Diversity Reading List

Abstract: The art work cannot be identified simply with a physical object, there has been an emphasis on the importance of theory context, and convention and a corresponding de-emphasis of the importance of the physical object for the identification of a work. In the hurry to abandon the object and to adopt theory as the means of identifying the art work, the importance of the object in that identification has sometimes been underestimated.

Abstract: This examination of the concept “work of art” has been prompted by the desire to find a starting point for aesthetic inquiry which, to begin with at any rate, will arouse no dispute. A claim for general agreement such as Clive Bell's: “The starting point for all systems of aesthetics must be the personal experience of a pecular emotion”, is countered by I. A. Richards's “the phantom aesthetic state”, and any attempt to claim “beauty” as the central concept is straightway confused by the varied contexts in which “beauty” and “beautiful” may function. We hear much more often of a beautiful stroke in cricket than in painting, and many of our moral judgments have an aesthetic flavour. An action may be bold, dashing, mean, underhanded, unimaginative, cringing, fine, as well as right or wrong. Aesthetic adjectives and adverbs may occur in any context, and part of our job is to separate out the various uses and establish their inter-relationships.

Publisher's Note: Have we become beauty-blind? For two decades or more in the humanities, various political arguments have been put forward against beauty: that it distracts us from more important issues; that it is the handmaiden of privilege; and that it masks political interests. In On Beauty and Being Just Elaine Scarry not only defends beauty from the political arguments against it but also argues that beauty does indeed press us toward a greater concern for justice. Taking inspiration from writers and thinkers as diverse as Homer, Plato, Marcel Proust, Simone Weil, and Iris Murdoch as well as her own experiences, Scarry offers up an elegant, passionate manifesto for the revival of beauty in our intellectual work as well as our homes, museums, and classrooms.

Scarry argues that our responses to beauty are perceptual events of profound significance for the individual and for society. Presenting us with a rare and exceptional opportunity to witness fairness, beauty assists us in our attention to justice. The beautiful object renders fairness, an abstract concept, concrete by making it directly available to our sensory perceptions. With its direct appeal to the senses, beauty stops us, transfixes us, fills us with a “surfeit of aliveness.” In so doing, it takes the individual away from the center of his or her self-preoccupation and thus prompts a distribution of attention outward toward others and, ultimately, she contends, toward ethical fairness.

Scarry, author of the landmark The Body in Pain and one of our bravest and most creative thinkers, offers us here philosophical critique written with clarity and conviction as well as a passionate plea that we change the way we think about beauty.

Abstract: I want to suggest that the notion of the suspension of disbelief cannot coherently be used to explain or account for our reactions to fictional characters and events, and that in any case it is unnecessary to the solution of the alleged paradox. I take fiction here to cover art works in which a story is told, presented or represented, i.e. novels, short stories, plays, certain kinds of painting and sculpture and dance-any works in fact is connection with which it makes sense to speak of characters appearing and events taking place in them.

Abstract: Few philosophical debates seem to allow for as little theoretical disparity as that on the subject of Realism or Anti-Realism. That the two antithetical positions uphold the broad structure of a dichotomy may come as no surprise: the question under scrutiny is, after all, one about whether the world and its contents are autonomous of our minds, or whether the world and its contents simply cannot be said to exist independently of our perception and understanding of them. There does not, in other words, seem to be much leeway between the two stances, at least partly because what they capture is a deeply entrenched conceptual divide over what does and does not exist. How, one may ask, could some thing exist but a little?

Introduction: One of the least controversial aspects of the highly provocative project that was early conceptual art was its wholesale rejection of the modernist paradigm. For artists adhering to the conceptual approach, modernism's loyalty to the notions of beauty, aesthetic sensation, and pleasing form, represented a commitment to obsolete artistic axioms.' Art, it was argued, should be purged of expressivist or emotivist aims; it was to '[free] itself of aesthetic parameters' and embrace an altogether different ontological platform. On this line, a conceptual artwork was taken to be 'a piece: and a piece need not be an aesthetic object, or even an object at all' (Binkley 1977: 265). In contrast to modernism, then, conceptual art set itself, from its very beginning, a distinctively analytic agenda by proposing to revise the kind of thing an artwork can be in order to qualify as such, and pronouncing aesthetics 'conceptually irrelevant to art' (Kosuth 1969). It is in view of this that conceptual art, to use the words of some of its most prominent exponents, can be understood as 'Modernism's nervous breakdown' (Art - Language 1997).

Abstract: This essay focuses on Schopenhauer's aesthetics and philosophy of art, areas of his philosophy which have attracted the most philosophical attention in recent years. After discussing the subjective and objective aspects of aesthetic experience on his account, I shall offer interpretations of Schopenhauer's theory of the sublime and solution to the problem of tragedy. In addition, I shall touch upon the liveliest interpretive debates concerning his aesthetic theory: the intelligibility of the 'Platonic Ideas' as the objects of aesthetic experience and the very possibility of aesthetic experience within Schopenhauer's system. Another aim of this essay is to suggest how some of Schopenhauer's aesthetic doctrines may be interpreted in a less metaphysically extravagant way. When understood in this manner, contemporary aestheticians might be inclined to take a closer look at Schopenhauer's aesthetic theory and philosophy of art, for it is distinctive in the tradition of Western philosophical aesthetics in its attempt to highlight and balance the hedonic and cognitive importance of aesthetic experiences; in its sensitivity both to the aesthetic experience of nature as well as of art; in the high value placed on the experience of music ; and in the innovative solution to the problem of tragedy it offers

Abstract:
The aesthetic category of the sublime has been theorized (especially in the Kantian tradition) as integrally intertwined with the moral. Paradigmatic experiences of the sublime, such as gazing up at the starry night sky, or out at a storm-whipped sea, lead in a moral or religious direction depending on the cognitive stock brought to the experience, since they typically involve a feeling of awe and reflection on the peculiar situation of the human being in nature. The monumental is a similar aesthetic category, integrally intertwined with the political, but, by contrast, has garnered almost no attention from aestheticians. My main goal in this paper is to sketch a theory of ‘the monumental’ as an aesthetic category—one that is a species of the sublime but differs qualitatively from the natural/environmental sublime in significant ways, and thus merits a distinctive label. In doing so, I aim to shed light on the nature and power of monuments specifically, and to begin to address a lacuna in our understanding of a long-standing and culturally important form of public art.

Summary: Sigman studies outrage and offense in the art context. The first important observation she makes is that, often enough, the public's recoiling from a piece of art comes with the assumption that the object of offense is interpretatively transparent. This is because in the absence of art-historical or theoretical wherewithal, we default to pre-conceptual reactions - fear of otherness, loss of our ethical bearings, low self-esteem etc. Since most historical offense-based arguments against art have made a claim that the particular work is demeaning to the public, Sigman carefully lays out the features of demeaning treatment - a mostly intentional act that treats persons as less than persons, usually in an abusive manner. On this description, very few artworks could be considered demeaning. Furthermore, as Sigman shows in her art-historical contextualization of artist Stelarc's performance work Street Suspension, public outrage could be tempered and/or extinguished through attentive engagement with problematic artworks.

Abstract: Following suggestions drawn from both analytic and postmodernist sources, I shall advise revisionist artwriters to follow Fou- cault's caution against conceiving of the artists whose stories are related in arts scholarship as historical persons who originated (that is, were the origins of) their art, and who, consequently, are prior to and separate from it. From this perspective, it is problematic how references to properties external to works of art-properties like gender-function in the kind of artwriting crucial to canonical reform.