Diversity Reading List

Summary: In this short selection, Keeshig-Tobias (Ojibway) raises questions about representation and authenticity in fiction about Native people written by non-Native authors. With reference to certain Native belief systems, she contextualizes why the telling of a story could be viewed as theft in a way that might seem counter-intuitive to a liberal Western audience.

Publisher’s Note: In May of this year I had the opportunity to give several talks on the topic of nihilism. Initially I intended to focus on the three themes of Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and Buddhism. When I was twenty, the fig­ures of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky burned a lasting impression deep into my soul-as I suppose they may still do to many young people even today-and the tremors I experienced at that time have con­tinued to make my heart tremble ever since. The final theme, of Buddhist "emptiness," came to capture my interest more gradu­ally. The connections among these three topics are not merely arbi­trary or external. The nihilism that Dostoevsky plumbed so deeply has important connections with that of Nietzsche, as a number of critics have pointed out; and Nietzsche considers what he calls Eu­ropean nihilism to be the European form of Buddhism. Even though there may be in Nietzsche a radical misunderstanding of the spirit of Buddhism, the fact that he considered it in relation to ni­hilism shows how well attuned he was to the real issue. It was con­siderations such as these that inclined me toward these three themes in my discussion of nihilism.

Abstract: The puzzle of imaginative desire arises from the difficulty of accounting for the surprising behaviour of desire in imaginative activities such as our engagement with fiction and our games of pretend. Several philosophers have recently attempted to solve this puzzle by introducing a class of novel mental states - what they call desire-like imaginings or i-desires. In this paper, I argue that we should reject the i-desire solution to the puzzle of imaginative desire. The introduction of i-desires is both ontologically profligate and unnecessary, and, most importantly, fails to make sense of what we are doing in the imaginative contexts in question.

Abstract: In this blogpost, King introduces the distinction between high art/highbrow and low art/lowbrow things both in terms of historical and social underpinnings. However King suggests that the distinction need not be cashed out simply in terms of what kinds of objects we choose to experience (e.g. fine wines vs. beer), but should also be understood in terms of the mode of appreciation or engagement we choose or endorse when experiencing certain objects. For instance, we can have a higbrow mode of appreciation towards an object usually considered lowbrow (and vice versa).

Publisher's note: Feminist approaches to art are extremely influential and widely studied across a variety of disciplines, including art theory, cultural and visual studies, and philosophy. Gender and Aesthetics is an introduction to the major theories and thinkers within art and aesthetics from a philosophical perspective, carefully introducing and examining the role that gender plays in forming ideas about art. It is ideal for anyone coming to the topic for the first time. Organized thematically, the book introduces in clear language the most important topics within feminist aesthetics:

• Why were there so few women painters?
• Art, pleasure and beauty
• Music, literature and painting
• The role of gender in taste and food
• What is art and who is an artist?
• Disgust and the sublime.

Each chapter discusses important topics and thinkers within art and examines the role gender plays in our understanding of them. These topics include creativity, genius and the appreciation of art, and thinkers from Plato, Kant, and Hume to Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. Also included in the book are illustrations from Gaugin and Hogarth to Cindy Sherman and Nancy Spero to clarify and help introduce often difficult concepts. Each chapter concludes with a summary and further reading and there is an extensive annotated bibliography. Carolyn Korsmeyer's style is refreshing and accessible, making the book suitable for students of philosophy, gender studies, visual studies and art theory, as well as anyone interested in the impact of gender on theories of art.

Introduction: For some time my own interests in aesthetics and in feminism appeared to run parallel yet mutually exclusive courses, but it seems to me now that philosophical aesthetics and feminist views of culture have begun to dovetail and to share certain concerns and orientations. Philo sophical aesthetics is not by and large taking note of this, however, and in the first section of this essay I argue that feminist perspectives pro vide a vantage from which the appearance of breakdown in unified theorizing can be seen to have an underlying order and pattern.2 Thus at first I shall emphasize a potential harmony be tween feminist critiques and recent directions in aesthetics. Then in the second section I shall focus on one of the subjects that has all but dropped from view in the reshuffling of the oretic concerns: aesthetic appreciation or plea sure. I argue that this concept is urgently in need of reexamination, a need that is especially evi dent when we consider feminist alternatives to the traditional idea of aesthetic pleasure.

Summary: Korsmeyer argues that although genuineness (or authenticity) is not a perceptual property, it is still an aesthetically relevant property for cultural artifacts, an argument that she locates in the relationship between age and the sense of touch. She thus offers a potential explanation for a common ntuition about the nature and value of authenticity in the Western tradition.

Introduction: Philosophers occasionally take note of the degree to which their theories make use of metaphoric language. Plato may have been the first to call attention to the heuristic use of sensory images to illuminate the world of abstractions, but twentieth-century thinkers have been particulalry reflective on the subject. Metaphors, remarks Iris Murdoch, are "fundamental forms of our awareness of our condition: metaphors of space, metaphors of movement, metaphors of vision." Philosophical systems, she believes, can often be understood as explorations of centrally important images. Indeed, it seems to her "impossible to discuss certain kinds of concepts without resort to metaphor, since the concepts are themselves deeply metaphorical, and cannot be analyzed into non-metaphorical components without a loss of substance." Mark Johnson agrees and obeserves that recent discoveries in cognitive science provide empirical evidence for claims about metaphor that previously were largely intuitive, namely, that "metaphor is not merely a linguistic phenomenon, but more fundamentallly, a conceptual and experiential process that structures our world.

Summary: Korsmeyer's account of disgust and the role it plays in art appreciation starts with a treatment of what she calls the "paradox of aversion" - the apparent incompatibility between humans' disposition to seek pleasure and their frequent voluntary exposure to unpleasant and even painful art-related experiences. Korsmeyer's provisional solution to the paradox is based on the realization that pleasure is not an emotion but rather "an intense absorption in an object that induces us to continue rather than halt an experience." This opens the possibility that the pleasure we take from a work of art retains a cognitive element such that we gain unique insight from what would, outside of the art context, have given us pain. Korsmeyer speaks of an "aesthetic conversion" whereby disgust and fear are transfigured into vehicles of absorption, and thus become aesthetically pleasurable. Since disgust and its magnetic force are of material interest to performance artists and their critics, Korsmeyer's treatment of the paradox of aversion helps re-contextualize an important art historical issue.

Summary: One of the most important and creative works in modern Japanese aesthetics. Kuki develops a description of a uniquely Japanese sense of taste (iki) that brings together characteristics of the geisha, samurai, and Buddhist priest.

Abstract: Aesthetic emotions are reputed to be irrational, but, aesthetic emotions as mental phenomena bear complex relations to rationality. Emotions give us knowledge about the world. The aesthetic consciousness of Korean is the internal roots of the Korean's mentality. The aesthetic consciousness and the mentality are inseparably related to each other. The aesthetic consciousness as the analogy of reason, in the context of A.G. Baumgarten plays a role to extend the logical world. Aesthetic rationality is the common sense or the communicative rationality of it. For the argument of universality we discuss the problem of aesthetic rationality. Since the modern aesthetics, the problem of aesthetic rationality came on the stage of aesthetics. Shamanism as the deep-rooted element of Korean mentality is the most authentic cultural legacy of Koreans. Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, and other religious elements influence the unique nature of the Korean character together with shamanism. They play a decisive role in determining the Korean mentality or consciousness. For Koreans, nature is a mirror of the self and a world of meditation which gives life, restoring all things to their proper state. As a peculiar color consciousness, Korean monochrome is characterized by vitality, spontaneity and unconcern for technical perfection. Korean art also tends to be devoid of an artificial movement and this reflects dislike of disturbance, deformation and convention. If we are to consider Korean contemporary art from an international perspective, we must define what it means to be Korean, i.e. our cultural habits and artistic elements hidden in the artist's unconsciousness. In this age of multiculturalism, the new interpretation on tradition makes it possible to merge the Korean art with the world stage. The extension of aesthetic emotion through experimentation shows us the change of aesthetic consciousness as a new possibility of interpretation.

Abstract: Many have argued that certain statues or monuments are objectionable, and thus ought to be removed. Even if their arguments are compelling, a major obstacle is the apparent historical value of those commemorations. Preservation in some form seems to be the best way to respect the value of commemorations as connections to the past or opportunities to learn important historical lessons. Against this, I argue that we have exaggerated the historical value of objectionable commemorations. Sometimes commemorations connect to biased or distorted versions of history, if not mere myths. We can also learn historical lessons through what I call repudiatory honouring: the honouring of certain victims or resistors that can only make sense if the oppressor(s) or target(s) of resistance are deemed unjust, where no part of the original objectionable commemorations is preserved. This type of commemorative practice can even help to overcome some of the obstacles objectionable commemorations pose against properly connecting to the past.

Summary: Lambert-Beatty explores the limits of art activism through a detailed account of Rebecca Gomperts' Women on Waves project. Starting in 2001, Gomperts - a physician with a background in art - sailed a customized maritime gynecological clinic with a crew from the Netherlands to the coastal areas of countries where abortion had been outlawed. The clinic would dock far enough from the shore (twelve miles being the limit of states' naval jurisdictions) to offer healthcare to local women undisturbed. Lambert-Beatty notes that for all of its political import, the project retains a radical imagination of the poetic kind. Considering its enthusiastic reception by the international artworld, and inclusion in major art exhibitions, it is also clear that Gomperts intended the work at least partially as art. And, yet, Women on Waves challenges notions of the aesthetic as the "retreat from the real" that it is so often seen as. Lambert-Beatty sees the pragmatic aspect of the work as an integral part of its beauty, and vice versa. This symbiotic balance seems to resolve the tension Ranciere finds "between the logic of art that becomes life at the price of abolishing itself as art, and the logic of art that does politics on the explicit condition of not doing it at all."

Content: Langer offers a theory of art according to which artworks are purely perceptible forms which embody some sort of feeling. Objects are art if they have ‘significant form’ which is understood as a form symbolic of human feeling or clearly expressing our internal lives. A discussion of different types of symbols and ways to symbolise follows to explain how art can symbolise feeling. The book discusses different arts, where they create different ‘primary illusions’, e.g. ‘virtual time’ is characteristic of music, while ‘virtual space’ – of visual arts. Thus arts are alike in that they all create forms symbolic of human feeling, but differ in what kind of illusions they create.

Publisher's Note: The Chinese Aesthetic Tradition touches on all areas of artistic activity, including poetry, painting, calligraphy, architecture, and the "art of living." Right government, the ideal human being, and the path to spiritual transcendence all come under the provenance of aesthetic thought. According to Li this was the case from early Confucian explanations of poetry as that which gives expression to intent, through Zhuangzi’s artistic depictions of the ideal personality who discerns the natural way of things and lives according to it, to Chan Buddhist-inspired notions that nature and words can come together to yield insight and enlightenment. In this enduring and stimulating work, Li demonstrates conclusively the fundamental role of aesthetics in the development of the cultural and psychological structures in Chinese culture that define "humanity."