The Sikh Art Gallery in Montreal, housed within the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, has attracted over 200,000 visitors since its opening in 2022, becoming the most visited Sikh gallery outside India. Supported by the Sikh Foundation International and the Chadha Family Foundation, the gallery showcases historical and contemporary Sikh art, promoting cultural exchange and education. Celebrated for fostering Canadian multiculturalism, the gallery contributes to the post-pandemic revival of the museum and Montreal’s (...) vibrant cultural landscape. The Sikh Art Gallery in Montreal, part of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA), has become a cultural hub since its opening in 2022, attracting over 200,000 visitors by September 2024. Established with support from the Sikh Foundation International (USA) and the Chadha Family Foundation (Canada), it has become the most visited Sikh gallery outside of India, with 208,289 visitors in 2023 alone. This success has positioned the gallery as a significant milestone in promoting Canadian multiculturalism, celebrated even by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for contributing to intercultural understanding. (shrink)

Tarot cards are a rich and fascinating art form. They are also an excellent tool for inquiry. I show why tarot has value, regardless of the user’s beliefs about magic. And I explain how novice or skeptical tarot users can appreciate (and create) that value by focusing on the card’s images, rather than consulting texts or expert guides. This is because, on a naturalistic conception, tarot’s zetetic value—that is, its value to inquiry—stems from its artistic properties.

At a time when professional art criticism is on the wane, the ancient quarrel between art and philosophy demands fresh answers. Professional art criticism provided a basis upon which to distinguish apt experiences of art from the idiosyncratic. However, currently the kind of narratives from which critics once drew are underplayed or discarded in contemporary exhibition design where the visual arts are concerned. This leaves open the possibility that art operates either as mere stimulant to private reverie or, in the (...) more contentful cases, as propaganda. The ancient quarrel between art and philosophy is that art influences surreptitiously while philosophy presents reasons that invite rational scrutiny. As such, in contrast to philosophy, art would undermine our agency. In July 2017, a group of philosophers gathered at the Art Gallery of NSW (AGNSW), in Sydney, Australia, in the presence of two AGNSW curators to explore the basis of their own experiences of selected artworks. Here, those commentaries are reproduced. Each reveal that objective grounds for an experience of art can be based in the community from which one draws one’s terms of reference. In our commentaries we see the expertise of the respective philosophical communities but other communities of culture or expertise might serve the same purpose and hence resolve the ancient quarrel. Before hearing these commentaries, I explain what is at stake when the ancient quarrel between art and philosophy is understood in contemporary terms. This Issue of the Curator also includes an article on the community-based art criticism that emerges from these commentaries followed by an exhibition review which reveals the incorrigible impulse (also demonstrated in the commentaries) to find the basis for the most apt experience of an artwork. A response by the AGNSW curators completes this issue. (shrink)

Why should a person, and in the context of this conference particularly an art historian, take seriously the notion of the aesthetic, its discovery and/or rediscovery? Aesthetics might after all be considered at best something of a distraction from bread and butter historical and sociological analysis, and at worst entirely incompatible with it. Pursuing the line further it might be urged that, since on the one hand aesthetics is about 'how things appear'—i.e. is subject to individual predilection, taste and feeling—and (...) on the other, historical analysis is about the careful and scholarly reconstruction of a past social reality, the two must be at loggerheads. What the art historian writes about on a weekday whilst wearing her hard hat at the office must not be confused with what she personally feels, wandering around a gallery in her woolly hat at the weekend. (shrink)

I develop a phenomenological account of racialized encounters with works of art and film, wherein the racialized viewer feels cast as perpetually past, coming “too late” to intervene in the meaning of her own representation. This points to the distinctive role that the colonial past plays in mediating and constructing our self-images. I draw on my experience of three exhibitions that take Muslims and/or Arabs as their subject matter and that ostensibly try to interrupt or subvert racialization while reproducing some (...) of its tropes. My examples are the Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (2015), the exposition Welten der Muslime at the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin (2011–2017), and a sculpture by Bob and Roberta Smith at the Leeds City Art Gallery, created in response to the imperial power painting, General Gordon’s Last Stand, that is housed there. My interest is in how artworks contribute to the experience of being racialized in ways that not only amplify the circulation of images but also constitute difficult temporal relations to images. Drawing on Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, I argue that such racialized images are temporally gluey, or stuck, so that we are weighted and bogged down by them. This essay received Honorable Mention from the American Society for Aesthetics Feminist Caucus Committee in the Feminist Research Essay prize in 2020. (shrink)

Richard Shusterman suggested that Maurice Merleau-Ponty neglected “‘lived somaesthetic reflection,’ that is, concrete but representational and reflective body consciousness.” While unsure about this assessment of Merleau-Ponty, lived somaesthetic reflection, or what the late Sam Mallin called “body phenomenology”—understood as a meditation on the body reflecting on both itself and the world—is my starting point. Another is John Dewey’s bodily theory of perception, augmented somewhat by Merleau-Ponty. -/- With these starting points, I spent roughly 20 hours with St. Benedict Restores Life (...) to a Young Monk (c. 1360), a work of tempera and gold leaf on panel, by Giovanni Del Biondo, active in Italy from 1356 to 1398, on display in the Art Gallery of Ontario’s permanent collection. Following Dewey’s suggestion that “[t]he eye ... is only the channel through which a total response takes place,” meaning that motor, emotional, intellectual and non-visual perceptual capacities become active when we encounter paintings, I describe how the work engaged a range of bodily modalities; and how reflecting on these, in turn, supplied phenomenal articulations of life negating, preserving and enhancing forces important in the culture that produced it, and famously discussed by Friedrich Nietzsche. By virtue of the approach adopted, I also demonstrate Dewey’s belief that intimate engagement with art entails a total coordination of one’s capacities around the artwork, while simultaneously reinforcing Merleau-Ponty’s ideas about perception and how we can find phenomenal articulations of concepts such as the Nietzschean ones just mentioned. While focusing on Del Biondo’s painting, my main purpose is to engage in body phenomenology practices, and to show, in the words of Shusterman, how “[w]e might sharpen our appreciation of art through more attention to our somaesthetic feelings involved in perceiving art” and indeed the world. (shrink)

Written over the course of two months in early 2008, Art as "Night" is a series of essays in part inspired by a January 2007 visit to the Velázquez exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, London, with subsequent forays into related themes and art-historical judgments for and against theories of meta-painting. Art as "Night" proposes a type of a-historical dark knowledge crossing painting since Velázquez, but reaching back to the Renaissance, especially Titian and Caravaggio. As a form of (...) formalism, this "night" is also closely allied with forms of intellection that come to reside in art as pure visual agency or material knowledge while invoking moral agency, a function of art more or less bracketed in modern art for ethical and/or political agency. Not a theory of meta-painting, Art as "Night" restores coordinates arguably lost in painting since the separation of natural and moral philosophy in the Baroque era. It is with Velázquez that we see a turning point, an emphasis on the specific resources of painting as a form of speculative intellect, while it is with contemporary works by Gerhard Richter and Anselm Kiefer that we see the return of the same after the collapse of modernism, and after subsequent postmodern maneuvers to make art discursive yet without the austerities of the formal means present in Art as Art. Art as "Night" argues for a nondiscursive form of intellection fully embodied in the work of art – and, foremost, painting. A synoptic and intentionally elusive and allusive survey of painting, through the collapse of the art market in late 2007, Art as "Night" suggests by way of this critique of an elective "night" crossing painting that the art world is an endlessly deferred version of pleroma , a fully synthetic world given to an exploration and appropriation of the given through classical mimesis and epistemology and its complete incorporation and transfiguration in a theory of knowledge and art as pure speculative agency. In effect, Art as "Night" is an incarnational theory of art as absolute knowledge. (shrink)

‘Art’ still needs a practical, useful definition, not of the academic variety, but rather of the plain and simple sort that you can usefully take with you into a gallery, and apply directly to what you see. People want to know, with a basic clarity, what it is they are looking at, and how to judge the good from the bad. Because if you don’t know what ‘art’ is, and you think it’s all about ‘classical fine crafting’, then you (...) are missing out on a very special type of experience, and an entire realm of imaginative possibilities. As it turns out, the best way to think of ‘art’ – taking a huge hint from the concept of ‘arthouse cinema’ - is not about delighting in solemn, stolid museum pieces, and developing a deferential love of the classical: it is all about an exploration - through various available media - of the strange, the disturbing, and the darkly fascinating. The great thing about art is that it offers a safe and enjoyable environment in which to contemplate all kinds of darkness, without having to submit to this negativity in life itself. (shrink)

Two art exhibitions, “Training Humans” and “Making Faces,” and the accompanying essay “Excavating AI: The politics of images in machine learning training sets” by Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen, are making substantial impact on discourse taking place in the social and mass media networks, and some scholarly circles. Critical scrutiny reveals, however, a self-contradictory stance regarding informed consent for the use of facial images, as well as serious flaws in their critique of ML training sets. Our analysis underlines the non-negotiability (...) of informed consent when using human data in artistic and other contexts, and clarifies issues relating to the description of ML training sets. (shrink)

The necessary condition for the reception of art is aesthetic distance, which paradoxically relies on direct experience: one has to be there in front of the artwork, has to live the experience. Therefore, the current pandemic and the practice of social distancing, which attempts to slow it down, is a serious challenge for the arts. This text analyses the ways in which artists and the institutions which mediate art react to the conditions caused by the pandemic. I will present some (...) creative practices which turn the adversity of the pandemic into an asset (the White Cuib Facebook project and the series by Sándor Bartha). So, there are projects which mine the gap (social distancing) and use it creatively. Then I will analyze the practice of some museums and galleries, focusing on the positive examples (e.g., the “Stay at Home Museum”) as well as on the difficulties. The examined cases will reveal the fact that while the artists were able to react in creative ways to the constraints and to create artworks which point beyond the contextual value, art institutions generally attempted merely to get through this period, hoping that they would soon be able to get back to life as usual. (shrink)

Diaristic, mixed notes on: John Ruskin's The Poetry of Architecture (1837) and Modern Painters (1885); Caravaggio, Victorian Aesthetes, G.K. Chesterton, and Tacita Dean; Jay Fellows' Ruskin’s Maze: Mastery and Madness in His Art (1981); Slavoj Žižek at Jack Tilton Gallery, New York, New York, USA, April 23, 2009, “Architectural Parallax: Spandrels and Other Phenomena of Class Struggle”; “Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice”, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts, USA, March 15-August 16, 2009; Janet Harbord, Chris Marker: La (...) Jetée (2009); The Politics of the Envelope, Princeton Envelope Group (PEG), ARC504, Princeton School of Architecture, Princeton, New Jersey, USA, Friday, May 8, 2009; Rhode Island School of Design, Degree Project Reviews, Division of Architecture & Design, Providence, Rhode Island, USA, May 16, 2009; etc. (shrink)

The ‘museal’ approach to art has been attacked from many angles in the last decade; the main issue raised by most of these attacks was that such an approach would promote a certain idea of art which has little to do with real-life or the layman’s interest. Some artists have protested by stepping out of the museum space with projects deliberately designed as non-museum items (performance, land-art, public art etc.). Art, however, is always meant for a public, so, as an (...) “unfortunate” consequence, those artists who wished to become famous were not able to avoid certain art institutions, such as museums, galleries, curators or critics. Until now. The internet, especially Facebook, provide genuinely new options/ opportunities for the virtual display of art pieces, an option that artists are eager to take advantage of. In the following, I will present the process of expansion of the public artistic sphere, I will attempt to show why Facebook serves well as a public artistic arena, and finally, I will present some salient Facebook-art-projects. The presented projects will include works by a street artist (Banksy), a performance artist (Gusztáv Ütő) and a graphic designer (Dan Perjovsky). These three artists are intrigued by current social issues, which are usually reflected in their works, also they all wish to spread their messages to the widest possible public. On of their favorite channels is the Facebook Wall. (shrink)

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 concern misses the mark by ignoring the gallery’s substantial efforts to avoid just such an outcome. Picking up on a suggestion from Loretta Todd, I argue that we can use Aboriginal Title as a model for thinking about the harms perpetuated by cultural appropriation, and the practices we should adopt to mitigate them. (shrink)

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, (...) from work on aesthetic cognitivism (Feagin, Susan, 1995, “Paintings and their places” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 73.2: 260-8.) and contextualism (Danto, Arthur C., 1988, “Artifact and Art”, in ART/ARTIFACT: African Art in Anthropological Collections. Exhibition Catalogue. New York: Center for African Art and Prestel Verlag, 18-32.) to cultural appropriation (Eaton, A. W. and Gaskell, Ivan, 2009, “Do subaltern artifacts belong in art museums?,” The Ethics of Cultural Appropriation, ed. James O. Young and Conrad Brunk, Oxford and Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 235-67), street art (Baldini, Andrea, 2016, “Street Art: A Reply to Riggle” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 74.2: 187-91), and the value of authenticity (Korsmeyer, Carolyn, 2016, “Real Old Things” British Journal of Aesthetics, 56.3: 219-31). The very first museum skeptic, however, was Antoine Chrysostôme Quatremère de Quincy (1755-1849). (shrink)

Book, 2005. B&W and colour digital print on paper. A4 format. Unbound. This project was developed during a stay in Broken Hill and the region, it was supported through the artist-in-residence program at the Faculty of Creative Arts at the University of Wollongong in August 2005 and it was edited during the following months. A full copy of the book is held in the collections of the Art Gallery of New South Wales Research Library and Archive; the Médiathèque, Musée (...) du Quai Branly, Collection des Récits de Voyageurs; the Bibliothèque Nationale, Département des Estampes et de la Photographie, Paris. (shrink)

Masculinities: Liberation through PhotographyBarbican Art Gallery, 20 February–17 May 2020.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) holds transformative potential for Sikhism, enhancing access to Gurbani, preserving history, and fostering global community connections. AI platforms can translate and recommend passages from the Guru Granth Sahib, broadening understanding across languages and contexts. Digitizing historical Sikh texts and artifacts safeguards them for future generations, while virtual congregation platforms and AI-powered tools can connect Sikhs worldwide, promoting spiritual growth and unity. Additionally, social media tools can amplify Sikh values like equality and Seva. However, these advancements (...) carry risks. AI’s flawed translations could misinterpret Gurbani, distorting Sikh teachings. Commercialization of religion via monetized platforms may contradict Sikh values of equality, potentially excluding those unable to afford such services. Over-reliance on AI risks diminishing the human connection integral to communal practices like attending Gurdwara or participating in langar. Privacy and data security concerns also arise, raising ethical questions about using religious data. Balancing innovation with Sikhism’s principles is crucial to ensure AI enriches the faith without compromising its essence. (shrink)

This study firstly addresses three threads in Chris Marker’s work – theology, Marxism, and Surrealism – through a mapping of the work of both Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Derrida onto the varied production of his film and photographic work. Notably, it is late Agamben and late Derrida that is utilized, as both began to exit so-called post-structuralism proper with the theological turn in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It addresses these threads through the means to ends employed and as (...) ends proper (as production of semi-autonomous works that also, paradoxically, index a much larger field of inquiry and theoretical praxis). It is perhaps French “schizophrenia” regarding theological versus political agency that best accounts for the sardonic deployment of irony and humor in Marker’s work in the face of Big History. Such means to ends (plus a subtle anti-intellectualism vis-à-vis fashionable academic trends) tend to underscore the severity and ultimate sincerity of Marker’s overall cultural-political project. -/- Dossier Chris Marker is also a study of a late-modern chiasmus, impersonal-personal agency, as it comes to expression in the works of Marker, as the dynamic interplay of political and subjective agency. As chiasmus, the complementary halves of this often-apocalyptic dynamis (a semi-catastrophic, temporal or historical force-field) also – arguably – secretly agree to meet, through the work of art, in the futural (problematized in contemporary French post-phenomenological and post-post-structuralist theory as “the event).” Consistent with the classical figure of concordia discors, Marker resolves these irreducible warring aspects of life experience in an atemporal and ahistorical moment that inhabits the work of art from its inception. This redemptive aspect in art is also the ultimate gesture of the artwork as autonomous subject and “mask” (or “screen”) for forces that reside beyond the frame of the image or work, as its proverbial Other, or within the frame, as other to that Other. -/- Despite the complications of the as-yet unresolved post-modern condition (its nihilist-relativist bias), and its similar, mostly circular concerns with the image and/or media, Marker’s work is clearly not post-modern. In fact, when tested against immemorial cultural epiphenomena, that work withstands all attempts at categorization and/or art-historical analysis proper. It remains unassimilable to the post-modern cause ... What emerges, upon closer examination, and through rigorous re-contextualization, is the prescient force of Marker’s works toward that futural state buried in art that is also “theological,” versus atheological, and heedlessly anterior to cultural politics per se. -/- In the case of Marker, this age-old or immemorial “thing-in-itself” (the artwork as image of world-chiasmus) finds its foremost or penultimate formation in his very-still photography – the singular images that are also the building blocks for his renowned ciné-essays. Not without irony, this same austere, reductive force of the still image (as form of proscription) also inhabits the more complex, synthetic works (or montages) that he has formulated and presented “dramatically,” here and there, through the often-sketchy apparatuses of his new-media experiments, as of the late 1980s. Ultimately, this world-image as chiasmus was always present within his earliest literary projects, from the 1940s forward – most especially in books and essays, with or without actual images. -/- Marker’s “return” to photography (to exhibiting still photography in galleries), in the late 2000s, is in many ways a return to the singular object of the artist-critic’s desire; the image in/for itself, while that image – endlessly troubled or interrogated for decades – continues to speak “in tongues” anyway, often against, or oblivious to, the voice of the author/artist/narrator. -/- Marker is a High Romantic Christian Marxist. The “Christic” aspect is rightly well-hidden, but emerges when the eschatological versus historical center of his work is exposed (the existential-metaphysical fuse such as also inhabits the works of Caravaggio), and when his early years are examined in light of his later and/or final years. Marker’s semi-personal/semi-impersonal apocalyptic vision is writ large in diverse works that cross decades, figuring a redemptive, world-shattering formation of art as pleroma. (shrink)

Review of “The Mad Square: Modernity in German Art 1910-37”, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia, November 25, 2011-March 4, 2012. A version of this essay appeared in the Appendices of Gavin Keeney, Not-I/Thou: The Other Subject of Art and Architecture (CSP, 2014), pp. 153-57.

In this paper we analyse the ideas implicit in the style of exhibition favoured by contemporary galleries and museums, and argue that unless the audience is empowered to ascribe meaning and significance to artwork through critical dialogue, the power not only of the audience is undermined but also of art. We argue that galleries and museums preside over an experience economy devoid of art, unless (i) indeterminacy is understood, (ii) the critical rather than coercive nature of art is facilitated, and (...) (iii) the conditions for inter-subjectivity are met. (shrink)

This paper is dedicated to the Εἰκόνες of the two Philostrati and to the Ἐκφράσεις of Callistratus, that is to say to three Greek works that bear important witness to the genre of art criticism in Antiquity and which concern both literary history and the history of art. The first series of Εἰκόνες is the work of Philostratus the Elder (2nd-3rd century AD) and comprises sixty-five descriptions of paintings with mythological subjects, which the author assures us he has seen in (...) a gallery in Naples. Another Philostratus, who claims to be the grandson of the former, and who is traditionally referred to as Philostratus the Younger, wrote a second, shorter series of Εἰκόνες, which describes seventeen paintings. Finally, a certain Callistratus, who probably dates from the 4th century AD, is the author of the Ἐκφράσεις, which group together fourteen descriptions of statues in marble and bronze.1 Ecphrasis is a subject that is often the focus of contemporary research. Perhaps its importance stems from the fact that we live in a civilization dominated by images, and we feel the need to control the visual imagery that surrounds us, to govern it and to make sense of it through language. The attention given to literary theory, rhetoric and sophistry today also helps to explain the success of this subject. The present book is situated in this field of research. The "La Licorne" series in which it is published specializes in the study of ancient and modern literature, a specialization to which this volume corresponds. This volume has two points of focus: (1) the literary form of description and the complex relationships between word and image, between the oral and the visual (hence the title Le défi de l'art, which signifies, among other things, that the art of the painter and of the sculptor challenges the sophist, who tries to describe works of art with words); (2) the Nachleben of ancient texts, because Philostratus and Callistratus were well-known to posterity, particularly during the Renaissance. (shrink)

Models are being used extensively for practicing and understanding scientific, engineering and mathematical subjects, but are rarely used as art analyzing tools, particularly, in learning environments. Contrarily, using art to explain mathematical ideas is not unprecedented. Strogatz (1988), for example, built a model based on Romeo and Juliet’s love story and used it to explain the idea of differential mathematics, and system dynamics. Artwork, specially written and plastic classics, is a fixed form of art. We frame them and put them (...) in a gallery, or a book (digital or physical). We don’t try to “fix” them or optimize their functioning, we analyze them to find meaning, intention, and patterns. In this article, we aim to show how, by building models combined with simple mathematical representations and analogies, it is possible to understand literary texts, from the prism of system and complexity theories, which emphasize the dynamic, non-linear, and non-reductionist aspects of the observed. We’ll demonstrate how modeling processes of three cultural assets, allow active correspondence with the original textual art, by treating them as systemic objects with interactions and dynamics. They will be analyzed while raising questions about the significance of modeling as a cognitive learning process. (shrink)

Obóz Kultury 2.0 Mirosław Filiciak, Alek Tarkowski, Agata Jałosińska, Andrzej Klimczuk, Maciej Rynarzewski, Jacek Seweryn, Stunża M., D. Grzegorz, Marcin Wilkowski & Anna Orlik .

In 2012, choreographer and dancer Jill Sigman of jill sigman/thinkdance and visual artist Janine Antoni collaborated to produce Wedge, a live performance at the Albright-Knox Gallery. In this essay, I describe the collaboration and the resulting work and examine the benefits and challenges of the collaboration. The discussion touches on broader issues pertaining to collaboration, co-authorship, artists' intentions, and interpretation.

periphery looks at you with hate. This phrase in red neon struck the visitors of Landscapes, an exhibition by Domenico Antonio Mancini in the Lia Rumma Gallery in Naples, in 2019. It was not addressed to the public but to the nineteenth-century pictorial views relocated in the last room of the exhibition, as if repainted by the immaterial vandalism of the colored light. The exhibition’s theme was the visibility of contemporary suburban environments, now accessible through Google street view visualizations. (...) Mancini’s non-representational Landscapes are Google addresses, not aesthetically appreciable but pragmatically challenging: the visitor must type on a touch screen to access to the outskirts of Naples, Palermo, Catania, Rome and Milan. The words at the end of the exhibition almost literally replicated a black graffiti drawn on Palazzo Missori in Milan. Are these relocation and remediation just about artification? What happens when, browsing Google street view, I take a close look at that graffiti recalling the political protests during the streets the 1960s? The deictic transitability in space and time of the hypermediated image can activate a fortuitous narrative and an open interpretation by looking back on the present as if it were past. Even a digital landscape is a moral landscape like that of public art for Danto, with a «internal beauty» whose meaning is not already embodied in architectural and artistic media but accessible and shareable through our portable devices. (shrink)

Jerry Fodor wrote the following assessment of Danto’s importance in 1993: “Danto has done something I’ve been very much wanting to do: namely, reconsider some hard problems in aesthetics in the light of the past 20 years or so of philosophical work on intentionality and representation” (Fodor 1993, p. 41). Fodor is absolutely right: some of Danto’s work could be thought of as the application of some influential ideas about perception that Fodor also shared. The problem is that these ideas (...) have turned out to be false. Both Danto and Fodor are modularist: they both think that perception is an encapsulated process that is in no way influenced by any kind of non-perceptual processing (see, e.g., Fodor 1983, Pylyshyn 1984). Many of Danto’s famous and influential arguments rely very directly on this modularist assumption. There is now, however, a wealth of evidence against modularism of the strong kind held to by Danto and Fodor. We now know that perceptual experience is not determined entirely by the retinal input: our visual processing is influenced at various point in a top-down manner. What we know and what kinds of visual stimuli we have encountered previously deeply influence how the retinal input is processed. The empirical literature on this is vast and conclusive (for an overview, see Teufel and Nanay 2017 but see also the references in the last section of this paper). What does this mean for Danto’s views on art and perception? While one of Danto’s premises may turn out to be false, the history and examples he gave are valuable and bear repeating. Even more importantly, Danto’s aesthetics can in part be separated out from his modularism, leading us to draw slightly different but arguably even more interesting conclusions from famous thought experiments such as the Gallery of Indiscernibles. (shrink)

Review of “Gaiety is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union: New Art from Russia,” Saatchi Gallery, London, England, and “Calder After the War,” Pace Gallery, London, England, April 2013. A version of this essay appeared in the Appendices of Gavin Keeney, Not-I/Thou: The Other Subject of Art and Architecture (CSP, 2014), pp. 157-60.

Dr Miranda Anderson is an Honorary Fellow in History, Classics and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh and an Associate Lecturer at the Open University. She has held several prestigious fellowships and was principal investigator of an AHRC-funded project, titled ‘The Art of Distributed Cognition’, which involved collaboration with the Talbot Rice Gallery. Her work has investigated the relations between cognition and culture, particularly literary works, challenging the boundaries between disciplines and engaging with numerous contemporary science, technology and society (...) (STS) questions. In this perspective article, she evokes the ‘fission-fusion’ concept on which she has been working for some years now – a concept that contributes to debates surrounding the issue of identity by drawing on the arts, humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. (shrink)

What, if anything, is aesthetically distinctive about sculpture? Some think that sculpture differs from painting in being a specially tactile art. Different things might be meant by this, but it is anyway unhelpful to focus on our means of access to sculpture’s aesthetic properties, rather than those properties themselves. A more promising idea is that, while painting provides its own space, sculpture exists in the space of the gallery. To pursue this thought, I expound and develop the views of (...) Susanne Langer. Sculpture organizes the surrounding space when we see that space as defined by the potential for action of the sculpted object. (shrink)

The notion of “relational aesthetics” was created by Nicolas Bourriaud in 1995 to describe the new artistic phenomena of the nineties. According to Bourriaud the manifestations of relational art create temporary communities, thus turning art into a social laboratory. This paper investigates the communities arising through these artistic endeavors. My hypothesis is that the empty communities motivated solely by the artistic event are not more consistent than the audience of a play or a performance, furthermore, they do not transcend the (...) elite public of galleries and exhibitions. On the other hand, when the artistic endeavor expresses a social message in addition to the artistic purpose, the possibility of real – though, also temporary – communities arises. (shrink)

Many of the following literary-critical texts (not all quite conventional “long-form” essays) originally appeared on the Landscape Agency New York website, LANY Archive-Grotto, on the web portal Geocities, between the years 1997 and 2008 – i.e., over a period of roughly ten years. Versions of some were published in various journals, academic or otherwise. In re-presenting them here, the intention is to trace a proverbial “red thread” that crosses the entirety of the work, arguably what might be denoted the works-based (...) agency of works, and, arguably, the telltale trace of what is otherwise known as the “life-work,” yet for works versus for authors. -/- The entire, retrospective apparatus of The Editioning of Gardens is also, decidedly, an homage to New York, New York, either where or from where much of the research was undertaken and “lived.” Manhattan, indeed, haunts these pages, directly and indirectly – that is to say, the unparalleled access to libraries, bookstores, universities, galleries, cafés, pubs, restaurants, cinemas, parks, and the streets is quite simply the source for the often-intense, yet suitably critical exegetical works. -/- This book is meant to both recapitulate themes crossing the “life-work” of the works collected, but to also illustrate the transitional gestalt of the 1990s and 2000s, something we collectively have not yet quite exited, and something that still haunts and gives pause to architects and landscape architects today. In naming this collection “The Editioning of Gardens,” the intention is to draw attention to the fact that it is landscape that underwrites almost all architectural interventions, whether acknowledged or denied, and that it is “landscape” – in the widest sense of the word – that we inherently and collectively inhabit. -/- NOTA BENE: -/- While many of the essays and texts presented here have been previously published as “working papers” or “reviews” on the LANY Archive-Grotto website, or in journals and P2P dossiers (i.e., in open-access collections posted to research repositories, here denoted Things Czech and Dossier LANY), their presentation in book form makes them more readily accessible and effectively new works as totality. Most have also been re-edited and re-formatted for inclusion in The Editioning of Gardens. -/- All texts are also dated so as to situate them in the timeframe in which they appeared (or were written), as snapshots or surveys of passing times. While re-edited and re-formatted for presentation here, they have not been re-written as such due to their implied “historic” and “time-based” nature. As collection, however, they function as an (un)timely reminder of critical exegesis as rite of passage – underscoring the significance of the title of the collection. This latter trait is what, ironically, makes the collection contemporary and post-contemporary – timely and untimely at once. (shrink)

This dissertation explores the question of whether we bear moral responsibility for our beliefs and how this responsibility is possible. Since we cannot directly choose our convictions, some have argued that we have no obligations concerning what we believe. However, we frequently hold each other accountable for our beliefs. Philosophers have responded to the argument against ‘belief duties’ in various ways. One response is that we are responsible for how we influence our beliefs. Another argues that moral responsibility does not (...) require the ability to choose. A third response claims that we, in fact, do have the ability to choose our beliefs. A fourth suggests that whether we have the freedom to choose our beliefs depends on how ‘belief’ is defined. The central claim of this dissertation is that the first response is incomplete, the second is mistaken, and that the third and fourth are the most promising. This book investigates in depth what ‘belief’ entails. If we understand belief as placing trust in a possible truth in our practical reasoning, rather than having convictions, then we can have both doxastic voluntary control and belief-related obligations. What we believe is crucial to our actions, and therefore, the ethics of belief is deeply connected with the ethics of action. (shrink)

The Sikh identity, represented by the Khalsa, is deeply rooted in unity, equality, and selfless service. Sikhs, known for their resilience, spirituality, and commitment to justice, have historically taken leading roles during challenging times. As the world becomes increasingly interconnected and complex, the need for a Global Sikh Renaissance has become more urgent. A key driver of this renaissance can be "Khalsa Synergy"—the collective unity and action of the global Sikh community. Through Khalsa Synergy, Sikhs can reconnect (...) with their roots while addressing modern challenges, ensuring that the core principles of Sikhism—Naam (spirituality), Kirat (honest living), and Vand Chhako (sharing with others)—are both preserved and adapted innovatively to meet contemporary needs. Understanding Khalsa Synergy: Khalsa Synergy refers to the harmonious collaboration among Sikhs worldwide to leverage their collective potential. "Khalsa," introduced by Guru Gobind Singh, embodies the virtues of purity, courage, and selflessness, representing a collective spirit that transcends individualism. On the other hand, Synergy emphasizes that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This concept allows Sikhs from diverse social, economic, or geographical backgrounds to work together toward common goals, such as addressing inequality, promoting education, advocating for environmental sustainability, and striving for global peace. (shrink)

The Sikh community, with its rich history and profound spiritual teachings, stands at a critical juncture in the 21st century. Today, more than ever, Sikhs need visionary leadership to navigate the complexities of a rapidly changing world. Visionary leaders are known for their foresight, creativity, and strategic thinking, which allows them to anticipate future trends and opportunities while guiding their organization or team in that direction. For Sikhs, such leadership entails guiding the community through contemporary challenges and ensuring that (...) the foundational principles of Sikhism, justice, equality, service, and humility, are upheld and promoted. (shrink)

Sikh identity is a unique and distinct expression of faith and culture that has developed over centuries and reflects the experiences and values of the Sikh community. It is characterized by several distinguishing features, including a deep devotion to God, the practice of the five Ks (Kesh, Kangha, Kara, Kachera, and Kirpan), adherence to the teachings of the ten Sikh gurus as contained in the Guru Granth Sahib, and a commitment to principles of social justice, equality, and (...) community service. In the present era, several challenges threaten Sikh identity, both externally and internally. Recognizing and addressing the challenges to Sikh identity is essential to protect and preserve it. It is essential to take suitable measures to counter discrimination and stereotypes and encourage the next generation to embrace their cultural and religious identity with pride and confidence. (shrink)

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 (...) to the identification, individuation, and interpretation of its associated artwork. This paper represents a first step towards an empirically centred study of our titling practices. I argue that, in order to accept titles as proper names, we must first recognize the social, rather than the referential, function of naming. (shrink)

The study of the arts in philosophy has often concentrated on the role that emotions (and affective responses more generally) play in art’s creation and value. Philosophical theories of art have sometimes even defined art in terms of its capacity to elicit or express emotions. Philosophers have debated such questions as what it is to express an emotion in art; whether emotions form part of the value of an artwork; whether the emotions involved in art appreciation are of the same (...) kind as those that we experience in real life, or of a different, even sui generis kind (i.e., aesthetic emotions); whether it is rational or appropriate to experience emotions in response to art; and what value, if any, there is in art that evokes unpleasant emotions. Although the focus here will be on what, to a first approximation, can be characterized as the “Western mainstream philosophical tradition,” discussion of the role of emotions in art can also be found in different approaches and traditions of thought: from Indian philosophy to cognitive science, to so-called Continental philosophy. (shrink)

Sikh Gurus' spiritual wisdom is universal. It is applicable to all, regardless of caste, creed, color, gender, age, and religion. But it is sad to note that a large numbers of Sikh children are not motivated enough to follow Sikh values. Many young people are addicted to alcohol, drugs, substance abuse and social media due to prevalent societal fashion or peer pressure. Unfortunately, Sikhs are ignoring this facet of their community life. However, there is no shortage of (...) available opportunities that can help Sikh youth to avoid this awful situation. The only condition is that we must reorient our outlook and actions. Let us have a look at the available options. (shrink)

Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity offers a radical new interpretation of Heidegger's later philosophy, developing his argument that art can help lead humanity beyond the nihilistic ontotheology of the modern age. Providing pathbreaking readings of Heidegger's 'The Origin of the Work of Art' and his notoriously difficult Contributions to Philosophy, this book explains precisely what postmodernity meant for Heidegger, the greatest philosophical critic of modernity, and what it could still mean for us today. Exploring these issues, Iain D. Thomson examines several (...) postmodern works of art, including music, literature, painting and even comic books, from a post-Heideggerian perspective. Clearly written and accessible, this book will help readers gain a deeper understanding of Heidegger and his relation to postmodern theory, popular culture and art. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in analytic philosophy that engages with non-Western philosophical traditions, including South Asian religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. However, thus far, there has been no engagement with Sikhism, despite its status as a major world religion with a rich philosophical tradition. This paper is an attempt to get a start at analytic philosophical engagement with Sikh philosophy. My focus is on Sikh ethics, and in particular on the theory of (...) vice and virtue that can be gleaned from Sikh scripture. According to this theory, the five major vices have a unified source in the vice of haumai. Haumai is a kind of false conception of oneself as singularly important, and correspondingly, a false conception of the world as revolving around oneself, as a world of objects there for one’s use. Vice, then, comes down to the failure to recognize the importance of others. The corresponding picture of virtue is that virtue consists in a recognition of the importance of others, through the recognition of an ultimate reality on which all are One. After reconstructing the Sikh theory of vice and virtue, I conclude with some comparative remarks on Sikh and Western ethics. (shrink)

Art is a creative phenomenon which changes constantly, not just insofar as it is being created continually, but also in the very meaning of ‘art.’ Finding a suitable definition of art is no easy task and it has been the subject of much inquiry throughout artistic expression. This paper suggests a crucial distinction between ‘art forms’ and ‘forms of art’ is necessary in order to better understand art. The latter of these corresponds to that which we would typically call art (...) such as painting, singing, etc. The former corresponds to the form out of which these take shape, movement, speech, etc. With this distinction set out, it becomes clearer that art and the aesthetic is rooted in the properties of the ‘thing’ such as the color, shape, and the texture, rather than the product of creation itself. Thus, the future of art will bring a new aesthetic in which these properties become recognized as art and as such there will be an aesthetic of everyday life. (shrink)

Taylor Swift’s choice to re-record several of her early studio albums might seem purely commercial. But the depth and intensity of the project suggests that Taylor’s Versions are new artworks, not just financially motivated copies. The elements of appropriation, audience participation, and institutional critique tie Swift’s project to a tradition dating back more than a century: conceptual art. I will stop short of arguing outright that Taylor’s Versions is a conceptual art project: it is foremost a contribution to popular music. (...) But considering it in relation to conceptual art sheds light on its achievements and one notable limitation. In the realm of appropriation, the fact that the re-recordings exhibit both close resemblance to and subtle differences from the originals has prompted an intensity of close listening by audience members, with distinctive aesthetic experiences in the realm of the uncanny. In the realm of participation, Swift has creatively motivated her fans to abandon her beloved original albums, and the fans have in turn evolved a variety of strategies to shift their allegiance to the new versions and hold each other accountable. When it comes to institutional critique—the movement in conceptual art that highlights and challenges the power structures governing art institutions—Swift’s project has raised awareness of troubling and exploitative power dynamics in the music industry. However, consideration of historical precursors of Swift’s institutional critique may lead us to question some elements of her self-presentation as a victim of gendered exploitation. (shrink)

Games occupy a unique and valuable place in our lives. Game designers do not simply create worlds; they design temporary selves. Game designers set what our motivations are in the game and what our abilities will be. Thus: games are the art form of agency. By working in the artistic medium of agency, games can offer a distinctive aesthetic value. They support aesthetic experiences of deciding and doing. -/- And the fact that we play games shows something remarkable about us. (...) Our agency is more fluid than we might have thought. In playing a game, we take on temporary ends; we submerge ourselves temporarily in an alternate agency. Games turn out to be a vessel for communicating different modes of agency, for writing them down and storing them. Games create an archive of agencies. And playing games is how we familiarize ourselves with different modes of agency, which helps us develop our capacity to fluidly change our own style of agency. (shrink)

Prof. (Dr.) Balwant Singh Dhillon, a much-acclaimed Sikh-historian, a dedicated researcher, a prolific writer, and a profound scholar of religion, was born in 1950, at Village Ran Singh Wala, District Faridkot, Punjab, India. With his keen interest in learning, he received a B.A. degree from SGGS College, Chandigarh, in 1972, and an M.A. (History) degree from the University of Rajasthan, Jaipur in 1974. During his younger days, he nurtured a keen interest in sports. On attaining the National Level Athlete (...) ranking, he was enthusiastic about pursuing a career in sports. Thereby, he joined Master Course for Coaching in athletics at the National Institute of Sports, Patiala, in 1974. Herein, he came in contact with Prof. Labh Singh of the Institute of Sikh Studies (IOSS, now Gurmat College), who inspired him to take up Sikh studies. This interaction brought a sea change in his life motive, and he committed himself to pursue a career in Sikh studies. After receiving M.A. (Religious Studies) degree from the IOSS in July 1976, he joined M. Lit. (Religious Studies) course at Punjabi University, Patiala. Here he had the opportunity to learn from several eminent scholars, e.g., Prof. Harbans Singh, Prof. Gurbachan Singh Talib, Prof. L.M. Joshi, and Dr. A.N. Sinha, etc., which made his resolve steadfast. In January 1977, he joined the Department of Guru Nanak Studies at Guru Nanak Dev University (GNDU), Amritsar, to pursue his research activities for a Ph.D. degree. In March 1985, he was awarded a Ph. D. degree by GNDU, for his outstanding research work on "The Sikh Gurus and the Mughal State." Starting, in April 1979, as a Research Assistant at the Department of Guru Nanak Studies, he rose to the position of Professor and Head of the department. He retired in June 2010. During his tenure at the university, he had also served as Dean, Faculty of Humanities and Religious Studies, Senator and Syndic of the University. As Head of the Department of Guru Nanak Studies, he played a vital role in starting the teaching of M.A. (Religious Studies and Philosophy)at GNDU, Amritsar. Under his stewardship, the research projects on "Sikh Religion and Philosophy," "Sikh History," and "Sikh Literature" were taken up, which led to a research and development grant of Rs. 3.2 Million from U.G.C., New Delhi, during 2006-2011. Dr. Dhillon was instrumental in establishing the Centre on Studies in Sri Guru Granth Sahib at the university, in April 2011, and served as its founding Director till February 2015. He has also served as the Editor-in-Chief for reputed Sikh research journals, "Journal of Sikh Studies" and "Perspectives on Guru Granth Sahib," published by the GNDU. In his forty years long professional career, he has been credited with authoring/publishing about a dozen books and over 100 articles in various research journals, books, and encyclopedias. Besides chairing several international seminars/conferences, he played a vital role in organizing many such events at the Department of Guru Nanak Studies and Centre on Studies in Guru Granth Sahib. He has the honour of representing India at many conferences/ seminars within Canada, America, England, Germany, and Australia. With his continuous dedication to religious studies, he has established himself as an exponent of interfaith dialogue and an eminent writer in the field of Sikh history. Through his well-researched and analytic writings, he has created an indelible mark of scholarship on his readers' minds. For his outstanding contributions in the fields of Sikh history and literature, he has been honoured by several literary and social organizations. Despite his great love and commitment to Sikh History and Religion, Dr. Dhillon subscribes to the idea that Sikh Gurus' Philosophy is perennial and universal in its approach to understand cosmology, Nature, life, and human behaviour in the present era. Furthermore, He asserts that the Sikh Gurus' ideology, its beliefs and practices, social order, worldview, and devotional pattern, as propounded in Sri Guru Granth Sahib, address the basics befitting the 21st century. His views on various aspects of Sikh history and philosophy are presented here for the benefit of readers. (shrink)

Women represent half of all humanity, yet they continue to face discrimination in various parts of the world. The feminist movement has done much to lessen gender discrimination in western societies. However, women in much of the world still face severe difficulties, such as violence, illiteracy, economic and social deprivation. It is increasingly recognized that better education and economic empowerment of women can play a significant role in uplifting the economic level of impoverished areas of the world and lowering birth (...) rates, which is crucial for addressing climate change. Having noted several general rituals and traditions of his time, Guru Nanak recognized that men often degraded women. They were thought of as property and treated as lowly and unworthy. He condemned these practices. Thus several centuries ahead of the feminist movement, Guru Nanak spoke out against gender discrimination in India's highly male‐dominated environment. He opposed established orthodoxy with the radical assertion that women were worthy of praise and equal to men. In this article, a brief review of the status of women in Sikh theology is presented. (shrink)

An object being non-art appears only trivially informative. Some non-art objects, however, could be saliently 'almost' art, and therefore objects for which being non-art is non-trivially informative. I call these kinds of non-art objects 'failed-art' objects—non-art objects aetiologically similar to art-objects, diverging only in virtue of some relevant failure. I take failed-art to be the right sort of thing, to result from the right sort of action, and to have the right sort of history required to be art, but to (...) be non-art by having failure where being art requires success. I assume that for something to be art that thing must be the product of intention-directed action. I then offer an account of attempts that captures the success conditions governing the relationship between intention-directed actions and their products. From this, I claim that to be failed-art is to be the product of a failed art-attempt, i.e., to be non-art as the result of the particular way in which that art-attempt failed. An art-attempt I take to be an attempt with success conditions, that, if satisfied, entail the satisfaction of the conditions for being art—whatever those may be. To be art, then, is to be the product of a successful art-attempt. As such, any art theory incompatible with my account of failed-art is an art theory for which the notions of success and failure do not matter, and therefore an art theory for which being art needn't be substantively intention-dependent. So, any theory of art unable to accommodate my account of failed-art is _ipso facto_ false. (shrink)

In the present time, the ecological crisis is one of the gravest challenges being faced by humanity. There is a serious concern that our planet may fail to remain a sustainable biosystem in the long run. Though human beings are seen as the most intelligent life form on Earth, yet they are responsible for almost all the environmental damage done to the planet. Sikh theology emphasizes that recognizing the sacred relation between human beings and the environment is crucial for (...) preserving the health of our planet and our survival. Furthermore, Sikh doctrines emphasize that humility, surrender to the divine spirit, and maintaining a harmonious relationship with all are crucial for humanity to find a way out of its current predicament. (shrink)

Dr. Amrit Kaur Raina, a renowned educationist, was a profound scholar of Sikhism. Having served as an educationist and administrator for over forty years at various prestigious educational institutions in India, she had also established herself as an eminent writer in the field of a comparative study of religions. Through her literary essays, as published in several reputed research journals, magazines, books, and newspapers, she had been able to create an indelible mark of scholarship on the minds of her readers. (...) Inspired by the writings of the Sikh Gurus and her father, Prof. Harnam Das, she devoted her life to disseminating the Sikh Gurus' educational philosophy and Gurmat among the masses. Being a prolific writer, with thirty-one books to her credit, in the diverse fields of education, religion, Punjabi, and Hindi literature, she had been honoured with the Shiromani Punjabi Sahityakar award (2006) and Haryana Gaurav Puraskar in Punjabi (2016) by Government of Haryana. A votary of honest living, Dr. Amrit Kaur Raina led a life dedicated to the love of God and selfless service to society. She was a true karam yogi who had devoted her whole life to spread the message of education, Gurmat, and service to all. She had been honored for her services to the Sikh cause, by several Sikh organizations, including SGPC, Amritsar; Guru Gobind Singh Foundation, Ludhiana; Sukhmani Society, Amritsar; Shaheed Memorial International Sewa Society, Ludhiana; S. D. College, Ambala Cantt; and Gurmat College, Patiala, etc. Dr. Amrit Kaur Raina often asserted that Sikh Gurus' educational philosophy, their Sikhi ethics, their compositions, and Sri Guru Granth Sahib as a whole are the substance that makes for spirituality befitting the 21st century. Her views on various aspects of Sikh Gurus' Educational Philosophy are presented here for the benefit of readers:. (shrink)

Most recent discussions of reasons in art criticism focus on reasons that justify beliefs about the value of artworks. Reviving a long-neglected suggestion from Paul Ziff, I argue that we should focus instead on art-critical reasons that justify actions—namely, particular ways of engaging with artworks. I argue that a focus on practical rather than theoretical reasons yields an understanding of criticism that better fits with our intuitions about the value of reading art criticism, and which makes room for a nuanced (...) distinction between criticism that aims at universality and criticism that is resolutely personal. (shrink)

Science and religion are based on different aspects of human experience. Science is a way of knowing and understanding the natural world, using empirical evidence and testable explanations. Religious faith does not depend only on empirical evidence and typically involves supernatural forces or entities. Thus, science and religion are separate and address the aspects of human understanding in different ways. The dialogue between science and religion is productive from a theological point of view since the world-environment in which the theologians (...) live is most productively studied by the sciences. The Sikh teachings, as recorded in Sri Guru Granth Sahib (SGGS), not only recognize a relationship between religion and science, logic and culture, it describes them to be interdependent. Sikh doctrines enunciate that the pursuits of learning about the cosmos by science and religion are not confrontational but complementary. Sikh precepts stress that the key to creating syncretism between science and religion is to cultivate a spirit of humility among scientists, theologians, faith practitioners, and clerics in front of Infinite Wisdom (Creator). (shrink)