Art and Form: From Roger Fry to Global ModernismROSESAMPenn State University Press. 2019. pp. 224. £71.95.

This work intends to discuss about the first generation of Romanian womenpainters within the wider context of the condition of woman within the Romanian society during the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. We will develop the following path: a) the movement of women’s emancipation in Romania – characteristics and phases; b) the Romanian art-world and this movement of women-painters.

A fluent economical collaboration between countries is a major need. European flows of trade and people are supported by efficient connections between main localities from a geographic region, in many cases overriding national borders. This paper introduces three traveling salesmen problem instances based on freely available geographic coordinates of the main cities of France, Portugal and Spain. These instances are unified, generating other four larger instances: three with all pairs of countries and one instance with the settlements from all the (...) three countries. The study includes an analysis of quality of solutions for a version of branch & cut algorithm and some hybrid heuristics including the Lin–Kernighan algorithm. $Bor\mathring{u}vka$, Quick$Bor\mathring{u}vka$ and Greedy algorithms are also used in the hybrid approaches in order to obtain a potential beneficent initial solution for the Lin–Kernighan algorithm. Concorde solver, nowadays state-of-the-art exact software, together with the already mentioned algorithms, is used to test and furthermore analyze the new TSP instances. Some results are represented using online services such as Google Maps, showing the potential integration of the Concorde’s optimum results into commercial routing applications. The very good results provided by the Lin–Kernighan method allow its usage for real medium-sized routing instances. (shrink)

Résumé Que cela soit dans l’approche d’Arthur Danto ou dans celle de Jean Baudrillard, le pop’art américain a souvent été assimilé à une reproduction à l’identique par la peinture d’images empruntées au flux médiatique de la culture de masse. En donnant « droit de cité » dans le domaine du Grand-Art à des photographies de presse, des images publicitaires ou bien à celles de comics bon marché, le pop’art américain aurait ouvert la voie à une expression artistique enfin libérée de (...) toutes normes, y compris celles de l’exigence ou de l’authenticité qui pouvaient encore animer les déjà trop vieilles avant-gardes modernistes. Il aurait ainsi favorisé une prolifération sans limite des possibles ou bien une équivalence généralisée de tous les systèmes de signes visuels. À l’encontre de ces approches, nous nous proposons de montrer que cette révolution du pop’art américain n’est pas tant la recherche d’une indiscernabilité que celle d’un meilleur discernement. (shrink)

This chapter explores Pop Art's significance for Arthur Danto's philosophy of art. It looks at the views of British curator Lawrence Alloway, Danto's immediate predecessor at the Nation. In 1974, Alloway defined the core of Pop Art as “essentially, an art about [emphasis mine] signs and sign‐systems”. Danto characterized artworks as the kinds of things that prompt philosophizing, a point that proves especially helpful when attempting to discern art‐cars, art‐cheese, art‐billboards, and art‐photographs from mere things. By 1973, Danto was already (...) grappling with issues inspired by Pop Art's many conundrums. The more artists adopted imagery and formats familiar to commercial art, the more philosophers needed models to discern, for example, James Rosenquist's billboard‐size paintings publicizing pasta, lipstick, cars, and the like, from his actual roadside billboards, hand‐painted between 1957 and 1960. (shrink)

This essay explores the work of “New York’s most famous unknown artist,” Ray Johnson, contending that his complex relationship to sadomasochism provides a key switch point for Pop’s sexual and racial imaginary. In the register of sex, Johnson’s sadomasochism contests the stability of the relationship between homosexuality and Pop, offering instead a queerer object that opens out new models of collaborative artistic production. In the register of race, sadomasochism enables Johnson to articulate a monochrome world, attempting to void the binarized (...) color-line’s fissuring force. While this strategy from our contemporary vantage feels politically suspect, I see it is part of a larger project of political and social reparation whereby the explicitly sadomasochistic themes of Johnson’s work imagine a rebuttal to and reconfiguration of the racist exclusionary forces of the art world. (shrink)

Mikhail Lifshitz is a major forgotten figure in the tradition of Marxist philosophy and art history. _The Crisis of Ugliness_, published here in English for the first time, is a compact broadside against modernism in the visual arts that resists the dogmatic complacencies of Stalinist aesthetics.

Music has often attempted to express mystical states of mind, cosmic harmony, the demonic and the divine. This wide-ranging survey explores how such film music works and uncovers its origins in Pythagorean and Platonic ideas about the divine order of the universe and its essentially numerical/musical nature.

›Pop‹ often functions as an abbreviation of ›popular‹. If that is the case, ›pop‹ includes talk of ›simple,‹ ›catchy‹, ›vivid‹ and/or ›standardised‹, ›schematised‹ and/or ›charming‹, ›spectacular‹ artefacts as well as their ›lively‹, ›unmediated‹ or ›conditioned‹, ›passive‹, ›merely sensual‹ reception. This essay reconstructs precisely those approaches to a pop aesthetic, from Richard Hamilton, among others, to cultural studies and German-language pop discourse, that deviate from this and offer an independent position. Three areas of such pop aesthetics are examined in more detail: (...) 1. determinations of individual pop arts and pop-specific value judgements, 2. forms of not purely discursive pop aesthetics, 3. provisions for an overarching pop aesthetic. In the comprehensive inspection of corresponding presentations on pop music, pop art, pop literature and pop design, characteristics cited, such as superficiality and artificiality, are examined for their viability, deficits are identified and, in some cases, new proposals are made. (shrink)

Andy Warhol (1928-1987), considerado por muchos como el más importante y emblemático artista estadounidense, sigue despertando, a más de 20 años de su muerte, un renovado interés interpretativo, acompañado de no pocas polémicas que evidencian criterios encontrados y lecturas diversas. Siendo el principal representante del Pop Art, Warhol concentró en sí mismo y en su obra los atributos fundamentales de toda una nueva etapa del desarrollo del arte, caracterizada por una especie de salto mortal desde lo que había sido hasta (...) los años cincuenta del siglo XX el paradigma por excelencia del buen arte y del gusto refinado, sobre todo en los medios artísticos estadounidenses: el expresionismo abstracto. El arte pop le devolvía un contenido figurativo al arte, pero, a diferencia de épocas anteriores, extraía ese contenido de los objetos más comunes de la cultura de masas de la sociedad de su tiempo. (shrink)

Here, for the first time, Christopher Kul-Want brings together twenty-five texts on art written by twenty philosophers. Covering the Enlightenment to postmodernism, these essays draw on Continental philosophy and aesthetics, the Marxist intellectual tradition, and psychoanalytic theory, and each is accompanied by an overview and interpretation. The volume features Martin Heidegger on Van Gogh's shoes and the meaning of the Greek temple; Georges Bataille on Salvador Dal’'s The Lugubrious Game; Theodor W. Adorno on capitalism and collage; Walter Benjamin and Roland (...) Barthes on the uncanny nature of photography; Sigmund Freud on Leonardo Da Vinci and his interpreters; Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva on the paintings of Holbein; Freud's postmodern critic, Gilles Deleuze on the visceral paintings of Francis Bacon; and Giorgio Agamben on the twin traditions of the Duchampian ready-made and Pop Art. Kul-Want elucidates these texts with essays on aesthetics, from Hegel and Nietzsche to Badiou and Rancire, demonstrating how philosophy adopted a new orientation toward aesthetic experience and subjectivity in the wake of Kant's powerful legacy. (shrink)

Starting from three works by Ugo Nespolo dedicated to pop and maintaining Warhol as a reference figure, this essay seeks to outline some crucial points of pop aesthetics: the idea of an artificial and constructible aesthetic and the consequent marginalization of nature; the construction of the pop beauty as phenomenology of iconic expendability; the network of media images as the final result of the dialectic between art and industry.

Współcześnie próby systematyzowania sztuki na podstawie jej wartości zastępują raczej teorie opisowe, które stronią od jej ocen. Co więcej, refleksja postmodernistyczna, zmieniając swój stosunek do sztuki niskiej, skutecznie zatarła różnice w hierarchizacji walentnych treści sztuki. Wzmocnienie głoszonych w awangardzie programowych tez zmierzających do unieważnienia dotychczasowych kryteriów postaw oceniających wartość sztuki przyszło wraz z tzw. filozofią postmodernizmu. Założenia postmodernizmu ukazują wizję sztuki współczesnej, która osiągnęła kres swoich możliwości twórczych, innymi słowy nie ma współczesnej możliwości powiedzenia w sztuce czegoś nowego, co nie (...) będzie tylko cytatem, powtórzeniem, rekapitulacją tego, co już w sztuce było. Tego rodzaju hipoteza zakłada, że wyobraźnia ludzka jest zbiorem skończonych możliwości, a w procesie rozwoju kultury doszliśmy w czasach współczesnych do punktu, w którym wszystkie możliwe kombinacje zostały już wykorzystane. W tej sytuacji możemy albo przyjąć postawę zniechęcenia, albo sięgnąć do czasów minionych i wyselekcjonować poszczególne elementy, zestawiając je w eklektycznej kombinacji tak, aby nosiły znamiona nowości. Ale, aby przeprowadzić ten eklektyzm, który ma spełniać pozory nowości, trzeba wyjść od zwątpienia w kategorię racjonalnego rozumu, czyli braku wiary w naturalny porządek świata. Tylko wtedy głównym operatywem na gruncie kultury pozostanie wszechobecna ironia. I w tym duchu, zgodnie z założeniami postmodernizmu, należy czytać tzw. wielkie narracje historyczne, czyli systemy filozoficzne, religie, projekty społeczne czy też teorię sztuki. Obecne w historii narracje należy traktować jak wielkie literackie opowieści, które, być może, mają ciekawą fabułę, ale nie są prawdziwe i nie wychodzą poza zdawkowy komentarz. Katalog często stawianych hipotez wybranych i omówionych w artykule wskazuje na ich niejasną i często wadliwą konstrukcję. Nie oznacza to jednak niemożności stawiania pytań o wartościowanie na gruncie estetyki. Należy pamiętać, że pewne kwestie pozostają niezmienne w ocenie sztuki. Kryterium oceny dzieła sztuki uzyskane na podstawie cech empirycznych pozostaje niezmienne, a zatem to, co nazywamy kwestiami warsztatowymi, może przejść jako pierwsza przesłanka uznania, bądź nie, dzieła sztuki za wartościowe. Podobnie na bazie pewnej fikcji wizualnej urzeczywistniane są wartości, które nie są dostępne w świecie realnym, tym samym nie pełnią funkcji czystej repetycji doświadczenia ze świata realnego, więc mogą zaistnieć w świecie sztuki. Tym samym wartość sztuki może być mierzona skalą wprowadzenia do doświadczenia podmiotu poznającego czegoś, czego dotąd podmiot nie doświadczył. (shrink)

Pop music is a form of indexical art -- Pop music belongs to the second of three culture industries -- At the heart of pop music is no object, but an impulse to connect -- An assembly of effects and small noises -- Minus music : popularity and criticism -- Production aesthetics.

Se plantea que la estética posmoderna, alejada de la posibilidad de concebirse como estética filosófica o filosofía del arte (al menos como la presentó Alexander G. Baumgarten al inicio de la Modernidad), adquiriría en la era actual la fisonomía de una pop estética, cuya expresión fundante pareciese ser la propia experiencia estética y no otras condiciones atribuibles a un determinado canon estético. En relación a esta conjetura, que por lo visto implica una cierta superación de la idea de obra, se (...) discute, por un lado, la conexión entre arte e inteligencia artificial y, por otro, las implicancias de la Everyday Aesthetics sobre el concepto de experiencia. Una y otra práctica, testimoniarían en la actualidad un renovado sentido común estético. (shrink)

This interview – conducted by Peter Beilharz and Trevor Hogan with Clinton Walker over the course of three months between Melbourne and Sydney via email and Skype – explores the questions of Australian popular culture writing with, against, and of the culture industries themselves. Walker is a leading freelance Australian cultural historian and rock music journalist. He is the author of seven books, five about Australian music. He has been a radio DJ and TV presenter. He compiled and produced four (...) double CD album collections of Australian music – Inner City Sound, Buried Country, Long Way to the Top, and Studio 22. He has been a key writer in several multi-media projects, including the Powerhouse Museum Real Wild Child exhibition and CD-Rom and ABC TV’s hit documentary series/CD/DVD Long Way to the Top. In 2006, a new US edition of his first book Inner City Sound was published. His Golden Miles: Sex, Speed and the Australian Muscle Car has been published in a revised edition in 2009. In 2012, his eighth book, The Wizard of Oz, will be published. Walker is currently writing with Beilharz and Hogan a book called The Vinyl Age: The History of Australian Rock Music, 1945–1995. The interviewers invited Walker to reflect critically on his 35-year ‘career’ as pop avatar, independent writer and critic in the post-war to post-modern Australian popular culture industries. Going from journalism to his path-finding books and television documentaries, the article traces this work’s development both in personal terms and as a symptom of the broader cultural evolution, from the suburbs to pop to art and rock and back again; between London and the provincial cultures of Oz; from one-way American consumerism to local DIY egalitarianism, analogue to digital to global dialogue, youth culture to multi-culturalism, and from the putative low brow to the legimitization process itself of popular culture. (shrink)

Over a decade ago, Arthur Danto announced that art ended in the sixties. Ever since this declaration, he has been at the forefront of a radical critique of the nature of art in our time. After the End of Art presents Danto's first full-scale reformulation of his original insight, showing how, with the eclipse of abstract expressionism, art has deviated irrevocably from the narrative course that Vasari helped define for it in the Renaissance. Moreover, he leads the way to a (...) new type of criticism that can help us understand art in a posthistorical age where, for example, an artist can produce a work in the style of Rembrandt to create a visual pun, and where traditional theories cannot explain the difference between Andy Warhol's Brillo Box and the product found in the grocery store. Here we are engaged in a series of insightful and entertaining conversations on the most relevant aesthetic and philosophical issues of art, conducted by an especially acute observer of the art scene today.Originally delivered as the prestigious Mellon Lectures on the Fine Arts, these writings cover art history, pop art, "people's art," the future role of museums, and the critical contributions of Clement Greenberg--who helped make sense of modernism for viewers over two generations ago through an aesthetics-based criticism. Tracing art history from a mimetic tradition through the modern era of manifestos, Danto shows that it wasn't until the invention of Pop art that the historical understanding of the means and ends of art was nullified. Even modernist art, which tried to break with the past by questioning the ways of producing art, hinged on a narrative.Traditional notions of aesthetics can no longer apply to contemporary art, argues Danto. Instead he focuses on a philosophy of art criticism that can deal with perhaps the most perplexing feature of contemporary art: that everything is possible. (shrink)

After a thousand years of feudal middle ages, the west entered a new era, namely the Renaissance, from the 14th century. With the influence of humanism on the cultural field, people's individuality consciousness has been released. Western pop music is a western art form with profound connotation and eternal value. In recent years, many scholars and music educators have carried out a series of research and popularization of western pop music. Through scientific methods, the students' ability to control pop music (...) can be transformed into the basic quality of solfeggio listening training, so as to achieve the combination of the advantages of pop music and serious music, so as to complete the interactive, concise and diversified solfeggio teaching and broaden new teaching ideas. The role and influence of religious songs on the development of western vocal music art is incalculable. Its value is reflected in various fields of vocal music art. Therefore, while singing and appreciating religious songs, we should also strengthen the study and research of their background and historical development. (shrink)

Post Pop - Abstract painting - Illusionary art - Figurative painting - Fetish art - Political art - Art as environment and architecture - High tech and the Third World.

Kristeva's Teresa My Love concerns the life and thought of a 16th century Spanish mystic, written in the form of a novel. Yet the theme of another kind of foreigner, equally exotic but this time threatening, pops up unexpectedly and disappears several times during the course of the novel. At the very beginning of the story, the 21st century narrator, psychoanalyst Sylvia Leclerque, encounters a young woman in a headscarf, whom Kristeva describes as an IT engineer, who speaks out, explaining (...) that "she and her God were one and that the veil was the immovable sign of this 'union,' which she wished to publicize in order to definitively 'fix it' in herself and in the eyes of others." In this paper I ask what difference Kristeva discerns between these two women, a distinction that apparently makes Teresa's immanence simultaneously a transcendence, but transforms a Muslim woman in a headscarf immediately into an imagined suicide bomber. Despite the problematic aspects of this comparison, we can learn something from them about Kristeva's ideas on mysticism and on art. Both mysticism and art are products of the death drive, but whereas the suicide bomber and the animal directly and purely pursue death Teresa and Adel remain on its outer edge and merely play with mortality. (shrink)

Drawing on newspaper articles, ad campaigns, declassified government archives, and old movies, Ken Hollings shows the culture of postwar America and its dream of limitless technological and human development.

From the 1990s until just before his death, the legendary art critic and philosopher Arthur C. Danto carried out extended conversations about contemporary art with the prominent Italian critic Demetrio Paparoni. Their discussions ranged widely over a vast range of topics, from American pop art and minimalism to abstraction and appropriationism. Yet they continually returned to the concepts at the core of Danto’s thinking—posthistory and the end of aesthetics—provocative notions that to this day shape questions about the meaning and future (...) of contemporary art. Art and Posthistory presents these rich dialogues and correspondence, testifying to the ongoing importance of Danto’s ideas. It offers readers the opportunity to experience the intellectual excitement of Danto in person, speculating in a freewheeling yet erudite style. Danto and Paparoni discuss figures such as Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp, Franz Kline, Sean Scully, Clement Greenberg, Cindy Sherman, and Wang Guangyi, offering both insightful comments on individual works and sweeping observations about wider issues. On occasion, the artist Mimmo Paladino and the philosopher Mario Perniola join the conversation, enlivening the discussion and adding their own perspectives. The book also features an introductory essay by Paparoni that provides lucid analysis of Danto’s thinking, emphasizing where the two disagree as well as what they learned from each other. (shrink)

Draws on examples ranging from prehistoric cave art to modern pop music to discuss the nature and purpose of art and its use by powerful social and cultural forces.

Se propone al alumnado del Grado de Magisterio de Infantil un proyecto de creación de cuento ilustrado y su posterior narración y grabación audiovisual por parejas, así como el diseño de un taller de ilustración y testeo de instrumentos de evaluación. Aplicamos para el análisis de las experiencias la Investigación Basada en las Artes Visuales y la antropología visual. Los resultados desvelan la comprensión por parte de las alumnas de magisterio de las peculiaridades que tendrán los niños y las niñas (...) con los que trabajarán, así como la importancia competencial que adquiere la expresión y el lenguaje artísticos en su formación. (shrink)

In Interplay of Things Anthony B. Pinn theorizes religion as a technology for interrogating human experiences and the boundaries between people and other things. Rather than considering religion in terms of institutions, doctrines, and creeds, Pinn shows how religion exposes the openness and porousness of all things and how they are always involved in processes of exchange and interplay. Pinn examines work by Nella Larsen and Richard Wright that illustrates an openness between things and traces how pop art and readymades (...) point to the multidirectional nature of influence. He also shows how Ron Athey's and Clifford Owens' performance art draws out inherent interconnectedness to various cultural codes in ways that reveal the symbiotic relationship between art and religion as a technology. Theorizing that antiblack racism and gender- and class-based hostility constitute efforts to close off the porous nature of certain bodies, Pinn shows how many artists have rebelled against these attempts to counter openness. His analyses offer a means with which to understand the porous, unbounded, and open nature of humans and things. (shrink)

At odds with the relevance it has as object of aesthetical experience around the world, pop-rock music is still a rare subject in philosophical inquiry. Nonetheless, it has arisen growing interest in the last two decades, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon tradition. In such context, this paper intends to give an overview of the philosophical contributions on the subject made so far, and provide some guidelines for its study in the field of aesthetics. After reconstructing the debate, starting from Theodor W. (...) Adorno’s thoughts on mass music as prolegomena and arriving at the so-called “ontologies of rock”, this article takes an aesthetic point of view concerning the specificity of pop-rock and argues that the decisive aspect of the genre in the choir of popular musical expressions lies in the unique role of technology applied in its production. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Philosophy and the Interpretation of Pop CultureStefán SnaevarrPhilosophy and the Interpretation of Pop Culture, edited by William Irwin and Jorge J. E. Gracia. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007, 297 pp., $29.85 paper.There has been quite a boom lately in the market for philosophical books on popular culture. The young American philosopher William Irwin has led the way by starting the fad of "... and philosophy" books; the (...) first one that Irwin edited was Seinfeld and Philosophy. So it is only fitting that he is one of the editors of this volume on philosophical interpretation of popular culture. In contrast to most of the earlier books of this kind, a sizable number of the contributors to this volume belong to the top brass of America's aestheticians: Noël Carrol, Ted Cohen, Carolyn Korsmeyer, and Richard Shusterman, to name but a few. The book is divided into two parts, "Philosophy and Popular Culture" and "Interpretation and Popular Art Forms." These titles are self-explanatory; it might be added that the aforementioned top brass dominates the first part.Irwin provides the book with a witty and well-written introduction, but he operates with a very wide definition of popular culture, classifying movies as such as items of pop culture. However, the medium surely is not the message. The fact that novels can be part of popular culture does not make Joyce's Ulysses a pop cultural object. Irwin's chapter, "Philosophy as/and/of popular culture," is rather two papers in one. One half addresses the concept of popular culture, containing an insightful critical evaluation of, among others, Noël Carroll's concept of mass art. The other half proposes that we can use popular culture to disseminate philosophical ideas to the general public. More so than in the introduction, Irwin is actually rather critical of popular culture in this chapter. He worries about its negative effect on culture in general—no cult of pop culture here. In addition, he rejects the notion of popular culture having the potential of becoming philosophy or its surrogate. He reminds us that Socrates used examples from everyday life and the popular culture of his day to make his philosophical points. In a similar fashion, the popular culture of today can be a stepping stone for philosophers to reach wider audiences. If you cannot beat them, join them! Popular culture could, for instance, be used to warn the public against its own evil aspects. This is an excellent idea, and I could not agree more; I myself often use examples from popular culture in my own lectures with good results. Irwin should expand on this idea and present it in a separate article.Richard Shusterman's chapter does not add much to his earlier writings. It is also somewhat like two articles in one; the first is a criticism of the denigration of pleasure and entertainment as aesthetic values, and the second half is an attempt to bridge the divide between intrinsic value and instrumental value. Both halves [End Page 111] contain some excellent arguments, but popular culture tends to be on the fringe in Shusterman's argument. The focus is on other more traditional, philosophical issues. Perhaps another venue would have been more suitable for this article.In contrast to Shusterman, Caroline Korsmeyer addresses the issues of popular culture in a fairly straightforward manner. Popular culture can be educational, even philosophically so. This claim does not mean that works of popular culture are works of philosophy in the ordinary sense of the word. However, we can "treat philosophy as a success term to refer to works demanding imaginative engagement that results in the recognition... of a philosophical position, such that what is done in philosophy proper that induces a possible conclusion is done in another genre by means appropriate to its appreciation" (31). Given this understanding of philosophy, we can understand works of popular culture as vehicles of philosophy. Korsmeyer maintains that the TV series Angel conveys some of Simone de Beauvoir's ideas from one of her books. Korsmeyer's chapter also contains a delightful discussion of "the probable impossible" and "the possible improbable" in fiction. But... (shrink)

PRELIMINAR Y STA TEMENT BY IA NNIS XENA KIS Subtended Philosophy* The worlds of classical, contemporary, pop, folk, traditional, avant-garde, etc., ...

The recent removal of the Richard Prince’s artwork Spiritual America from the Tate Modern’s “Pop Life: Art in a Material World” exhibition is the most recent and high-profile case of a work of art being withdrawn from a gallery in the UK on the grounds that it has allegedly breached legislation concerning indecent images of children. Surprisingly, the issue has been hardly considered by academics from law departments and is almost entirely ignored by philosophers specializing in aesthetics and ethics. This (...) essay considers the ethics of images of children by drawing from continental ethics and aesthetics, and by engaging with the only significant treatment of the subject undertaken by a philosopher, namely Peter J. King’s “No Plaything.” This paper shows that a continental perspective can open up positions that King’s ‘objectivist utilitarianism’ is oblivious of. In particular, the essay draws from Derrida’s reading of Kant’s Third Critique and the former’s quasi-conception of “the frame” in The Truth in Painting and “droit de regard” in Right of Inspection. In distinction to King, this paper engages with the actual existing reality of currently enacted laws and their application in particular cases such as in Spiritual America. I will begin with art ‘in the frame’ as the colloquial expression has it, art wrongfully and unjustly accused by the police. I will proceed via an examination of the question of the frame in Kant and Derrida, to demonstrate a need to reclaim the ethical status of works of art. The core procedure of my paper will be a ‘rediscovery’ of Spiritual America as the Kantian example that allows us to find the law. My argument will be that no work of art or image can of itself be decent or indecent. (shrink)

The urgency of the research is determined by the intensive development of new technologies as prospects for further development of society. Art accumulates intellectual, spiritual, material, and value heritage of previous epochs and determines the perspective features of the future. Vocal art is thereby one of the manifestations of individual ideological rethinking. Variety as a socio-cultural phenomenon combines different styles of music, genres, types, and aspects of professional music and vocal performance, which is important for the research in the context (...) of social rethinking of future social development. Objective of the article is to determine specifics of pop vocal art, its long-term development as an aspect of integration into society of the future. The article reflects the essential characteristics of the concept of pop vocal art and worldview perception of art as an aspect of the future society. In the process of research a method of abstraction, descriptive method, methods of analysis and synthesis were used in the theoretical substantiation and characterization of pop music as a vocal art. The method of generalization and systematization was used to determine the results of the research. The results became the basis for asserting the importance of pop vocal art in the further development of society. (shrink)

Purpose. The article is devoted to the analysis of corporality as an attribute of plastic art in the Ancient art, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the modernism and the postmodernism. Theoretical basis. The authors consider historical development of the art as a change of paradigms. Within each paradigm a special understanding of art is created, which is characterized both by the act of creativity itself and by the evaluation of its results. Particularly urgent is the task to identify the origins (...) of these changes, to indicate their stages, the direction of the evolution of artistic creativity. In this context, corporality as a paradigm of European plastic art is considered in the article in the concrete historical dimension from the classics to the postmodernism. Originality. Postmodern experiments stimulate blurring the borders between the traditional forms and genres of art. Review of canonical ideas about the creation and destruction, order and chaos in art illustrates conscious reorientation from the classical understanding of artistic creativity to the construction of artifacts-simulacra, which is a characteristic feature in the oeuvre of contemporary artists, ranging from the pop art to the present day. Conclusions. The ideas of postmodern philosophers found their visual embodiment in modern artistic practices. Reconstruction of the body, re-switching of its elements according to the principle of chaotic collage, the interpretation of the human body as a separate substance isolated from the individual him/herself, which is presented as a phenomenon of mass culture, became the basis of the creative method of contemporary plastic art. The ideas of postmodern philosophers have found their visual embodiment in the contemporary artistic practices. (shrink)

Wang Guangyi, one of the stars of the new wave of Chinese art, has artistically addressed major philosophical trends in Western philosophy while drawing on Taoism, Marxism and Maoism. By bringing together a team of experts in the philosophy of art to discuss his work, The Philosophy and Art of Wang Guangyi presents the first philosophical exploration of Wang's art, his thought and his analysis of Chinese society. -/- From his use of words in images to his reference to the (...) classics of Western painting, contributors set Wang's work against key questions in contemporary art. As well as answering what makes the language of pop art successful, they examine whether art and its history have come to an end, as Hegel posited, and if it is possible or even necessary to rework a new narrative for the history of contemporary art. The Philosophy and Art of Wang Guangyi marks an important contribution to understanding the background, work and ideas of a 21st-century political artist outside the West. (shrink)

This editorial highlights the remarkable contributions in this JIS volume that explore the arts as a gateway to the transcendentals of beauty, truth and goodness. It focuses on the recurring notions of order, telos, and creativity reflecting the essential attributes of human nature as imago Dei. Apart from the arts as art therapy, how can the arts connect one to the transcendentals? Can homo musicus aspire to self-transcendence? A shining example of music as self-transcendence is the life and times of (...) Tony Bennett, the legendary singer and an American icon of traditional pop, big band, show tunes, and jazz. Bennett’s love of music, in particular, transcends his physical limitations engendered by the onset of Alzheimer’s in later life. (shrink)

Here, for the first time, Christopher Kul-Want brings together twenty-five texts on art written by twenty philosophers. Covering the Enlightenment to postmodernism, these essays draw on Continental philosophy and aesthetics, the Marxist intellectual tradition, and psychoanalytic theory, and each is accompanied by an overview and interpretation. The volume features Martin Heidegger on Van Gogh's shoes and the meaning of the Greek temple; Georges Bataille on Salvador Dalí's _The Lugubrious Game_; Theodor W. Adorno on capitalism and collage; Walter Benjamin and Roland (...) Barthes on the uncanny nature of photography; Sigmund Freud on Leonardo Da Vinci and his interpreters; Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva on the paintings of Holbein; Freud's postmodern critic, Gilles Deleuze on the visceral paintings of Francis Bacon; and Giorgio Agamben on the twin traditions of the Duchampian ready-made and Pop Art. Kul-Want elucidates these texts with essays on aesthetics, from Hegel and Nietzsche to Badiou and Rancière, demonstrating how philosophy adopted a new orientation toward aesthetic experience and subjectivity in the wake of Kant's powerful legacy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:George J. Leonard EMERSON, WHITMAN, AND CONCEPTUAL ART The widespread abandoning of the art object at the end of the 1960s was taken as something radically, even frighteningly, new, by critics and artists alike. Objects, concept artist Joseph Kosuth was asserting by 1969, are "irrelevant" to art. Though an artist might choose, as in the past, to "employ" objects, "all art is finally conceptual." In fact it was now (...) time that the object, nothing more than the "physical residue" of the artist's mental activity, was dispensed with.1 "We / open our eyes and ears seeing life / each day excellent as it is," John Cage chanted: "This / realization no longer needs art...."2 Aestheticians as disparate as Murray Krieger and Harold Rosenberg reacted to this "transfiguration of the commonplace," as Arthur Danto has called it. Danto has gained a wide scholarly audience for his ideas about the 1960s as "the end of art," or at least as the beginning of "post-historical art."3 We know from such works as Renato Poggioli's TL· T^ry oftL· Avant-Garde that, in this century, particular movements have routinely declared themselves to be art's climax.4 Critics like Jacques Barzun and artists like Amedee Ozenfant had been saying for years that art was exhausted. Yet conceptualism's attack on the object struck most critics as something both alarming and new: Irving Sandler wrote in a special edition of the College Art Association's Art Journal devoted to the problem that it demolished "every notion of what art should be,"5 and Murray Krieger feared that this "leap beyond Pop Art" would "complete the obliteration of the realm of art, its objects, its museums...."6 But the conceptualist attacks on the art object were, in fact, not new. One can find attacks as scathing in Emerson and Whitman; so scathing, that criticism has rarely taken them seriously. The attacks the concep297 298Philosophy and Literature tualists mounted in the 1960s were only the culmination ofan intellectual tendency which appeared throughout the West one hundred and sixty years before. It has long been a scholarly commonplace that after 1800 an "intellectual tendency"—as M. H. Abrams finallytermed it—extolling the possibilities of this world emerged in all parts of Western culture. When itappears in literature we nowusually call it, withAbrams, Natural Supernaturalism; or, with Harold Bloom, the "visionary company." Man, Wordsworth decreed, can and must learn to find "Paradise" in "the common day."7 Surprisingly litde work has been done on what happened when this intellectual tendency, Natural Supernaturalism, confronted the art object. Emerson and Whitman can stand for many who were necessarily ill at ease with the idea of art objects as elite objects superior to the common things it was their mission to extol. Wordsworth works before these two; Ruskin develops similar ideas into greater complexity; but since Emerson writes clear expository prose and avoids fanciful terminology, he makes a good place to enter this dark wood. Let us begin with some straightfor-ward, overdue interdisciplinary history, reading Emerson on the art object, noticing similar passages in Whitman, and noting where Emerson has reworked Hegel for his own ends. For Emerson objects are but thought's "inert effect," as for the concept artist Kosuth they would be but the "physical residue" of the artist's activity. Emerson and Kosuth, opposite Shakespeare, do not applaud the art process as the giving to an airy nothing a local habitation and a name; rather they disdain the stuff as petrifactions, as dead mud footprints left by living thoughts diat have raced away.8 In his essay "Circles," Emerson derides our admiration for a work of architecture, directing us to the "litde waving hand" that built it, for "that which builds is better than that which is built." By the same logic, the invisible thoughts which truly wrought the object were even better than the hand and "nimbler."9 When such passages are discussed at all, they are usually considered Platonic,10 but, in his essay "Art," Emerson envisions a use for art objects Plato would have blinked at. For the time being, art objects have a particular "office" to fill. That office, Emerson wrote in... (shrink)

This article analyses the short performances of Drag Sethlas at the yearly Gran Canaria Drag Queen Contest in Spain (2017–20) from the perspective of religious studies and gender studies, following on from an earlier article in which this case was explored in light of the severe blasphemy accusations (by local and national bishops and lay organisations) against the 2017 show. These short performances consist of remarkable representations of Roman Catholic texts, saints, symbols and rituals acted out as prize-winning drag-queen shows (...) that were aired on national television. At the same time, these acts are situated, by reference to famous earlier controversial acts by the pop artists Madonna, Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande, in a genealogy of provocations and blasphemy accusations that are currently made in North American and Western European countries. In exploring the forms of ritualisation (cf. Bell 1989) in the provocation that this type of popular artistic performance with strong religious connotations evokes, I show the presence of a double theatricality in Sethlas’s first and most controversial performance: on the one hand a ‘holy drama’ centred around a religious pattern of penance, repentance and redemption, and on the other hand a specific drag theatricality, with its parodies, mockery and daring erotic scenes. It is precisely the connection between both forms of theatricality, especially the representation of the Virgin Mary and Jesus, who play a large and special role in both forms of theatricality, that contributes most to the provocativeness of this scene. (shrink)

L'invention de nouvelles figures de l'art est un fait polémique. Absconses selon les schèmes de la définition de l'art suscitée par les précédentes, elles forcent l'esthéticien à forger de nouveaux concepts, plus idoines, à inventer un nouveau style, plus juste, à prendre de nouveaux masques, à muter dans un nouveau corps, plus sensible à ces nouveaux charmes. L'histoire de la création artistique est la raison de l'histoire de l'esthétique.C'est cette vie critique de l'esthétique, que cet article s'attache à mettre en (...) évidence en prenant l'exemple paradigmatique du pop art. (shrink)

Comprised of thirteen articles by well-known authors, this book makes the case to philosophers that popular culture is worthy of their attention. Issues of concern include the distinction between high culture and popular culture, the aesthetic and moral value of popular culture, allusion and identification in popular culture, and special problems posed by the interpretation of popular culture. Popular art forms considered include: movies, television shows, comic books, children's stories, photographs, and rock songs.