heidegger2 thought that art's audience had to take a detour in order to appreciate or understand a work of art. They wrote about this around the same time (mid-1930s) and independently of one another, so this similar circumstance in the history of aesthetics is unusual since they come from very different philosophical traditions. What was it (...) about the climate of the times that led them to such an idea? Is it still viable today? Both philosophers thought that art's audience is not in a position to immediately appreciate works of art—that we are missing something for a direct appreciation or apprehension—so we must take a detour. Why the detours and what are they? Are the detours similar? And are Dewey and Heidegger right about this? The essay that unfolds below attempts to answer these questions.First a definition is in order so we know what the term "detour" means when I use it. What is a detour? It is a deviation from a direct course or the usual procedure; a roundabout way temporarily replacing part of a route; in other words, a bypass or a roundabout way to some destination. The Little Oxford Dictionary adds a different twist on my characterization: "a course that leaves and rejoins [the] direct route."3 Applying this idea to art, we can say that a detour describes an audience who ordinarily perceives an artwork is a legitimate beginning for an appreciation of it, but that course must be bypassed for another (conception) before it can rejoin the direct route (perception). In other words, perceptions in the aesthetic experience must be aided by conceptions—a decidedly Kantian stance taken by Dewey and Heidegger. Their illustrations make my interpretation plausible.One of Heidegger's examples is Van Gogh's painting of a pair of peasant boots.4 He selects this painting to illustrate his metaphysics, which centers around the notion of "equipment." Peasant boots are equipment in [End Page 100] the sense that they are worn or used; the mere thing (like shoes or boots in a store [exhibited] or a closet [in storage]) disappears in use and becomes equipment. Between equipment and mere things—these two categories of being—are artworks. They are pictorial representations of equipment (in Heidegger's illustration; a pair of shoes as mere things could be a pictorial representation, like an advertisement, but it wouldn't be the same). Through the painted boots, a world comes into focus—a network of meaning. The world Heidegger sees in the Van Gogh painting is captured in the following descriptions: "In the vicinity of the [art]work we were suddenly somewhere else than we usually tend to be…. The art work let us know what shoes are in truth" (ATCR 233). So the nature of art is still a question about the nature of representation for Heidegger: it is what the shoes disclose to us about human existence. As he says, it is not just merely a pair of shoes portrayed but shoes "from the dark opening of the worn insides … the toilsome tread of the worker stares forth" (ATCR 232). In other words, we see the difficult labor that this particular owner toiled with in her daily chores.In Tralbaut's book, he quotes Heidegger in a caption alongside the painting: "Engraving in the intimate obscurity of the hollow of a boot is the weariness of the steps of work. The rough and solid weight of the clog tells of the slow and obstinate trudge across the fields."5 Heidegger continues in the same vein:In the stiffly rugged heaviness of the shoes there is the accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through the far-spreading and ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind. On the leather lie the dampness and richness of the soil. Under the soles slides the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls. In the shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening grain and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of... (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to investigate appropriate methods for educating students into citizenship within a pluralistic state and to explain why civic education is itself important. In this discussion, I will offer suggestions as to how students might be best prepared for their future political roles as participants in a democracy, and how we, as theorists, ought to structure institutions and curricula in order to ensure that students are adequately trained for political decision making. The paper is divided (...) into six sections. In the first two sections, I argue that community is a learned understanding and that such education,even when it supports liberal commitments,cannot be neutral. I use the social contract tradition as an entrance into the perpetual nature of conflict within a pluralist society. In the third and fourth sections, I develop a pedagogy geared towards educating students into what I call cognitive conflict, and argue that the arts, widely understood, should be privileged over other disciplines. In the fifth section, I examine two difficulties inherent inmy pedagogy — first that it seems to demandthat all perspectives be taught, and second that it seems to promote anxiety among students. In the final section, I ask that political theory reexamine the role of harmony in justice. I conclude that a managed conflictis a more acceptable organizational description of liberal political structures. (shrink)

David Lewis insists that restrictivist composition must be motivated by and occur due to some intuitive desiderata for a relation R among parts that compose wholes, and insists that a restrictivist’s relation R must be vague. Peter van Inwagen agrees. In this paper, I argue that restrictivists need not use such examples of relation R as a criterion for composition, and any restrictivist should reject a number of related mereological theses. This paper critiques Lewis and van Inwagen (and others) on (...) their respective mereological metaphysics, and offers a Golden Mean between their two opposite extremes. I argue for a novel account of mereology I call Modal Mereology that is an alternative to Classical Mereology. A modal mereologist can be a universalist about the possible composition of wholes from parts and a restrictivist about the actual composition of wholes from parts. I argue that puzzles facing Modal Mereology (e.g., puzzles concerning Cambridge changes and the Problem of the Many, and how to demarcate the actual from the possible) are also faced in similar forms by classical universalists. On my account, restricted composition is rather motivated by and occurs due to a possible whole’s instantiating an actual type. Universalists commonly believe in such types and defend their existence from objections and puzzles. The Modal Mereological restrictivist can similarly defend the existence of such types (adding that such types are the only wholes) from similar objections and puzzles. (shrink)

Many artists, art critics, and poets suggest that an aesthetic appreciation of artworks may modify our perception of the world, including quotidian things and scenes. I call this Art-to-World, AtW. Focusing on visual artworks, in this paper I articulate an empirically-informed account of AtW that is based on content related views of aesthetic experience, and on Goodman’s and Elgin’s concept of exemplification. An aesthetic encounter with artworks demands paying attention to its aesthetic, expressive, or design properties that realize its purpose. (...) Attention to these properties make percipients better able to spot them in other entities and scenes as well. The upshot is that an aesthetic commerce with artworks enlarges the scope of what we are able to see and has therefore momentous epistemic consequences. (shrink)

Many artists, art critics, and poets suggest that an aesthetic appreciation of artworks may modify our perception of the world, including quotidian things and scenes. I call this Art-to-World, AtW. Focusing on visual artworks, in this paper I articulate an empirically-informed account of AtW that is based on content-related views of aesthetic experience, and on Goodman’s and Elgin’s concept of exemplification. An aesthetic encounter with artworks demands paying attention to its aesthetic, expressive, or design properties that realize its purpose. Attention (...) to these properties make percipients better able to spot them in other entities and scenes as well. The upshot is that an aesthetic commerce with artworks enlarges the scope of what we are able to see and has therefore momentous epistemic consequences. (shrink)

Definire l’arte? Danto è un filosofo pirotecnico, acuto e colto, e da quasi trent’anni è anche l’influente critico d’arte del settimanale radical newyorkese «The Nation». Per quanto Danto lamenti una certa disattenzione nei suoi confronti da parte dei critici e degli storici dell’arte, è invece persuaso — a ragione, anche se forse limitatamente al mondo anglo-americano — che il suo famoso articolo del 1964, The Artworld, — poi sostanzialmente rielaborato in forme diverse — «really did become...

The notion of naivety is a form of classification and explanation of the social world. By applying Erving Goffman’s expression games model, it is observed that the notion of naivety corresponds to a situation in which an observer assumes that the observed subject does not accommodate his behavior to the presence of the observer, in the assumption that the latter might take advantage from what he learns from it. This article explores this model’s explanatory power in reference to the diverse (...) forms in which the notion of naivety is used in contexts where transinteractive structures of the art world have to be taken into account. La noción de ingenuidad es una forma cotidiana de clasificación y explicación del mundo social. Usando el modelo de juegos de expresión de Erving Goffman, se observa que ella corresponde a la situación en que un actor asume que otro no modifica su comportamiento teniendo en cuenta lo que el primero aprende de él para alcanzar sus propios objetivos. En este artículo se explora la utilidad de este modelo para explicar el uso de la noción de ingenuidad en referencia a estructuras transinteractivas de mundos del arte. (shrink)

In this paper, I set out to answer two foundational questions concerning our psychological engagements with fictions. The first is the question of fictional transformation: How we can see fictional media while also ‘seeing’ those objects as fictional ones? The second is the question of fictional response: How and why we take the objects of fiction to be the types of things that we can respond to and judge? Standard responses to these questions rely on distinct cognitive attitudes like pretense, (...) imagination, and make-believe. I call this position the distinct attitude view. I argue against the DAV, arguing instead that a psychological framework of fiction can answer the two questions without appealing to distinct mental attitudes. Hence, I call my position the standard attitude view. The challenge for the SAV is to explain the two questions in terms of everyday mental states and the intentional content of those states. I do so by appealing to the concept of taking the fictional stance.... (shrink)

This paper examines the hitherto neglected resonance between Danto's and Derrida's concepts of the Artworld and the Frame. In doing so, I challenge prevalent understandings of Danto's theoretical framework, highlighting the necessary instability that he integrates into his definition of the art object. Equally, I emphasise the applicability of Derrida's deconstructive concept to the concrete conditions of contemporary artistic practice. I begin by examining the tensions present in Danto's definitional approach, as it demands a complex vision of Artworld relations. I (...) then consider how the ontologically constitutive character of Danto's Artworld may be re-examined through Derrida's concept of the parergon, as a supplementary techné that is fundamentally unstable and fragmented. Through this comparative reading I show that despite their different approaches, Danto's and Derrida's philosophies of art advance similar ontological conclusions. I thus argue that while their differences should not be minimised, our understanding of Danto's and Derrida's aesthetic concepts is enriched through recognition of their unforeseen correspondences. (shrink)

This article develops a theory of serial reading rethought as a theory of serial unreading, a processual form of attention directed toward virtual principles of production, whether a procedure, formula, operation, algorithm, or even an obsessive compulsion. The material specificity of the series’ parts matter but only insofar as the concrete detail suggests its own unwinding, the virtual and nonlinear path to its current state. In other words, the value or facility of serial unreading includes rediscovering the rules governing the (...) production of the work. Thus, unreading is not necessarily an end in itself. In fact, by dispersing and expanding our attentional field, acts of unreading make us better readers of nonserial works. In drawing our attention to their governing rules, operations, or patterns of production, serial works generate a primary principle of criticism: the impulse to reverse engineer the object. To show how this works, I examine three twentieth-century items—one series of minimalist drawings and two poetic works. By choosing a small cluster of examples I aim to mimic the oscillations of serial unreading, the way audiences are required to move from one member of the series to the transtextual techne that produced it. By withholding or abjecting the single finished object (often projecting divergent endlessness), serial art projects its governing intention in terms of techne—which subsists virtually along with the actual work as its formal and efficient cause—rather than deep expression. Moving quickly among individual works, I try to show how the feeling of navigating their expanded, multidirectional fields leads us on a cognitive path (whether we take it or not) toward criticism. (shrink)

I offer an analysis of the role played by consideration of an item's functions when it is judged aesthetically. The account applies also to artworks, of which some serve extrinsic functions (such as the glorification of God and the communication of religious lore) and others have the function of being contemplated for their own sake alone. Along the way, I deny that aesthetic judgements fit the model of judgements either of free beauty or of dependent beauty, given how these two (...) came to be described in the early twentieth century. (shrink)

Este estudo discute a questão do fim da arte com base nas reflexões críticas de Clement Greenberg e na posterior apropriação dessas reflexões por Arthur Danto. Em primeiro lugar, pretendo mostrar como a visão negativa de Greenberg acerca da arte produzida a partir dos anos 1960 implica o tema do fim da arte. Em segundo, pretendo expor a tarefa assumida por Danto a partir de sua avaliação dos diagnósticos e da teoria de Greenberg. This paper addresses the question of the (...) end of art based on the critical reflections of Clement Greenberg and the subsequent appropriation of these reflections by Arthur Danto. Firstly, I intend to show how the negative view of Greenberg about art produced from the 60's implies the issue of the end of art. Secondly, I intend to expose the task taken up by Danto based on his debate with Greenberg's theory. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Hegel, Hegelianism, and Historicism The Old Chisholm Trail: Historical Facts, Bits of Knowledge Artworks, The Artworld, and The Brillo Box Revolution The End of Art: Not the End at All Individualism Triumphant Danto and Nietzsche: A Hegelian Synthesis.

This essay discusses the mounted image of St. George slaying an emperor within the broader context of how and why early Christian images were transformed and adapted to the early Byzantine religious style. The representational framework of Arthur Danto’s philosophical system is used to tie together the threads of this research. By drawing parallels between changes in contemporary art and culture – often referred to as the modern/postmodern shift – and the transition of the Hellenistic to the Byzantine era, structures (...) common to artistic creation and reception are brought to the fore. The case study presents the history of the depiction of St. George slaying Diocletian, how it emerged in the Caucasus region, and the manner in which it reflects the stylistic changes that took place in the late antique eastern Roman world. The social, cultural and philosophical ramifications of the shift of high classical art to the early Byzantine style are laid out in terms of art, modes of inquiry, and action-orientation. A theory is presented on what role the image of St. George killing Diocletian may have played in transforming the late antique and early medieval worldview. The final section sketches a philosophical framework that supports the conclusions of this research. (shrink)

This article sketches a strategy for teaching Heidegger’s essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” (“Origin”). I illustrate how one can address Heidegger’s Nazi affiliation while simultaneously engaging his philosophy of art on its own terms—goals that often work at cross purposes in the classroom. Like many, I read “Origin” together with Meyer Schapiro’s critique of Heidegger’s interpretation of a van Gogh still life of shoes, which figures so prominently in “Origin.” My innovation is to pair the Heidegger/Schapiro dispute (...) with Holocaust imagery of victims’ shoes and personal effects. Such imagery serves to introduce historical and political context for the debate and to highlight methodological differences in their conceptions of the meaning, reception, and interpretation of artworks and images more generally. These differences raise big-picture questions about the norms that govern our engagements with art and the theoretical desiderata we want a philosophy of art to satisfy. The dispute between Heidegger and Schapiro, read in conjunction with Holocaust imagery, lends these rather abstract questions a concreteness and urgency that greatly enhances classroom discussion. (shrink)

The rise of popular culture programs in universities is to a significant degree a consequence of the rejection of a particular theory of aesthetics. According to this older, rejected view, the classical, “fine” arts were considered—largely on the basis of complexity of form—higher, more refined, more admirable, and of greater value than other kinds of “popular” creative activities. While the former were the subject of intense critical study, the latter were neglected, seen as unworthy of serious attention. Ultimately, the sociological (...) fact that these classical forms of culture were intimately connected to a certain privileged socioeconomic strata—society’s “elite”—triggered a reassessment of not only the canon but .. (shrink)

What is the sense of the question “What is art?” It may seem that the only adequate answer will be the effort to define the notion of art, that is, the exclusive purpose of this question is the classification of art, encompassing all artifacts regarded as works of art and distinguishing them from those do not belong to art. The study points to the connection between our classification of artifacts and our evaluation and understanding of them. It also recalls reflections (...) on the subject “What is Art?”, which does not even attempt to define it. Their aim is different: to change our understanding, evaluation or explication of art. (shrink)

The last twenty‐five years have seen a radical shift in the work of politically committed artists. No longer content to merely represent social reality, a new generation of artists has sought to change it, blending art with activism, social regeneration projects, and even violent political action. I assess how this form of contemporary art should lead us to rethink theories of artistic value and argue that these works make a convincing case for an often‐dismissed position, namely, the pragmatic view of (...) artistic value. However, the pragmatic view, when properly applied, sets the bar high indeed—art that tries to change society should be considered good art only when it succeeds in making a tangible difference. (shrink)

After briefly noting key contemporary critiques of aesthetic experience, this article revisits its original account in Plato’s theory of aesthetic experience as the madness of divine possession and then Aristotle’s response of defending art’s rationality as poiesis, which largely dominates the ensuing aesthetic tradition. I subsequently explore how the mysterious notion of possession continues to surface in important modern accounts of aesthetic experience (e. g. in Theodor W. Adorno, T. S. Eliot, John Dewey) and explain how the supernatural idea of (...) possession could find a naturalistic explanation that integrates the concepts of artworld, habitus and atmosphere. The article then exemplifies this naturalistic explanation through an analysis of the possession experience pertaining to performance art as documented in The Adventures of the Man in Gold. (shrink)

Roberta Dreon - Richard Shusterman is one of the leading figures in the current field of pragmatist aesthetics and he has undoubtedly played a pivotal role in recovering a pragmatist approach to aesthetics. His book Pragmatist Aesthetics was simultaneously published in France under the title L’Art à l’état vif. La pensée pragmatiste et l’esthétique populaire in 1992, paving the way for a long awaited French translation of Dewey’s Art as Experience in 2010, beaut...

Since the second half of the twentieth century, the influential concept of aesthetic experience has been strongly criticized by powerful voices both in analytic philosophy and in continental theory, sometimes to the point of rejecting its significance for art or even to denying its very existence. Nonetheless, it stubbornly reasserts itself as central to understanding art's meaning and value. Philosophical critique of aesthetic experience takes multiple forms. Theorists seeking a definition of art generally reject aesthetic experience as inadequate for this (...) task because it is both too wide and too narrow. Aesthetic experience surely occurs beyond the limits of art, as in our encounter with natural beauty, but it... (shrink)

Scientists, humanists, and art lovers alike value art not just for its beauty, but also for its social and epistemic importance; that is, for its communicative nature, its capacity to increase one's self-knowledge and encourage personal growth, and its ability to challenge our schemas and preconceptions. However, empirical research tends to discount the importance of such social and epistemic outcomes of art engagement, instead focusing on individuals' preferences, judgments of beauty, pleasure, or other emotional appraisals as the primary outcomes of (...) art appreciation. Here, we argue that a systematic neuroscientific study of art appreciation must move beyond understanding aesthetics alone, and toward investigating the social importance of art appreciation. We make our argument for such a shift in focus first, by situating art appreciation as an active social practice. We follow by reviewing the available psychological and cognitive neuroscientific evidence that art appreciation cultivates socio-epistemic skills such as self- and other-understanding, and discuss philosophical frameworks which suggest a more comprehensive empirical investigation. Finally, we argue that focusing on the socio-epistemic values of art engagement highlights the important role art plays in our lives. Empirical research on art appreciation can thus be used to show that engagement with art has specific social and personal value, the cultivation of which is important to us as individuals, and as communities. (shrink)

Arthur Danto argued from the premiss that artworks are essentially cognitive to the conclusion that they are incidentally aesthetic. I wonder why Danto, and the very many of us he persuaded, came to believe that the cognitive and the aesthetic oppose one another. I argue, contrary to Danto’s historical claims, that the cognitive and the aesthetic did not come into opposition until the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, and that they were brought into opposition for reasons of art-critical expediency (...) rather than philosophical necessity. I conclude that a robustly cognitive notion of the aesthetic remains an option for us. (shrink)

David Hume’s essay “Of the Standard of Taste” —which represents a major step towards clarifying eighteenth-century philosophy’s dawning aesthetics in terms of taste—also relates closely to literal, physical taste. From the analogy between gustatory and critical taste, Hume, apt at judging works of art, puts together a contradictory argument of subjectivism and the normativity of common sense. However, a careful reading of the text unveils a way of appealing to art criticism as a vital component in edifying a philosophically more (...) solid standard of taste. Hume’s emphatic references to a requisite “delicacy” complicate the picture, for it is not clear what this delicacy is, but a close inspection of how Hume frames the criterion of delicacy by means of “practice” and the absence of “prejudice” might perhaps challenge us to address issues of contemporary art. (shrink)

Important work on the relation of pragmatic ethics and aesthetics, such as Steven Fesmire's John Dewey and Moral Imagination: Pragmatism in Ethics, misses an important feature of the entire issue unless non-mimetic representation is invoked to explain the relation between what Dewey would call the "problem" and the "solution" presented in experience. This cannot be elaborated within a Rortyan neo-pragmatism, nor can it be addressed without attending to the "spiritual" aspect of moral agency.

This article explores Heidegger’s ambivalent philosophical relationship with Richard Wagner. After showing how Heidegger situates Wagner within his larger critique of aesthetics, I will explain why Heidegger believes that Wagner’s operas, due to the dominance of music, could not attain the status of “great art.” Because music can do no more than stimulate or intensify feelings, it becomes, for Heidegger, the paradigm of what art has become under the influence of aesthetics. Heidegger’s views on music even motivate him to contest (...) Nietzsche’s thesis that music was the origin of Greek tragedy. Heidegger dismisses Nietzsche’s developmental account and argues instead that poetry is the essence of tragic drama. To conclude, I will show that Heidegger’s exclusive focus on Wagner’s theoretical work is too narrow, for his music reveals ontological concerns that cannot be easily assimilated into Heidegger’s history of aesthetics, and in fact suggest possible affinities with Heidegger’s own philosophical insights. (shrink)

Essays in Literary Aesthetics Ranjan K. Ghosh Springer. 2018. pp. XIII + 82. £49.99.

This work proposes a coevolutionary theory of aesthetics that encompasses both biotic and human arts. Anthropocentric perspectives in aesthetics prevent the recognition of the ontological complexity of the aesthetics of nature, and the aesthetic agency of many non-human organisms. The process of evaluative coevolution is shared by all biotic advertisements. I propose that art consists of a form of communication that coevolves with its own evaluation. Art and art history are population phenomena. I expand Arthur Danto’s Artworld concept to any (...) aesthetic population of producers and evaluators. Current concepts of art cannot exclusively circumscribe the human arts from many forms of non-human biotic art. Without assuming an arbitrarily anthropocentric perspective, any concept of art will need to engage with biodiversity, and either recognize many instances of biotic advertisements as art, or exclude some instances of human art. Coevolutionary aesthetic theory provides a heuristic account of aesthetic change in both human and biotic artworlds, including the coevolutionary origin of aesthetic properties and aesthetic value within artworlds. Restructuring aesthetics, art criticism, and art history without human beings at the organizing centers of these disciplines stimulate new progress in our understanding of art, and the unique human contributions to aesthetics and aesthetic diversity. (shrink)

Philosophers should listen to punk rock. Though largely ignored in analytic aesthetics, punk can shed light on the nature, limits, and value of art. Here, I will begin with an overview of punk aesthetics and then extrapolate two lessons. First, punk intentionally violates widely held aesthetic norms, thus raising questions about the plasticity of taste. Second, punk music is associated with accompanying visual styles, fashion, and attitudes; this points to a relationship between art and identity. Together, these lessons suggest that (...) art appreciation is not just about finding beauty or aesthetic worth but is also about constructing a self. (shrink)

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 78, Issue 1, Page 97-100, Winter 2020.

Supposing that talk of a distinctively artistic type of value is warranted, what separates it from other sorts of value? Any plausible answer must explain both what is of value and what is artistic about artistically valuable properties. Flaws with extant accounts stem from neglect of one component or the other; the account offered here, based on careful attention to actual art-critical practices, brings both together. The “value” component depends on the capacity of artworks to provide subjectively valuable experiences, while (...) the “artistic” component relies on the specific norms constitutive of artworld institutions. Understanding artistic value in this way allows for progress on several persistent problems, including the ethical value of art, relativism in artistic value, and the proper boundaries of philosophical aesthetics. (shrink)

The paper argues that something is art only if (i) it belongs to a special kind of internal history and (ii) needs to be understood and appreciated in the light of such history. This goes against both the traditional view that art has a timeless, ahistorical essence and the historicist view that there can be no ahistorical perspective for understanding art. The paper draws on Hegel’s view that art needs to be understood through its history, but rejects the idea that (...) the history of art has an end in the double sense of a goal and an end point. It also rejects Arthur Danto’s Hegel-inspired claim that the ahistorical essence of art is revealed at the end of its history and opens the door to a natural alliance between philosophers of art and art historians. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to critically address a widespread assumption that reads like this: Works of art that make use of digital media automatically, through interactivity, are generally better suited for generating democratic processes in society than other art forms or phenomena that do not make use of digital media, and, therefore, digital art is more avant-garde than other art forms. By analysing the chains of equivalence underlying this assumption the article presents and discusses a number of issues (...) that, taken together, render this assumption fallacious. (shrink)

In The Necessity of Art Ernst Fischer develops a Marxist aesthetics in the humanist tradition, arguing art’s necessity as both a vehicle of social criticism and as an essential element of humanity. These twin themes place Fischer’s work, then, at the centre of issues in Marxist aesthetics that have traditionally proved contentious: firstly, about the function of art, both under capitalism and universally; and about the relationship – causal or otherwise – between economic conditions and art. Fischer’s aesthetics overemphasises the (...) humanising possibilities of great works of art to the neglect of an everyday aesthetics that argues the possibilities for aesthetic lives based on good work under communism. But he provides a theoretic start to effectively countering structuralist Marxism, and he was in his lifetime – as John Berger’s Introduction movingly conveys – a powerful opponent of the bureaucratisation of art under Zhdanov’s Socialist-Realist creed. (shrink)

El artículo se propone abordar los estudios de patrimonio según una perspectiva alternativa. Elementos como la agencia, la materialidad y la ontología son fundamentales, en tanto están acompañadas por factores como la destrucción o el desgaste, la conservación o la restauración. En este sentido, este artículo deconstruye los mecanismos del patrimonio mueble, en el cual es factible el traslado de fragmentos en diversos ámbitos, como exponente de la objetivación moderna. Asimismo, se plantea en qué medida estas prácticas y la materialidad (...) inciden en la construcción de discursos epistemológicos y categorías disciplinares relativos a los museos. Finalmente, se muestra un caso específico: la introducción de restos materiales procedentes de las misiones jesuíticas-guaraníes al Museo de La Plata a fines del siglo xix. (shrink)

As the Global South is increasingly interpenetrated by neoliberal and authoritarian regimes, the idea of the South as a site of emancipatory resistance and exotic cultural difference has ended. This article offers an alternative route into the cultures of the South. It focuses on the shifting forms of the South in contemporary visual art and outlines the possibilities of the non-coercive forms of cultural exchange and the cartographies of a cosmopolitanism from below. This perspective on the South is most evident (...) in in the stories of embodied solidarity that stand in contrast to the top-down visions of socio-economic development and cultural homogenization. (shrink)

As the Global South is increasingly interpenetrated by neo-liberal and authoritarian regimes the idea of the South as a site of emancipatory resistance and exotic cultural difference has ended. This article offers an alternative route into the cultures of the South. It focuses on the shifting forms of the South in contemporary visual art and outlines the possibilities of non-coercive forms of cultural exchange and the cartographies of a cosmopolitanism from below. This perspective on the South is most evident in (...) the stories of embodied solidarity that stand in contrast to top down visions of socio-economic development and cultural homogenization. (shrink)

What are the groundrules in the philosophy of art? What criteria of adequacy should we use for assessing theories of art?

The premise of this article is straightforward: cheap art as a method and movement, though often ignored in the aesthetics literature, is ideally suited for creative activism. To understand this claim, we must have a working definition of the term "cheap art", which I develop in the first section. In doing so, I focus on four features of cheap art, united by the core idea of anti-elitism, that make it well suited to support creative activism: (1) Cheap art is light, (...) quick, sloppy, and easy to do. (2) Cheap art is made from cheap materials. (3) Cheap art rejects the idea of art as a business created for the artworld elite and aims instead to provide art of the people and for the people. (4) Cheap art challenges its audience members rather than seeking to placate or soothe them. After a brief defense of the claim that cheap art is in fact art, I discuss each aspect in detail, emphasizing its advantages for creative activism. I close with two suggestions for evaluating cheap art, which I argue can be extended to creative activism more broadly. (shrink)

Art theory has consistently emphasised the importance of situational, cultural, institutional and historical factors in viewers’ experience of fine art. However, the link between this heavily context-dependent interpretation and the workings of the mind is often left unexamined. Drawing on relevance theory—a prominent, cogent and productive body of work in cognitive pragmatics—we here argue that fine art achieves its effects by prompting the use of cognitive processes that are more commonly employed in the interpretation of words and other stimuli presented (...) in a communicative context. We describe in particular how institutional factors effectively co-opt these processes for new ends, allowing viewers to achieve cognitive effects that they otherwise would not, and so provide cognitivist backing for an Institutional Theory of Art, such as that put forward by Arthur Danto. More generally, we situate and describe the Western fine art tradition as a phenomenon that is a consequence of both the cognitive processes involved in communication, and of cultural norms, practices and institutions. (shrink)