Art restoration has been around as long as human beings have been involved with artifacts and works of art. Pliny mentions the Shrine of Ceres in the Circus Maximus at Rome.1 When the shrine was undergoing restoration, the embossed work of the walls was cut out and enclosed in framed panels, and figures were taken from the pediment and dispersed. Alteration, or the lack of it, clearly impacts the aesthetic appreciation of works of art, and the hermeneutics of that debate (...) are important in terms of both education and historical understanding.The purpose of this article is to survey the field of restoration and its interaction with problems of interpretation, aesthetic debate... (shrink)

Art restorations often give rise to controversy, and the reason does not always seem to be a lack of skill or dedication on the side of the restorer. Rather, in some of the most famous cases, the reason seems to be a lack of agreement on basic principles. In particular, there seems to be a lack of agreement on how the following two questions are to be answered. First, what is art restoration supposed to achieve, in other words, what is (...) the goal of restoration? Second, how can this goal be achieved, in other words, what are the means that a restorer can legitimately make use of? In this paper, I formulate, and defend, a principle that answers these questions. Although the principle may sound platitudinous, it has been contradicted by prominent philosophers and by important organizations concerned with conservation. Moreover, defending the principle turns out to be impossible without touching on such vexed philosophical issues as the ontology and identity of artworks, as well as the nature of perceptual and aesthetic properties (including the nature of artistic value). (shrink)

Different phases of the restoration of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel frescoes are discussed, including the techniques used to remove foreign matter deposited or applied in the course of time. Huge scientific and technical support is used for this project in contrast to the age?old operations of previous restorers and the simplicity of their equipment.

Robert Elliot's "Faking Nature," represents one of the strongest philosophical rejections of the ground of restoration ecology ever offered. Here, and in a succession of papers defending the original essay, Elliot argued that ecological restoration was akin to art forgery. Just as a copied art work could not reproduce the value of the original, restored nature could not reproduce the value of nature. I reject Elliot's art forgery analogy, and argue that his paper provides grounds for distinguishing between two forms (...) of restoration that must be given separate normative consideration: malicious restorations, those undertaken as a means of justifying harm to nature, and benevolent restorations, or, those which are akin to art restorations and which cannot serve as justifications for the conditions which would warrant their engagement. This argument will require an investigation of Mark Sagoff's arguments concerning the normative status of art restorations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 8.1 (2003) 22-36 [Access article in PDF] Art or Nature?Aristotle, Restoration Ecology, and Flowforms Trish Glazebrook He to whom nature begins to reveal her open secrets will feel an irresistible yearning for her most worthy interpreter: Art. 1Aristotle believed strongly in a distinction between artifact (technê) and nature (physis). He intended by "technê" more than is generally understood by the contemporary term "art," for he (...) meant anything produced by human intention. For example, for Aristotle medicine was technê in that the doctor produces health. The key point in distinguishing art from nature for him was that things in nature grow and develop on the basis of an internal principle of change, whereas artistic production requires an outside agent. There are some complications with the Aristotelian account: are the spider's web and the bird's nest art or nature? Aristotle can respond to this problem easily enough by arguing that spiders and birds create on the basis of instinct, while reason is requisite for artistic production. Yet some art may not meet this definition: artists may not always have a full conception of the work to be produced prior to its execution. Creativity can be emergent rather than intentional during the productive process, and may arise, for example, from the artist's interaction with the chosen material. [End Page 22]Despite these objections to the Aristotelian distinction, however, his analysis of the differences between art and nature can be usefully applied to recent debates in restoration ecology in order to argue that the human capacity to restore nature does not justify its destruction. Nature cannot be "faked," that is, recreated through art. Furthermore, the Aristotelian analysis has been influential historically by providing a conceptual basis for the technological domination of nature, as if nature were nothing more than matter upon which form can be imposed. Yet there are alternative possibilities in Aristotle's account that ecologically-minded art can bring to fruition. I will use Aristotle's analysis to suggest a potential resolution of the "faking nature" debate, and accordingly to show how contemporary, ecologically-minded art can promote an ideology of production that works with rather than against nature.Robert Elliot argues that restoration ecology does not justify environmental destruction, because faked nature (that is, nature re-created by human artifice) is not as valuable as the original. 2 I will call this claim, which is based on the idea that restoration is analogous to artistic production, "the Elliot view." I will first assess the Elliot view, and give reasons why I sympathize with his conclusions, yet find his arguments unconvincing. Second, I will present Aristotle's distinction between nature and art, with emphasis on his arguments that nature is goal-directed, in order to give content to the claim that nature has intrinsic value. Third, I will look at restoration policies and practices in the oil industry in Alberta, Canada, to establish a praxical notion of restoration, and to support Elliot's claim that nature cannot be faked. I have chosen oilfield restoration as a working example for the sake of the general methodological principle that praxes without reflections are blind, while reflections that transcend the lifeworld are empty; and specifically because Alberta leads the industry in restoration standards and practices. Finally, I will use Flowforms to argue that ecologically-minded art can demonstrate how production of artifacts need not affirm a logic of domination, but rather can open a space for an alternative conception of the human relation to nature. The Elliot View Elliot's view depends on distinguishing nature from art, and attributing a greater value to the natural. On what basis should we accept this value-hierarchy? The reasons Elliot gives are less than convincing. Ultimately his arguments rest on two points: that copies are not as good as [End Page 23] originals; and that even if an ecosystem's value could be fully restored, the value lost in the time between despoilation and restoration is irrecoverable. He simply finds "naturalness" to be more valuable than artifice. But he is not alone in... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 8.1 (2003) 22-36 [Access article in PDF] Art or Nature?Aristotle, Restoration Ecology, and Flowforms Trish Glazebrook He to whom nature begins to reveal her open secrets will feel an irresistible yearning for her most worthy interpreter: Art. 1Aristotle believed strongly in a distinction between artifact (technê) and nature (physis). He intended by "technê" more than is generally understood by the contemporary term "art," for he (...) meant anything produced by human intention. For example, for Aristotle medicine was technê in that the doctor produces health. The key point in distinguishing art from nature for him was that things in nature grow and develop on the basis of an internal principle of change, whereas artistic production requires an outside agent. There are some complications with the Aristotelian account: are the spider's web and the bird's nest art or nature? Aristotle can respond to this problem easily enough by arguing that spiders and birds create on the basis of instinct, while reason is requisite for artistic production. Yet some art may not meet this definition: artists may not always have a full conception of the work to be produced prior to its execution. Creativity can be emergent rather than intentional during the productive process, and may arise, for example, from the artist's interaction with the chosen material. [End Page 22]Despite these objections to the Aristotelian distinction, however, his analysis of the differences between art and nature can be usefully applied to recent debates in restoration ecology in order to argue that the human capacity to restore nature does not justify its destruction. Nature cannot be "faked," that is, recreated through art. Furthermore, the Aristotelian analysis has been influential historically by providing a conceptual basis for the technological domination of nature, as if nature were nothing more than matter upon which form can be imposed. Yet there are alternative possibilities in Aristotle's account that ecologically-minded art can bring to fruition. I will use Aristotle's analysis to suggest a potential resolution of the "faking nature" debate, and accordingly to show how contemporary, ecologically-minded art can promote an ideology of production that works with rather than against nature.Robert Elliot argues that restoration ecology does not justify environmental destruction, because faked nature (that is, nature re-created by human artifice) is not as valuable as the original. 2 I will call this claim, which is based on the idea that restoration is analogous to artistic production, "the Elliot view." I will first assess the Elliot view, and give reasons why I sympathize with his conclusions, yet find his arguments unconvincing. Second, I will present Aristotle's distinction between nature and art, with emphasis on his arguments that nature is goal-directed, in order to give content to the claim that nature has intrinsic value. Third, I will look at restoration policies and practices in the oil industry in Alberta, Canada, to establish a praxical notion of restoration, and to support Elliot's claim that nature cannot be faked. I have chosen oilfield restoration as a working example for the sake of the general methodological principle that praxes without reflections are blind, while reflections that transcend the lifeworld are empty; and specifically because Alberta leads the industry in restoration standards and practices. Finally, I will use Flowforms to argue that ecologically-minded art can demonstrate how production of artifacts need not affirm a logic of domination, but rather can open a space for an alternative conception of the human relation to nature. The Elliot View Elliot's view depends on distinguishing nature from art, and attributing a greater value to the natural. On what basis should we accept this value-hierarchy? The reasons Elliot gives are less than convincing. Ultimately his arguments rest on two points: that copies are not as good as [End Page 23] originals; and that even if an ecosystem's value could be fully restored, the value lost in the time between despoilation and restoration is irrecoverable. He simply finds "naturalness" to be more valuable than artifice. But he is not alone in... (shrink)

Eric Katz’s insight about the relationship between causal history and value only generates a principled critique of de-extinction when conjoined with the diminishment claim, or the claim that human involvement in something’s causal history diminishes its value. The diminishment claim is a form of negative anthropocentrism. In addition to thinking about de-extinction as a form of ecological restoration, we could think of it as a form of environmental artwork. This reframing highlights the implausibility of the diminishment claim.

In 1972, one of Michelangelo's earliest and best-known Pietàs was attacked by an evident lunatic. Fifteen times it was struck with a ninepound hammer; the Madonna's arm was broken in several places, her nose was knocked off, and her eye and veil were badly chipped. Immediately after the assault, and before knowing precisely what was needed to be replaced, the Director of the Vatican Museum, Redig de Campos, decided that integral restoration was called for.

The essay consists of three parts: the first argues that Deleuze's moral philosophy in The Logic of Sense provides an ethical model of counter-actualisation; the second shows how three different practices of art therapy offer a means to effect this counter-actualisation and thereby demonstrate the restorative power of art; the third explores how such a power might form part of what Guattari calls the ‘ethico-aesthetic paradigm’ (Guattari 1995).

Image restoration is a research hotspot in computer vision and computer graphics. It uses the effective information in the image to fill in the information of the designated damaged area. This has high application value in environmental design, film and television special effects production, old photo restoration, and removal of text or obstacles in images. In traditional sparse representation image restoration algorithms, the size of dictionary atoms is often fixed. When repairing the texture area, the dictionary atom will be too (...) large to cause blurring. When repairing a smooth area, the dictionary atom is too small to cause the extension of the area, which affects the image repair effect. In this paper, the structural sparsity of the block to be repaired is used to adjust the repair priority. By analyzing the structure information of the repair block located in different regions such as texture, edge, and smoothing, the size of the dictionary atom is adaptively determined. This paper proposes a color image restoration method that adaptively determines the size of dictionary atoms and discusses a model based on the partial differential equation restoration method. Through simulation experiments combined with subjective and objective standards, the repair results are evaluated and analyzed. The simulation results show that the algorithm can effectively overcome the shortcomings of blurred details and region extension in fixed dictionary restoration, and the restoration effect has been significantly improved. Compared with the results of several other classic algorithms, it shows the effectiveness of the algorithm in this paper. (shrink)

English Abstract In Art as Experience, John Dewey decried the estrangement of art from lived human experience, both by artificial conceptual walls and the physical walls that secluded art within museums. Instead he argued that making and enjoying art are crucial organic functions that sustain communities and integrate individuals within their environments. In the 1920’s Diego Rivera became one of the luminaries of the Mexican muralist movement by creating frescoes that were rooted in Mexican life, both in their subject matter (...) and public location. Rivera and the other artists working within the government cultural program guided by José Vasconcelos created murals that boldly expressed the new values of democracy, peaceful revolution, racial equality and cultural pride. This essay explores the deep resonance between Rivera’s most prominent murals from this period and Dewey’s argument that art is a refined and integral feature of human experience. In particular, this essay will examine the great extent to which these men independently came to the common understanding that for people to thrive and grow they need to create and experience art that grows out of and remains rooted in their culture. Without claiming that either thinker influenced the other, this essay argues that their works mutually inform and enrich each other. Both men sought to free art from the museum, but where Dewey urged us tear down the walls that separated art from lived experience, Rivera transformed walls themselves into murals that unified and educated the people of Mexico and restored their culture. (shrink)

The Whole Child is a beautifully written book combining classic philosophical themes such as wonder and happiness with contemporary parenting virtues like courage, compassion, integrity, and discipline.

In this article, I argue that our ontology of art has undergone a major change in the course of modern history. While we currently think of artworks as parts arranged in a certain way, there was a time when artworks were thought of as metaphysically more akin to ordinary artefacts such as tables and chairs; that is, as wholes having replaceable parts. This change in our ontology of art is reflected in our approach to art restoration. But what explains the (...) change? I will suggest that the change took place because of a change in our conception of the function of art. More specifically, I will suggest that we have started to think of artworks as parts arranged in a certain way, because we have started to think of artworks as having, primarily, an aesthetic function. (shrink)

On the face of it, the expression "nature restoration" may seem an oxymoron, for one may ask whether it makes any sense to suppose that human beings could restore that which is not human. Several writers recently have argued that, strictly speaking, this is nonsense and, furthermore, that the conceptual confusion involved may lead to ethically problematic consequences. In this essay I begin by discussing the problematic perceived in the notion of nature restoration. I proceed to consider Japanese gardens and (...) earthworks, insofar as both types of art forms foreground the relationship of artefactuality to nature. I conclude that the counterintuitive way in which these arts engage us with nature may help us understand the manner in which nature restoration is plausible. (shrink)

This book discusses possible paths towards restoring our humanity in today’s global techno-scientific culture. It begins by considering how talking face-to-face develops and improves critical discussion, before moving on to show that observing in both physics and art involves participating with what we are observing. The book then highlights how doing in general involves developing a third-person stance in order to improve our critical self-awareness, and how making in general is intertwined with the making and remaking of our multiple cultures. (...) It also explores how critical discussion allows our thinking both to confront and to keep in touch with reality, and provides six tentative maxims on how to ‘be’ as a human. (shrink)

One of the central worries raised in relation to ecological restoration concerns the problem of authenticity. Robert Elliot, for example, has argued that restoration “fakes nature.” On this view, restoration is like art forgery: it deceptively suggests that its product was produced in a certain way, when in fact, it was not. Restored landscapes present themselves as the product of “natural processes,” when in actuality, they have been significantly shaped by human intervention. For Elliott, there seem to be two sources (...) of inauthenticity in ecological restoration: first, the restored landscape is inauthentic because its natural genealogy has been disrupted by the intervention of humans: it has lost its authentic natural identity; second, the restored landscape is inauthentic because it pretends to be something it is not: it obscures its own history. We argue that the first sense of authenticity is problematic; however, the second concern—about obscuring history—is important. Case studies involving the naturalization of former military lands can be used to tease out more fully the ways in which landscapes can be “inauthentic” by misleading observers about their genealogy. In such landscapes, it is not departure from “the original” per se that is the source of inauthenticity; rather, restored landscapes fail to be authentic when they deceptively obscure critical elements of their past. (shrink)

Art is saturated with cultural significance. Considering the full spectrum of ways in which art is colored by cultural associations raises a variety of difficult and fascinating philosophical questions. This curriculum guide focuses in particular on questions that arise when we consider art as a form of cultural heritage. Organized into four modules, readings explore core questions about art and ethics, aesthetic value, museum practice, and art practice. They are designed to be suitable for use in an introduction to philosophy (...) of art, as well as in more topically focused courses, particularly on topics concerning the ethics and politics of art. (shrink)

Black Art and Aesthetics comprises essays, poems, interviews, and over 50 images from artists and writers: GerShun Avilez, Angela Y. Davis, Thomas F. DeFrantz, Theaster Gates, Aracelis Girmay, Jeremy Matthew Glick, Deborah Goffe, James B. Haile III, Vijay Iyer, Isaac Julien, Benjamin Krusling, Daphne Lamothe, George E. Lewis, Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, Meleko Mokgosi, Wangechi Mutu, Fumi Okiji, Nell Painter, Mickaella Perina, Kevin Quashie, Claudia Rankine, Claudia Schmuckli, Evie Shockley, Paul C. Taylor, Kara Walker, Simone White, and Mabel O. Wilson. The (...) stellar contributors practice Black aesthetics by engaging intersectionally with class, queer sexuality, female embodiment, dance vocabularies, coloniality, Afrodiasporic music, Black post-soul art, Afropessimism, and more. Black aesthetics thus restores aesthetics to its full potential by encompassing all forms of sensation and imagination in art, culture, design, everyday life, and nature and by creating new ways of reckoning with experience, identity, and resistance. Highlighting wide-ranging forms of Black aesthetics across the arts, culture, and theory, Black Art and Aesthetics: Relationalities, Interiorities, Reckonings provides an unprecedented view of a field enjoying a global resurgence. Black aesthetics materializes in communities of artists, activists, theorists, and others who critique racial inequities, create new forms of interiority and relationality, uncover affective histories, and develop strategies for social justice. (shrink)

This article contends that the evolution toward interdisciplinary collaboration that we are witnessing in the sciences must also occur in the humanities to ensure their very survival. That is, humanists must be open to working with scientists and social scientists interested in similar research questions and vice versa. Digital humanities is a positive first step. Complexity science should be the next step. Even though much of the ground-breaking work in complexity science has been done in the natural sciences and mathematics, (...) it can, if critically adapted, provide the needed metaphor for a broad integration of disciplines, humanistic and otherwise. Given its almost a-disciplinary nature, a complexity approach to the research problems in the humanities necessarily breaks down silos. Moreover, it can restore and reframe the seamless intellectual fabric sought by researchers before the atomization of the various disciplines in the nineteenthcentury academy. (shrink)

Neither art nor philosophy was kind to beauty during the twentieth century. Much modern art disdains beauty, and many philosophers deeply suspect that beauty merely paints over or distracts us from horrors. Intellectuals consigned the passions of beauty to the margins, replacing them with the anemic and rarefied alternative, "aesthetic pleasure." In Only a Promise of Happiness, Alexander Nehamas reclaims beauty from its critics. He seeks to restore its place in art, to reestablish the connections among art, beauty, and desire, (...) and to show that the values of art, independently of their moral worth, are equally crucial to the rest of life.Nehamas makes his case with characteristic grace, sensitivity, and philosophical depth, supporting his arguments with searching studies of art and literature, high and low, from Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and Manet's Olympia to television. Throughout, the discussion of artworks is generously illustrated.Beauty, Nehamas concludes, may depend on appearance, but this does not make it superficial. The perception of beauty manifests a hope that life would be better if the object of beauty were part of it. This hope can shape and direct our lives for better or worse. We may discover misery in pursuit of beauty, or find that beauty offers no more than a tantalizing promise of happiness. But if beauty is always dangerous, it is also a pressing human concern that we must seek to understand, and not suppress. (shrink)

In the ontology of the artwork and its regimes of existence, Gérard Genette gives but little room to the theory and practice of restoration. However, restoration is seen in relation to the identity of the work itself and to its material and pragmatic temporality and anachronism. In the wake of Nelson Goodman, it is also understood as a form of actuation and implementaion of the aesthetic experience. Starting from these premises, the present essay intends to examine the relationship between Genette’s (...) and Daniel Arasse’s reflections on restoration and the history of art, highlighting their similarities and differences with Cesare Brandi’s theory of restoration and, therefore, pointing out their as yet undischarged debts to Sartre’s phenomenology of image. (shrink)

It has been proved that total generalized variation can better preserve edges while suppressing staircase effect. In this paper, we propose an effective hybrid regularization model based on second-order TGV and wavelet frame. The proposed model inherits the advantages of TGV regularization and wavelet frame regularization, can eliminate staircase effect while protecting the sharp edge, and simultaneously has good capability of sparsely estimating the piecewise smooth functions. The alternative direction method of multiplier is employed to solve the new model. Numerical (...) results show that our proposed model can preserve more details and get higher image visual quality than some current state-of-the-art methods. (shrink)

Atypical among Heidegger’s numerous discussions of poets is the condemnation of Rilke in the 1942-43 lecture course Parmenides. At stake is the definition of “the open” (das Offene): Rilke reserves the open for animals as freedom from conceptual determinacy, whereas Heidegger reserves it for human beings as the place of Being in which things first appear as what they are. The open, for Heidegger, names the existential conception of place (as distinct from a geographical point) and features in his life-long (...) attempts to articulate the relations between language, human existence, poetry and the everyday. By denying that human beings have access to the open, Rilke runs athwart this project and by denying it in a poem he confounds the expectations that Heidegger harbours with respect to the work of art as a site of the opening up of aesthetic experience, within the everyday, to ontological questioning. (shrink)

In the restoration of art and artifacts there are three salient types of value to consider: relic, aesthetic, and practical. Relic value includes an object’s age, aura, originality, authenticity, and epistemic value. Aesthetic value is connected to how an object looks, sounds, or tastes. Practical value involves whether a thing can be used as designed—whether a book can be read, a building occupied, a car driven. I argue that while these are all legitimate values, it is impossible for a restorer (...) to maximize them all. I conclude that restoration inexorably involves aesthetic choices; there is no supreme value to be maximized and we should be pluralists about the right balance of values. Restoration is like baking a cake; there are many wrong ways to do it, but there are many right ways as well. (shrink)

Soundscapes affect people’s health and wellbeing and contribute to the perception of environments as restorative. This paper continues the validation process of a previously developed Perceived Restorativeness Soundscape Scale (PRSS). The study takes a novel methodological approach to explore the PRSS face and construct validity by examining the qualitative reasons for participants’ numerical responses to the PRSS items. The structure and framing of items are first examined, to produce 44 items which are assessed on a seven-point Likert agreement scale, followed (...) by a free format justification. Ten English speaking participants completed the PRSS interpretation questionnaire in two cafes in Montréal, Canada. Interpretation of participant free format responses led to six themes, which related to either the individual (personal attributes, personal outcomes), the environment (physical environment attributes, soundscape design) or an interaction of the two (behaviour setting, normality and typicality). The themes are discussed in relation to each Attention Restoration Theory (ART) component, namely Fascination, Being-Away, Compatibility, and Extent. The paper concludes by discussing the face and construct validity of the PRSS, as well as the wider methodological and theoretical implications for soundscape and attention restoration research, including the terminology importance in items measuring ART components and the value of all four components in assessing perceived restorativeness. (shrink)

Conservation and exhibition of historical works of art run many risks of misrepresentation of the life and meanings of objects. This paper explores the identities of some particularly compelling examples of Byzantine art restored under special circumstances at the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas. This examination of the restoration of frescos and icons, and their particular display histories, reveals the contingencies of our encounters with and explanations of historical art.

Die Erhaltung und Ausstellung von historischen Kunstwerken geht viele Risiken in Bezug auf die Darstellung des Lebens und der Bedeutungen von Objekten ein. Dieser Beitrag untersucht die Identitäten einiger besonders fesselnder Beispiele byzantinischer Kunst, die in der Menil Collection in Houston, Texas unter besonderen Umständen restauriert wurden. Eine Untersuchung der Wiederherstellung der Fresken und Ikonen sowie ihrer jeweiligen Ausstellungsgeschichten offenbart die Kontingenzen unserer Begegnungen mit und Erklärungen von historischer Kunst. Conservation and exhibition of historical works of art run many risks (...) of misrepresentation of the life and meanings of objects. This paper explores the identities of some particularly compelling examples of Byzantine art restored under special circumstances at the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas. This examination of the restoration of frescos and icons, and their particular display histories, reveals the contingencies of our encounters with and explanations of historical art. (shrink)

In Pragmatism. The Restoration of Its Scientific Roots (P) and The Pragmatic Vision. Themes in Philosophical Pragmatism (PV) Rescher continues the work of analysis and assessment of the pragmatist tradition that he started more than thirty years ago with the publication of his The Primacy of Practice (1973). The thirty essays that compose the two books (some of them already published elsewhere) deal with a large number of issues, ranging from axiology to epistemology, from art to religion. Th...

In our life with science, we trust experts; we form judgements by inference from past evidence. We conduct ourselves very differently in the aesthetic domain. We avoid deferring to aesthetic experts. We form our judgements through direct perception of particulars rather than through inference. Why the difference? I suggest that we avoid aesthetic testimony and aesthetic inference, not because they’re unusable, but because we have adopted social norms to avoid them. Aesthetic appreciation turns out to be something like a game. (...) We have laid down certain rules and restrictions in order to shape a kind of activity we cherish. And aesthetic properties turn out to be a kind of social construct. Much like the goal of a game, they are constituted in part by our obedience to certain rules. The norms of aesthetic life are different from those of science because our purposes are different. We engage in science to get the right answers; we engage in aesthetic appreciation to be absorbed in the activity of the sensuous perception of particulars. Our aesthetic practices are a constructed shelter from science; they restore to us a small domain where we may once again engage in our own sensuous perception of particulars. (shrink)

Environmental artworks are not an aesthetic affront against nature because the aesthetic qualities of artworks are to some extent a function of other sorts of qualities, such as moral, social, or ecological qualities. By appealing to a new ecological paradigm, we can characterize environmental artworks as anthropogenic disturbances and evaluate them accordingly. Andrew Light’s model of ecological citizenship emphasizes public participation in ecological restoration projects, which are very similar to environmental artworks. Participation in the creation, appreciation, and criticism of environmental (...) art can count as a form of ecological citizenship when these practices provoke public deliberation about environmental and other community-regarding values. (shrink)

Anti-introduction: Paint it Black -- PART I: MESSAGES IN A BOTTLE: AESTHETIC THEORY CONTRA CRITICAL THEORY -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Critical Messages in a Bottle and Restoration -- 3. Excursus I: The Prevalence of a View: Being Uncompromisingly Critical at the Grand Hotel Abyss -- 4. Excursus II: The Prevalence of a View: 'Don't participate:' The Politics of Social Praxis -- 5. Aesthetic Messages in a Bottle and Progress -- 6. Messages in a Bottle as the Work of Art (...) -- PART II: ART ITSELF THINKS: THE POLITICS OF AESTHETIC (MIS-)EDUCATION -- 7. Introduction -- 8. The Politics of Artistic Practice: 'What artist isn't socially engaged?' -- 9. The Politics of Spectatorship: Shocking Spectators -- 10. The Politics of Aesthetic (Mis-)Education -- 11. Contemporary Art Itself Thinking: Making the Invisible Visible? -- Anti-conclusion: The Russian Ending. (shrink)

In recent years, a trend has emerged in the field of art conservation, the aim of which is to protect street art objects. Attempts to conserve murals face many problems. This is due to various factors – lack of time distance to this type of objects, difficulties in assessing their artistic value, frequent lack of interest of artists in the conservation of their works, material impermanence of murals, their often-occasional nature; also, the fact that most of these objects are not (...) legally protected. The paper discusses the problems faced by an art restorer who wants to save murals. Examples of murals are presented, the conservation of which is not possible, among others, due to the fact that the houses on which they were painted are intended for demolition. There are also examples of murals whose rescue from destruction gained public approval and the conservation of which was carried out. The paintings are in a very poor condition. This is a feature of most murals, which are usually made on old, unrepaired plasters with low-quality paints. Their maintenance is a very difficult task. The presentation shows the various stages of conservation of works lacated in Warsow. The conservation of the murals is carried out in order to preserve street art facilities. Apart from the involvement of art conservators, social support for this type of activity is also important. However, one should be aware that most of murals have no chance of becoming a permanent part of the city landscape. Their fate will be determined by chance. (shrink)

Though nearly 400 pages, Benjamin Richardson’s The Art of Environmental Law, Governing with Aesthetics, will not tell you everything you always wanted to know about aesthetics and environmental law but were afraid to ask. What it will give you is a fascinating overview that is remarkably readable despite its considerable length.Richardson’s opening chapter explains that his objective is to show “how insights from aesthetics can enrich the study and understanding of environmental law.” (p. 5) Strictly speaking, what he draws upon (...) are insights about aesthetics rather than from aesthetic theories, philosophical or otherwise. Richardson does occasionally draw upon philosophical texts, most frequently those of Allen Carlson and Glenn Parsons, Arnold Berleant, Yuriko Saito, and Emily Brady. But this is a work of applied aesthetics, aimed at an interdisciplinary audience. Indeed its greatest strength is its interdisciplinarity. Richardson draws on studies of environmental law and landscape management, biodiversity conservation, museum practices, advertising, ecotourism, environmental restoration, land art, and environmental activism, as well as philosophical environmental aesthetics. The result is a valuable resource for anyone interested in the many different avenues through which aesthetic values, broadly construed, can enter into the development and application of environmental law. (shrink)