One typically thinks of the relevance of Kant’s aesthetic theory to Western art in terms of Modernism, thanks in large part to the work of eminent critic and art historian Clement Greenberg. Yet, thinking of Kant’s legacy for contemporary art as inhering exclusively in “Kantian formalism” obscures a great deal of Kant’s aesthetic theory. In his last book, Arthur Danto suggested just this point, urging us to enlarge our appreciation of Kant’s aesthetic theory and its relevance to contemporary art, because, (...) for Danto, “Kant had two conceptions of art.” In this essay, I support and build on Danto’s claim that there are really two conceptions of art at work in Kant’s third Critique, and that the second conception offers a non-Modernist/formalist way that Kant’s aesthetic theory remains relevant to post 1960s art. My ultimate aim is to highlight another facet in the continuing relevance of Kant’s aesthetic theory to post-Expressionist contemporary art, namely, the explicit attention to the differential aesthetic values of nature and art respectively. I shall do this by putting it in dialogue with the art practice of Latvian-American artist, Vija Celmins whose illustrious career since 1960s has made her an ‘artist’s artist’ but who has also recently garnered much wider attention with a retrospective titled “To Fix the Image in Memory.” Celmins takes up artistically a problematic that is quite central philosophically to the concerns of the third Critique, and thus her work illustrates another way in which Kant’s aesthetic theory is of great continuing relevance to the artworld today. (shrink)

Ever since I first saw a dance performance I have wondered why it is that I am sometimes fascinated and touched by some people moving about on a stage, while at other times it leaves me completely indifferent. I will argue that an answer to this question has to be searched for in the way sensory stimuli are processed in the brain. After all, all our actions, perceptions and feelings are mediated and controlled by the brain. The thoughts and feelings (...) evoked by a dance performance are no exception and thus they too have a neural substrate in the brain. (shrink)

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 addresses two issues: the first is the philosopher's fear of a lawless freedom of nature. I quote Deleuze and Guattari, who explain our terror before chaos and the consequent call for help and protection. My hypothesis was that this threat of chaos has affected also the enlightened mind of Kant. Facing the possibility of chaos, the objective Kant did not exactly fear delusion and madness, which affect only fragile subjectivities, but was terrified with the chance that nature does (...) not behave regularly, i.e., that _ knowledge _ becomes impossible. The second issue is a harder and more difficult question, and it is related to the _modern_ artist’s (or genius) anguish. It is a technical or an artistical complaint. He/She finds no more given rules to create his/her artworks. Differently from the philosopher, the genius fears the silence and the absolute muteness of nature. I try to deal with these two issues by taking into account Kant’s concept of purposiveness of nature as a regulative principle. I realize that, although this sufficed to calm down the philosopher’s anxiety, it proved to be insufficient to guide the artist. The delusion and madness that threaten the genius are deeper and more extreme than those of the philosopher. In order to treat the artist’s pain, without having to abandon the connection between art and nature, that constitutes one of the most fruitful reading keys of Kant’s Aesthetics, I resort to other ideas I found reading Lacoue-Labarthe and Hannah Arendt. (shrink)

This article considers the notion of ‘play’ in the plastic arts as described by Johan Huizinga, its definitional relation to the materiality of the art object, and the way in which such a conception rests on a notion of aesthetic order that, after the work of Marcel Duchamp, could not be sustained. I argue that Duchamp’s readymadesforce a re-evaluation of plasticity (and thus of Huizinga’s definition of play), and introduce a permanent revolution of plasticity, which in social and intellectual terms (...) must be considered as the expression of an essential disorder underlying all appearances. It is further argued that Duchamp achieved this by employing strategies of disguise in order to lay bare the epistemic play of surfaces, and thus the contingency of knowledge and identity. Duchamp’s wager was that changing fashions in art revealed that it was neither formal presentation nor skill that defined art, but rather some connection to a hidden realm of disorder, and that this connection could be found, and repeatedly renewed, by ensuring that the art ‘object’ was received as an uncertain bequest. (shrink)

Attempting art: an essay on intention-dependenceIt is a truism among philosophers that art is intention-dependent—that is to say, art-making is an activity that depends in some way on the maker's intentions. Not much thought has been given to just what this entails, however. For instance, most philosophers of art assume that intention-dependence entails concept-dependence—i.e. possessing a concept of art is necessary for art-making, so that what prospective artists must intend is to make art. And yet, a mounting body of anthropological (...) and art-historical evidence and philosophical argument suggests that not only is such a criterion unsatisfied by most of the art-historical canon, but it also rests on a false premise: concepts of 'art' are not shared between cultures, nor even in the same culture across time. My dissertation aims to rectify this error by first exploring what our commitment to art's intention-dependence actually entails, and then showing that, properly understood, intention-dependence sets a number of important constraints on theories of art with respect to explanatory desiderata such as the success- and failure-conditions of art-attempts, the cross-cultural identification of art, and the reference of 'art' and art-kind terms. I begin by situating art's intention-dependence in the philosophical literature on intentional action, arguing that, properly conceived, intention-dependence is a weak criterion which can be satisfied either directly or indirectly. It therefore does not necessarily entail concept-dependence. I then use this distinction to motivate a new treatment of the success- and failure-conditions for art-attempts, arguing that the extant model's emphasis on compliance with 'the manner intended' is far too restrictive to capture actual artistic practices. I go on to show that Ruth Millikan's model of linguistic conventions supplies an independently plausible explanation of art's concept-independent origins in terms of the development of a system of indirectly intention-dependent conventions called an 'artworld'. I argue that this account of artworld development supplies us with the tools we need to distinguish art-kinds from other artifactual kinds. Finally, I turn my attention to methodological issues, arguing that even though 'art' is a social kind with its roots in arbitrary and historically-contingent networks of conventions, the philosophy of art is not merely an exercise in bare conceptual analysis. In fact, there is now a great deal of evidence to show that the ways we think about 'art' are inconsistent, incomplete, imperialistic, and largely unprincipled. Yet I argue that this does not mean that the artworld data have no bearing on theories of art. Instead, I argue that our best reflective understanding of our artworld practices sets the constraints on the reference of 'art' and art-kind terms. I argue that we have no privileged epistemic access to the ontology of social kinds; our only privilege lies in our ability to determine the proper subject of our inquiries. (shrink)

Avtor predstavi dva primera, ko je bil v zgodnjem dvajsetem stoletju kombinezon preoblikovan v projekt z utopijskim potencialom. V Italiji je bil tak primer tuta, v Rusiji pa prozodezhda. V prvem primeru je šlo za enodelni kombinezon, ki je postal po prvi svetovni vojni zelo priljubljeno oblačilo. To je bil projekt, ki je asociiral na futurizem in utopizem. Pred vojno sta nekoliko podoben projekt razvila Giacomo Balla in Fortunato Depero. Manj kot desetletje po tej futuristični intervenciji v oblačenju je nastala (...) tuta. Neodvisno od italijanskega oblačila je nastal njen ruski ekvivalent, t.i. »proizvodna oblačila«. Pred tem so kombinezon nosili mehaniki in letalci. Okrog leta 1920 je kombinezon postal simbol nove postoktobrske revolucionarne družbe, v kateri naj bi človeški odnosi in »postartistična« ustvarjalnost bistveno odstopali od tradicionalnih pojmov, kot so umetnost, umetnik in umetnina. Umetnik-konstruktor, ki naj bi bil bolj inženir kot pa umetnik, naj bi zamenjal zastarelega buržoaznega umetnika in buržoazno institucijo umetnosti. V Bauhausu je slovenskega umetnika Avgusta Černigoja fasciniral kombinezon, ki ga je nosil Moholy-Nagy. Po vrnitvi v Ljubljano ga je nosil tudi sam ter vzbujal osuplost med lokalnim prebivalstvom. V osemdesetih letih dvajsetega stoletja je tej modi sledil še drug slovenski umetnik, namreč Dragan Živadinov. (shrink)

The present text tackles the old problem of artistic autonomy given the constitutive heteronomy of post-conceptual artistic practices in terms of their medium-specificity. Instead of considering the idea of artistic autonomy as a modernist prejudice to be discarded, I suggest that it may be revised as the performative autonomy of discourse against ideological uses of language, given that conceptual art is considered as practice and activity rather than the production of objects. Resistance may be itself redefined as the performative re-articulation (...) of language within its conventional use. Therefore, if aesthetic formalism tried to achieve the autonomy of art in the social sphere by means of medium-specificity, whereas early conceptualists strolled towards a functionalist type of artistic autonomy in the artistic sphere, contemporary post-conceptual practices revised the very concept of form as the critical communicative articulation of the social sphere. (shrink)