23 found
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  1. Distant Dinosaurs and the Aesthetics of Remote Art.Michel-Antoine Xhignesse - 2024 - British Journal of Aesthetics 64 (3):361-380.
    Francis Sparshott introduced the term ‘remote art’ in his 1982 presidential address to the American Society for Aesthetics. The concept has not drawn much notice since—although individual remote arts, such as palaeolithic art and the artistic practices of subaltern cultures, have enjoyed their fair share of attention from aestheticians. This paper explores what unites some artistic practices under the banner of remote art, arguing that remoteness is primarily a matter of some audience’s epistemic distance from a work’s context of creation. (...)
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  2. Failures of Intention and Failed-Art.Michel-Antoine Xhignesse - 2020 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 50 (7):905-917.
    This paper explores what happens when artists fail to execute their goals. I argue that taxonomies of failure in general, and of failed-art in particular, should focus on the attempts which generate the failed-entity, and that to do this they must be sensitive to an attempt’s orientation. This account of failed-attempts delivers three important new insights into artistic practice: there can be no accidental art, only deliberate and incidental art; art’s intention-dependence entails the possibility of performative failure, but not of (...)
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  3. Exploding stories and the limits of fiction.Michel-Antoine Xhignesse - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 178 (3):675-692.
    It is widely agreed that fiction is necessarily incomplete, but some recent work postulates the existence of universal fictions—stories according to which everything is true. Building such a story is supposedly straightforward: authors can either assert that everything is true in their story, define a complement function that does the assertoric work for them, or, most compellingly, write a story combining a contradiction with the principle of explosion. The case for universal fictions thus turns on the intuitive priority we assign (...)
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  4. What Makes a Kind an Art-kind?Michel-Antoine Xhignesse - 2020 - British Journal of Aesthetics 60 (4):471-88.
    The premise that every work belongs to an art-kind has recently inspired a kind-centred approach to theories of art. Kind-centred analyses posit that we should abandon the project of giving a general theory of art and focus instead on giving theories of the arts. The main difficulty, however, is to explain what makes a given kind an art-kind in the first place. Kind-centred theorists have passed this buck on to appreciative practices, but this move proves unsatisfactory. I argue that the (...)
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  5. Imagining fictional contradictions.Michel-Antoine Xhignesse - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):3169-3188.
    It is widely believed, among philosophers of literature, that imagining contradictions is as easy as telling or reading a story with contradictory content. Italo Calvino’s The Nonexistent Knight, for instance, concerns a knight who performs many brave deeds, but who does not exist. Anything at all, they argue, can be true in a story, including contradictions and other impossibilia. While most will readily concede that we cannot objectually imagine contradictions, they nevertheless insist that we can propositionally imagine them, and regularly (...)
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  6. The Heaviest Metal.Michel-Antoine Xhignesse - 2024 - Philosophia 52 (3):681-697.
    It has recently been argued that metal’s ‘heaviness’ is conceptually inarticulable. I argue, on the contrary, that ‘heaviness’ is a matter of inaccessibility—the ‘something more’ that makes metal ‘heavy’ is actually something less: less auditory processing fluency. Like profound literature, metal resists, but also invites and rewards, interpretation. I argue that understanding ‘heaviness’ in terms of auditory processing fluency allows us to make sense of a number of otherwise puzzling features of the music, and to articulate a unifying gestalt for (...)
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  7. Imagining Dinosaurs.Michel-Antoine Xhignesse - forthcoming - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.
    There is a tendency to take mounted dinosaur skeletons at face value, as the raw data on which the science of paleontology is founded. But the truth is that mounted dinosaur skeletons are substantially intention-dependent—they are artifacts. More importantly, I argue, they are also substantially imagination-dependent: their production is substantially causally reliant on preparators’ creative imaginations, and their proper reception is predicated on audiences’ recreative imaginations. My main goal here is to show that dinosaur skeletal mounts are plausible candidates for (...)
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  8. Schopenhauer’s Perceptive Invective.Michel-Antoine Xhignesse - 2020 - In Jens Lemanski (ed.), Language, Logic, and Mathematics in Schopenhauer. Basel, Schweiz: Birkhäuser. pp. 95-107.
    Schopenhauer’s invective is legendary among philosophers, and is unmatched in the historical canon. But these complaints are themselves worthy of careful consideration: they are rooted in Schopenhauer’s philosophy of language, which itself reflects the structure of his metaphysics. This short chapter argues that Schopenhauer’s vitriol rewards philosophical attention; not because it expresses his critical take on Fichte, Hegel, Herbart, Schelling, and Schleiermacher, but because it neatly illustrates his philosophy of language. Schopenhauer’s epithets are not merely spiteful slurs; instead, they reflect (...)
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  9. Entitled Art: What Makes Titles Names?Michel-Antoine Xhignesse - 2019 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 97 (3):437-450.
    Art historians and philosophers often talk about the interpretive significance of titles, but few have bothered with their historical origins. This omission has led to the assumption that an artwork's title is its proper name, since names and titles share the essential function of facilitating reference to their bearers. But a closer look at the development of our titling practices shows a significant point of divergence from standard analyses of proper names: the semantic content of a title is often crucial (...)
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  10. Retitling, Cultural Appropriation, and Aboriginal Title.Michel-Antoine Xhignesse - 2021 - British Journal of Aesthetics 61 (3):317-333.
    In 2018, the Art Gallery of Ontario retitled a painting by Emily Carr which contained an offensive word. Controversy ensued, with some arguing that unsanctioned changes to a work’s title infringe upon artists’ moral and free speech rights. Others argued that such a change serves to whitewash legacies of racism and cultural genocide. In this paper, I show that these concerns are unfounded. The first concern is not supported by law or the history of our titling practices; and the second (...)
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  11. (1 other version)Schopenhauer's Aesthetic Ideology.Michel-Antoine Xhignesse - 2023 - In David Bather Woods & Timothy Stoll (eds.), The Schopenhauerian mind. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 127-40.
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  12. Fake Views—or Why Concepts are Bad Guides to Art’s Ontology.Michel-Antoine Xhignesse - 2018 - British Journal of Aesthetics 58 (2):193-207.
    It is often thought that the boundaries and properties of art-kinds are determined by the things we say and think about them. More recently, this tendency has manifested itself as concept-descriptivism, the view that the reference of art-kind terms is fixed by the ontological properties explicitly or implicitly ascribed to art and art-kinds by competent users of those terms. Competent users are therefore immune from radical error in their ascriptions; the result is that the ontology of art must begin and (...)
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  13. A Garden of One's Own, or Why Are There No Great Lady Detectives?Shelby Moser & Michel-Antoine Xhignesse - 2023 - Feminist Philosophy Quarterly 9 (1):1-20.
    Although the character of the “lady detective”is a staple of the cozy mystery genre, we contend that there are no great lady detectives to rival Holmes or Poirot. This is not because there are no clever or interesting lady detective characters, but ratherbecause the concept of greatness is sociallyconstructed and, like coolness, depends on public acclaim and perception. We explore the mechanics of genre formation, arguing that the very structure of cozy mysteries precludes female greatness. To create a “great”character,theauthor cannot (...)
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  14. In Defence of Tourists.Michel-Antoine Xhignesse - 2023 - Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics 60 (2):176-92.
    It is not uncommon for art historians and philosophers of art to deride the kinds of aesthetic experiences tourists seek out by characterizing them as bowing to the will of the herd, succumbing to peer pressure, or simply seeking out what is popular. Two charges, in particular, tend to be levelled against tourists. The first, which I call the motivation problem, contends that tourists are motivated to seek out aesthetic experiences for the wrong kinds of reasons. The second, which I (...)
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  15. A Trip to the Zoo.Michel-Antoine Xhignesse - 2022 - In V. Vinogradovs (ed.), Aesthetic Literacy vol I: a book for everyone. Melbourne: Mont Publishing House. pp. 52-55.
    This is a short piece on literary literacy, in the form of a choose-your-own-adventure story. -/- The entire piece is spread across all three volumes: Volume 1 Chapter 12, Volume 2 Chapter 5, and Volume 3 Chapter 22.
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  16. Inheriting the World.Michel-Antoine Xhignesse - 2020 - Journal of Applied Logics 7 (2):163-70.
    A critical reflection on John Woods's new monograph, Truth in Fiction – Rethinking its Logic. I focus in particular on Woods’s world-inheritance thesis (what others have variously called ‘background,’ ‘the principle of minimal departure,’ and ‘the reality assumption,’ and which replaces Woods’s earlier ‘fill-conditions’) and its interplay with auctorial say-so, arguing that world-inheritance actually constrains auctorial say-so in ways Woods has not anticipated.
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  17. Attempting art: an essay on intention-dependence.Michel-Antoine Xhignesse - 2017 - Dissertation, Mcgill University
    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 (...)
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  18. Thinking through illustration. [REVIEW]Michel-Antoine Xhignesse - 2023 - Metascience 33 (1):131-134.
    A review of Thomas Wartenberg's Thoughtful Images: Illustrating Philosophy Through Art (OUP 2023).
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  19. Quatremère de Quincy’s Moral Considerations on the Place and Purpose of Works of Art: Introduction and Translation. [REVIEW]Michel-Antoine Xhignesse - 2022 - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 80 (4):520-523.
    In 2006, David Carrier (Carrier, 2006, Museum Skepticism: A History of the Display of Art in Public Galleries. Durham: Duke University Press.) coined the term ‘museum skepticism’ to describe the idea that moving artworks into museum settings strips them of essential facets of their meaning; among art historians, this is better known as ‘decontextualization’, ‘denaturing’, or ‘museumization’. Although they do not usually name it directly, many contemporary debates in the philosophy of art are informed by an inclination towards museum skepticism, (...)
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  20. Brains, ectobrains, and the construction of a subgenre. [REVIEW]Michel-Antoine Xhignesse - 2022 - Metascience 32 (1):87-90.
    Review of Fernando Vidal's _Performing brains on screen_ (Amsterdam 2022).
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  21. James O. Young, "Radically Rethinking Copyright in the Arts: A Philosophical Approach.". [REVIEW]Michel-Antoine Xhignesse - 2021 - Philosophy in Review 41 (1):49-51.
    A review of James Young's "Radically Rethinking Copyright in the Arts: A Philosophical Approach" (Routledge 2020).
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  22. Andina, Tiziana. The Philosophy of Art: The Question of Definition—From Hegel to Post‐Dantian Theories, trans. Natalia Iacobelli, New York: Bloomsbury, 2013, 190 pp., 5 b&w illus., $37.95 paperback, $120.00 cloth. [REVIEW]Michel-Antoine Xhignesse - 2016 - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 74 (1):106-108.
    A review of Tiziana Andina's The Philosophy of Art: The Question of Definition: From Hegel to Post-Dantian Theories (Bloomsbury 2013).
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  23. Christy Mag Uidhir, Art & Art-Attempts. Reviewed by. [REVIEW]Michel-Antoine Xhignesse - 2015 - Philosophy in Review 35 (3):182-184.
    A review of Christy Mag Uidhir's Art & Art-Attempts (OUP 2013).
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