Kant's only aesthetic work apart from the Critique of Judgment , Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime gives the reader a sense of the personality and character of its author as he sifts through the range of human responses to the concept of beauty and human manifestations of the beautiful and sublime. Kant was fifty-eight when the first of his great Critical trilogy, the Critique of Pure Reason , was published. Observations offers a view into the mind (...) of the forty-year-old Kant. (shrink)

Gillo Dorfles offers a veritable "catalogue raisonne of reigning bad taste" in the visual arts. His purpose is not simply to entertain but rather to demonstrate the contagious and corrosive nature of a phenomenon that threatens to debilitate the creative energies of the very society that spawned it. He and the other contributors examine the use of kitsch in politics, religion, advertising, film, architecture and design, "pornokitsch," and the modern trappings that surround birth, family life and death. To document the (...) vulgar and the sentimental, the unintentionally hilarious and the simply hideous is an undertaking that will, inevitably, include something to offend everyone. 311 pages; 276 color and b&w reproductions; 6.75 x 9.25 inches. (shrink)

This books contains Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, along with his essay, "Who Thinks Abstractly?," translated by Walter Kaufmann, along with Kaufmann's commentary. It was re-issued by the University of Notre Dame Press in 1977. Rear cover blurb: "[Kaufmann's] lengthy commentary is a minor masterpiece of concise and erudite interpretation. This is a welcome departure from the lazy habit of pretending that Hegel was an obscure pedant who left some quite readable lectures on the philosophy of (...) history....To grasp what Hegel was really trying to do, one has to confront his metaphysics, and thanks to Kaufmann this can now be done even by the philosophical novice." - George Lichtheim in New York Review of Books. (shrink)

A series of provocative discussions on everything from individual authors to contemporary religious thinking, Against Interpretation and Other Essays is the definitive collection of Susan Sontag's best known and important works published in Penguin Modern Classics. -/- Against Interpretation was Susan Sontag's first collection of essays and made her name as one of the most incisive thinkers of our time. Sontag was among the first critics to write about the intersection between 'high' and 'low' art forms, and to give them (...) equal value as valid topics, shown here in her epoch-making pieces 'Notes on Camp' and 'Against Interpretation'. Here too are impassioned discussions of Sartre, Camus, Simone Weil, Godard, Beckett, Lévi-Strauss, science-fiction movies, psychoanalysis and contemporary religious thought. Originally published in 1966, this collection has never gone out of print and has been a major influence on generations of readers, and the field of cultural criticism, ever since. -/- Susan Sontag (1933-2004) was born in Manhattan and studied at the universities of Chicago, Harvard and Oxford. She is the author of four novels - The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover and In America, which won the 2000 US National Book Award for fiction - a collection of stories, several plays, and six books of essays, among them Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. Her books are translated into thirty-two languages. In 2001 she was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the body of her work, and in 2003 she received the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. (shrink)

Mr. Danto argues that recent developments in the artworld, in particular the production of works of art that cannot be told from ordinary things, make urgent the need for a new theory of art and make plain the factors such a theory can and cannot involve. In the course of constructing such a theory, he seeks to demonstrate the relationship between philosophy and art, as well as the connections that hold between art and social institutions and art history. The book (...) distinguishes what belongs to artistic theory from what has traditionally been confused with it, namely aesthetic theory and offers as well a systematic account of metaphor, expression, and style, together with an original account 0f artistic representation. A wealth of examples, drawn especially from recent and contemporary art, illuminate the argument. (shrink)

In The Abuse of Beauty, art critic and philosopher Arthur Danto explains how the notion of beauty as anathema to art arose and flourished and offers a new way of looking at art and beauty. He draws on the thought of artists, critics, and philosophers such as Rimbaud, Fry, Matisse, and Greenberg, to reposition beauty as one of many modes -- along with sexuality, sublimity, disgust, and horror -- through which the human sensibility expresses itself. 20 black-and-white illustrations are included.

CONTENTS LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS Vtt A CHRONOLOGY OF EDMUND BURKE INTRODUCTION X FURTHER READING XXxix A NOTE ON THE TEXTS xliv A Vindication of Natural ...

"The writer discusses the concept of kitsch. Having reviewed a variety of approaches to kitsch, he posits an historical conception of it, connecting it to modernity and defining it as a coping-mechanism for modernity. He thus suggests that kitsch is best understood as a tool in the struggle against the particular stresses of the modern world and that it uses materials at hand, fashioning from them some sort of stability largely through projecting images of nature, stasis, and continuity. He discusses (...) the relation of kitsch to fine art, arguing that fine art also has as its primary function a counter-movement to modernity. He suggests that the main difference between fine art and kitsch is that fine art, as well as its emotional function, also involves a reception context that allows it to assume an intellectual task. Among the writer's conclusions, he finds that positing a stark or absolute contrast between kitsch and fine art is unjustifiable as both have the same roots and objectives." [WilsonWeb]. (shrink)

Burke's theory of the sublime helps us understand how we use aesthetic values to deal with our political regimes. Insofar as political regimes use power, they can be experienced as sublime. The sublime experience is a power exchange, from object to subject. But it might also be a power drain, which would leave us helpless toward our regimes. Includes analyses of the uses of beauty and sado-masochism.