EVENTAL AESTHETICS RETROSPECTIVE 1. LOOKING BACK AT 10 ISSUES OF EVENTAL AESTHETICS.

This paper proposes a prolegomenal model for the mechanisms through which new styles and schools of art – Cubism or conceptual art, for example – undergo the catalytic, evental transition from potential to actual. The model proposed herein, of fine art as a complex adaptive system that emerges and grows in a manner analogous to that of certain specific forms of biological organization, is predicated on a shift from the residual traces of Greenbergian disciplinary and mediumistic differentiation – grounded in (...) an analytic autonomy – to modes of interaction and aesthetic signal exchange emergent from an autopoietic autonomy – a systemic process of autocatalysis and transformation similar to the recursively generative feedback relations seen in cell metabolism and in ecosystems. This conceptual recalibration leads to a model of artistic eventalization and change that algorithmically unfolds from the adjacent possible as an emergent phenomenon, analogous to the aggregative and spontaneous, self-organizational swarm behavior seen in the flocking of birds or the schooling of fish, applied here to schools of art. (shrink)

This review explores the present fashion for aesthetics in contemporary sociology. It evaluates the claims that society is undergoing a deep-seated process of aestheticization, and that sociology is experiencing an aestheticization of its epistemological concerns. The aestheticization literature is divided as follows: (1) the re-reading of classical sociological theory through the aesthetic dimension of modernity; (2) the claim that postmodern society involves an `aestheticization of everyday life'; and (3) those sociological theories which stress that contemporary society is more and more (...) like a work of art in its form. The argument is made that the discovery of aesthetics as a way of problematizing sociological reasoning is to some extent rediscovery, returning to various Kantian precepts: the disinterestedness characteristic of aesthetic experiences; the antinomy between the individual and the social aspects of taste; and the work of art as an organism predicated on an inner teleology. (shrink)

In "Aesthetic Histories" our contributors’ shared concern is the inspiring and confounding, healthy and uncomfortable and above all inevitable relationship between history and aesthetic praxis.