Claims by historians that history is both an art and a science are used to avoid the rigor appropriate to the sciences and to remain blind to the imaginative innovations characteristic of modern art. Few modern historians have approached the intellectual courage of Burckhardt's "impressionist" view of the Renaissance; yet such courage--even to contemplate the dissolution of historiography as we now know it--is required before artists and scientists will be willing to take history seriously.

The nihilists are right, admits philosopher Loyal Rue. The universe is blind and aimless, indifferent to us and void of meaning. There are no absolute truths and no objective values. There is no right or wrong way to live, only alternative ways. There is no correct reading of a text or a picture or a dance. God is dead, nihilism reigns. But, Rue adds, nihilism is a truth inconsistent with personal happiness and social coherence. What we need instead is (...) a new myth, a noble lie. Only a noble lie can save us from the psychological and social chaos now threatened by the spread of skepticism about the meaning of life and the universe. In By the Grace of Guile, Loyal Rue offers a wide ranging look at the importance of deception in nature and in human society, concluding with an argument for a noble lie to replace the religious beliefs rejected by modern thought. Most of the book is a provocative apology for deception, illuminating its role in the shaping of history, evolution, personality, and society. Ranging from the Bible and Greek philosophy, to Saint Augustine and Montaigne, to Galileo, Kirkegaard, and Freud, Rue shows that it may be more accurate to describe the history of our culture as a flight from deception than as a quest for truth. He turns then to the natural world to reveal how deception works at every level of life, ranging from plants that mimic dung, carrion, or prey to lure insects that then spread pollen, to a remarkable African insect (Acanthaspis petax) that bedecks itself with dead ants and enters the ant colony undetected to binge at will. Moreover, he points out that psychological research has shown that strategies of deception and self-deception are essential to our personal well-being, that we sometimes shore up our self-esteem by deceptive means, by leaving others in a state of ignorance, by manipulating others into a state of false belief, by suppressing information from consciousness, and by fabricating or distorting our own sense of reality. And he argues that social coherence is achievable only within certain optimal limits of deception--the social fabric would be threatened by an overabundance of lies and false promises, of course, but it would also collapse if everyone were perfectly honest all the time. Finally, he argues that society is caught up in a Kulturkampf with nihilists promoting intellectual and moral relativism and realists defending objective and universal truths. The noble lie, says Rue, would introduce a third voice, one which first agrees with the nihilists that universal myths are pretentious lies, but then insists, against the nihilists, that without such lies humanity cannot survive. The challenge, he concludes, is ultimately an aesthetic one: it remains for the artists, poets, novelists, musicians, filmmakers, and other masters of illusion to seduce us into an embrace with a noble lie. We need a new myth that tells us where we have come from, what our nature is, and how we should live together--a story with the courage and presumption to say how things really are and what really matters. (shrink)

Devenir borgne! Difficile de ne pas vivre ce handicap comme un drame. Sans la vision binoculaire et stéréoscopique, le réel semble n'avoir plus d'épaisseur. L'auteur rapporte ce qu'il a éprouvé au cours de sa prise en charge ophtalmologique et interroge en même temps les peintres malvoyants et les philosophes : qu'est-ce que voir? Le handicap visuel permettrait-il de dépasser l'ordinaire de la vision? Pour répondre à ces questions, Monet, Degas, Victor Brauner sont interpellés dans leurs oeuvres ou encore Bruegel et (...) Rembrandt, en même temps que sont convoqués Platon, Descartes, Alain, Merleau-Ponty ou encore James Joyce et William Blake, sans oublier les Évangiles. Les bien-voyants ne se rendent pas compte qu'ils sont condamnés à vivre la tyrannie du réel. Et si les yeux empêchaient de voir en vrai? Le genre humain n'a peut-être pas vocation à voir mais à entrevoir. Dans ces conditions, ne devrait-on pas considérer la malvoyance comme un atout? Ne serait-il pas temps de voir autrement qu'avec les yeux? Peut-être, alors, sentira-t-on la présence de l'Être émerger de la pénombre"--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

An artistic interpretation of historical facts is quite relevant in the literature and non-fiction of a post-totalitarian society. Prose works on historical themes are valuable and interesting in that they create an illusion for readers to be present in a certain period of historical time, and it is the artistic modeling of events that makes priceless facts of history completely disappear. The historical past is an inexhaustible material that word artists have been referring to for centuries, creating the best (...) examples of fiction. Prose texts of historical subjects are perceived by each next generation in a new way, historical events and phenomena are interpreted from different angles, the activities of famous figures of the past are widely covered. Non-fiction literature is a kind of literature that is on the verge of artistry and documentary. The main non-fiction genres are a diary, autobiography, biography, memoirs, confession, letters, etc. On the one hand, non-fiction literature claims to recognize the author’s subjective truth about him in her texts; on the other hand, only the reader can either, demonstrating full confidence in the author, call this text documentary, or admit the presence of poetry and aesthetics in the work and tilt the scales in the direction of artistry. The material for observation and research of the phenomenon of artistic modeling are works that allow us to trace the most common, in our opinion, models of correlation of historical and artistic consciousness in postmodern literature and non-fiction of a post-totalitarian society. (shrink)

In the spirit of James and Dewey, I ask what one might want from a theory of knowledge. Much Anglophone epistemology is centered on questions that were once highly pertinent, but are no longer central to broader human and scientific concerns. The first sense in which epistemology without history is blind lies in the tendency of philosophers to ignore the history of philosophical problems. A second sense consists in the perennial attraction of approaches to knowledge that divorce knowing subjects (...) from their societies and from the tradition of socially assembling a body of transmitted knowledge. When epistemology fails to use the history of inquiry as a laboratory in which methodological claims can be tested, there is a third way in which it becomes blind. Finally, lack of attention to the growth of knowledge in various domains leaves us with puzzles about the character of the knowledge we have. I illustrate this last theme by showing how reflections on the history of mathematics can expand our options for understanding mathematical knowledge. (shrink)

Created during a certain time period of the world’s art development, fictional history embodies not only a set of individual authorial creative acts, but it is the only "artistic-historical model" conditioned by a number of objective aesthetic and non-aesthetic factors. As such, fictional history represents an integral part of the national worldview. Its exploration requires a combinatorial unity of methods. The article proposes a set of modern methodological principles for studying the processes of artistic modelling of history in the aesthetic (...) consciousness on the synchronous level and their representation in literary works. The methods of academic literary criticism are combined with the advanced methods of modern interdisciplinary humanities that are based on postmodern philosophy. Thus, in the chosen combination of the scientific approaches, the heuristic potential of the structural-semiotic and structural-typological methods, mythopoetics and myth-restoration, imagology, hermeneutics, and receptive aesthetics, correlates with the methods of systematic and descriptive analysis. Such diverse theoretical combinations, the existence of a kind of "methodological sinusoid" within the study, do not contradict but complement each other. (shrink)

This article addresses cultural memory’s ability to address past and present injustices by focusing on the artistic-political practices displayed by the professional actresses of Roma descent from the independent theater the Giuvlipen in Bucharest. The founders of this Romani women-centered theater also have ‘invented’ the word ‘Giuvlipen’ – ‘feminism’ in the Romani language – because there had previously been no word to connote both the forms of oppression and the consciousness raising politics performed by Romani women. By applying the lens (...) of intersectional feminism, the argument this article aims to put forth is that Giuvlipen’s artistic performances can foster the awareness raising of the Romani women’s ‘double jeopardy’. At the same time, the artistic performances displayed by the Giuvlipen Theater challenge the habits of historical remembering and its politics of oblivion, which can in turn promote experiential forms of knowledge and new structures and archives of feelings. (shrink)

In this first of two articles, I look at the project for the “Encyclopedia of Artistic Terminology” in connection with the idea of a synthesis of the “artistic sciences” as the principal task of the State Academy of Artistic Sciences (GAKhN, 1921–1930) in Moscow. The most important feature of the Academy was the unity of its epistemological conception (the system of artistic sciences) and the institutional structure of the Academy (its “departments,” “sections,” and “laboratories”), which embodied the interdisciplinary intention of (...) uniting the philosophy of art, the artistic sciences, and artistic experimentation. I analyze the connection of the project with the task of “concept formation” in the artistic sciences, which was recognized in European philosophy at the beginning of the twentieth century as the main criterion for scientificity in the human sciences. I also investigate how the Encyclopedia project, developed by Gustav Shpet, took into account previous attempts to systematize aesthetic terminology (in nineteenth-century dictionaries). I show that the project of the “Encyclopedia of Artistic Terminology” was not the sole attempt to create a new dictionary of aesthetic concepts and of the cultural sciences. Similar projects were being developed in the 1920s and 30s in Germany (Erich Rothacker planned to produce Handwörterbuch der gesamten gemeingeisteswissenschaftlichen und kulturphilosophischen Grundbegriffe) and in France (Étienne Souriau published Vocabulaire d’esthétique; see Souriau 2010). (shrink)

Rylands English MS 60, compiled for the Spencer family in the eighteenth century, contains 130 printed portraits of early modern artists gathered from diverse sources and mounted in two albums: 76 portraits in the first volume, which is devoted to northern European artists, and 54 in the second volume, containing Italian and French painters. Both albums of this ‘Collection of Engravings of Portraits of Painters’ were initially planned to include a written biography of each artist copied from the (...) few sources available in English at the time, but that part of the project was abandoned. This article relates English MS 60 to shifting practices of picturing art history. It examines the rise of printed artists’ portraits, tracing the divergent histories of the genre south and north of the Alps, and explores how biographical approaches to the history of art were being replaced, in the eighteenth century, by the development of illustrated texts about art. (shrink)

Parallel to Kemp's interest in contemporary science, one of his most consistent themes is the historical exploration of the possibilities of perceived and represented structures and patterns as organisational imperatives in nature and cognition. Structures in the context of Kemp's writing not only relate to the privileged observation sites of modern science but also act as instruments for an art history of contextually examined yet philosophically approached continuities.

A unique collection of essays by Australia's foremost art historian, this volume explores the problems involved in defining and describing a visual aesthetic suited to a modern democratic society. Smith sets these problems in their Australian as well as their universal contexts, probing into such areas as community art, art and elitism, Aboriginal art, art and urban society, art in a multi-cultural society, art and abstraction, art and Marxism, and art and modernism.

The history of art in Russia and China is closely intertwined in the XX century, including thanks to the creative and pedagogical activities of Russian artists who found themselves in exile. Largely thanks to them, Harbin and Shanghai became major art centers in the 1920s–1930s. This period is characterized by fruitful processes in the country's art and culture, but also political upheavals at the same time. The problem of the study is to determine the peculiarities of the perception and (...) interpretation by the emigrant masters of events from the life of the Chinese people, the atmosphere that prevailed in China. Thus, the subject of the study is the paintings and graphics of the largest emigrant artists of the specified period, and the object is the images of China of those years, conveyed in their works, and the means of implementing the idea. The main purpose of this article is to determine the range of themes and subjects that Russian emigrant artists addressed when creating images of contemporary China, as well as the specifics of their artistic embodiment. It is achieved by analyzing the historiography of this issue in Russian art criticism, as well as analyzing the creative works of such prominent representatives of the artistic intelligentsia in exile as M.A. Kichigin and his daughters, V.S. Podgursky, Ya.L. Likhonos, V.A. Asypkin. The study of the thematic component of their works shows that the masters were attracted by events from the life of ordinary people, as well as psychological portraits of residents of Chinese cities. Artistically, the artists remained committed to the Russian school, but allowed the influence of expressive features of Chinese painting. (shrink)

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein cites the Gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Koehler almost as often as he cites William James in his posthumously published writings on the philosophy of psychology. Yet, few treatments of the Wittgenstein–Koehler relation in the philosophical literature could be called sustained discussions. Moreover, most of them treat Koehler as a mere whipping boy for Wittgenstein, one more opportunity to criticize the practice of psychologists. This article emphasizes how much the two thinkers agreed, and the extent to which some (...) of Wittgenstein’s work not only agreed with but also has a logical structure parallel to some of Koehler’s text. Both thinkers hold that the theoretician should strive to recognize and resist the impulse to step in and purify, distill, streamline, or exclude phenomena: common, everyday experience for Koehler and common, everyday uses of words for Wittgenstein. They both aim to counteract the tendency to discount and disparage what is ordinary and common. (shrink)

A history of western civilization as reflected in creation myths from the past two millennia also evaluates the debate about whether God created man or vice versa as it has been expressed by artists in a variety of disciplines, in a lavishly illustrated chronicle that traces a range of tales from Genesis to Ovid.

An increasing number of scholars at the intersection of feminist philosophy and critical disability studies have turned to Merleau-Ponty to develop phenomenologies of disability or of what, following Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, I call "non-normate" embodiment. These studies buck the historical trend of philosophers employing disability as an example of deficiency or harm, a mere litmus test for normative theories, or an umbrella term for aphenotypical bodily variation. While a Merleau-Pontian-inspired phenomenology is a promising starting point for thinking about embodied experiences of (...) all sorts, I here draw a cautionary tale about how ableist assumptions can easily undermine accounts of non-normate experience. I first argue that the omission or misguided treatment of disability within the history of philosophy in general and the phenomenological tradition in particular is due to the inheritance of what I call “the ableist conflation” of disability with pain, suffering, and disadvantage. I then show that Merleau-Ponty’s famous reading of the blind man’s cane is problematic insofar as it omits the social dimensions of disabled experiences, misconstrues the radicality of blindness as a world-creating disability, and operates via an able-bodied simulation that confuses object annexation or extension with incorporation. In closing, I contend that if phenomenology is to overcome the errors of traditional philosophy, as Merleau-Ponty once hoped, it must heed the insights of “crip” or non-normate phenomenology, which takes the lived experience of disability as its point of departure. [French translation forthcoming in Pour une phénoménologie critique, ed. Donald A. Landes, Quebec City, Les Presses de l'Université Laval/Paris, J.Vrin]. (shrink)

The Spirit of Secular Art: A History of the Sacramental Roots of Contemporary Artistic Values explains the spiritual prestige of art. Various theorists have discussed how art has an aura or indefinable magic. This book explains how, when and why it gained its spiritual properties. The idea that all art is somehow spiritual (even though not religious) is often assumed; this book, while narrating the historical trajectory of art in the most accessible language, reveals how the mysteries of religious practice (...) are abstracted and saved through all stages of secularisation in European culture. The Spirit of Secular Art presents a coherent theory defining the sacred basis of Western aesthetics. It evocatively describes the afterlife of the holy from Ancient Greece to the present, and outlines how the mysterious institution of art can be explained in material terms. Unlike other books in the genre, The Spirit of Secular Art radically deconstructs traditional art history in terms of 'prestige' and the value of the non-material. The book functions as: an alternative critical history of art, integrated with the histories of literature and belief; a philosophical essay on the fundamental values of art and religion; and a critique of the spiritual conceits of contemporary aesthetics and art appreciation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Blind Spots and Avenues for Transformation within the Utopian Canon: Toward A Terrestrial EcotopianismHeather Alberro (bio)Limitations and Exclusions of the (Western) Utopian CanonUtopianism in all of its manifestations often powerfully (re)surfaces during times of significant socio-ecological upheaval as a response to oppressive and exploitative realities. As such it is a fervent refusal against a given status quo and its purported inevitability. Utopianism and hope are rendered possible by, (...) and draw their transformative potential from, the boundless terrain of potentiality surrounding any given reality.1 Indeed, without such conditions of radical uncertainty, hope and utopianism would not be possible. Often and understandably, the seminal works of Plato, Thomas More, William Morris, H. G. Wells and others come to mind when we think of utopian studies. Hence Kumar’s parochial observation that there is no discernible utopian tradition beyond the West because other cultures lack the foundational myth of the Golden Age—that is, the Garden of Eden, Atlantis, and Arcadia—that has been so formative to the development of utopia in the West.2 These traditional or “transcendental” utopian modalities often feature a dichotomous opposition to their present reality, depicting time and historical movement [End Page 528] as linear successions of stages proceeding from an archaic past and toward a future wherein the utopian ideal is seen as occupying a “fixed space outside time and history.”3 Such temporally “transcendent” utopias marked the dawn of the modern phase of utopian thought, originating in the seventeenth century alongside new theories of social evolution that coalesced into modern Enlightenment notions of linear historical progress.4Prioritizing Pluralism: Critical Heterotopias of the “Here and Now”What kind of life? We are still confronted with the demand to state the “concrete alternative.” The demand is meaningless if it asks for a blueprint of the specific institutions and relationships which would be those of the new society: they cannot be determined a priori; they will develop, in trial and error, as the new society develops.5Tom Moylan’s notion of “critical utopianism,” which emerged during the “historic block” of political opposition of the 1960s and 1970s, marks one important step within the utopian canon toward praxis and the essential “Nowness” of critique and imaginative projection.6 This “critical” strand of utopianism is fueled by a fervent opposition to the exploitation and domination of people and the natural world that is increasingly characteristic of Western-capitalist societies.7 This opposition is coupled with a utopian desire for mutual aid, ecological resilience, liberation, and peaceful living—in effect, a longing for community.8 The “critical” in Moylan’s formulation has a bivalency: first, in the sense of critique through the debunking and deconstruction of the utopian genre itself, which was “colonized” by capitalism toward the 1970s and infused with technocratic dreams of material abundance through boundless economic expansion; and second, in the sense of the critical mass required to effect fundamental societal transformations.9 If the better is the enemy of the good, then perfection serves as “a stick with which to beat the possible.”10 Utopias do not offer rigid blueprints of a fixed or perfect ideal world but rather head toward “the ideal” by offering “a rich blending of creative fantasy, critical thinking, and oppositional activism” predicated on a demand for radically new relations between social and natural systems.11 Ever critically self-reflective, critical utopias continually remind us of the limitations of the utopian impulse, particularly the dangers of pursuing rigid and transcendental visions of “the better.” Nevertheless, these are desperate times that demand some orientation toward a better; utopianism’s [End Page 529] denunciative function is not enough. Thus, in his impassioned recent work Becoming Utopian, Moylan denotes the need for an intersectional, democratically unified leadership structure that can help sustain a political movement for counteracting the “global/neoliberal superpower order while reaching for a utopian horizon.”12 With a focus more on process than a fixed ideal, the critical utopia explores and articulates vibrant post-capitalist futures that are simultaneously open-ended, and far more socio-ecologically resilient than the “now” of late capitalism.Akin in function and style to critical utopias are the grounded and transgressive... (shrink)

The history of philosophy is replete with attempts at invoking rationality as a means of directing and even subduing human desire and emotion. Understood as that which moves human beings to action, desire and emotion come to be associated with human freedom and rationality as a means of curbing that freedom. Plato, for instance, takes for granted a separation between thought and action that drives a wedge between our rational ability to exercise self-discipline and the free expression of desire and (...) emotion. Hobbes, on the other hand, replaces our internal ability for rational self-control with the external authority of the political State. So long as freedom and control are pitted against one another, human beings are incapable of attaining a symbiosis of these two elements of human action so essential to realizing true democracy. Unlike Plato, John Dewey sees in democracy the greatest potential for individual and social life. The purpose of this dissertation is to demonstrate how the educational philosophy of Dewey, which culminates in an educational aesthetic, appeals to and makes the most of the symbiosis of freedom and self-control, emotion and reason. Dewey’s educational aesthetic not only offers an alternative to traditional methods of education, but also demonstrates how the goal of a democratic way of life is made feasible by means of intelligently guided self-discipline—a form of self-control guided by intelligence that is not a constraint upon freedom, but instead embodies greater opportunity for freedom. I trace the basis for this synthesis, in the social-political and pedagogical principles of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Both Locke and Rousseau offer educational theories that begin turning our attention toward the essential partnership required of rationality and emotion. Dewey's educational aesthetic is then considered as a response to alienating forms of education that continue to pit control and freedom against one another, and which thwart the intellectual and emotional development necessary for autonomy and democratic forms of social organization. (shrink)

C. D. C. Reeve develops a powerful new account of the age-old argument over whether the just are happier than the unjust, drawing from a new understanding of Plato's conception of philosophy.

This article proposes the concept of blind visuality as a response to the injunction to look differently at both visual images, and vision itself, posed by Bruce Horak’s exhibition Through a Tired Eye. The brightly colored impressionistic paintings suggest an artist who revels in the domain of the visual, yet he describes his practice as a representation of blindness. This accessible exposition of blind visuality speaks to the broad question of what critical disability arts contribute to discourses about (...) vision, visuality and spectatorship in the arts. I analyze Horak’s paintings as examples of blind epistemology and haptic visuality, showing that this work evokes a way of seeing that blurs the boundaries between vision and embodied feeling. I argue that by expanding understandings of vision and multi-sensory knowledge, deconstructing the separation between vision and haptic perception, and challenging western ocularcentricism, blind visuality poses an alternative economy of looking that reflects disability aesthetics, shifts from individualism to relationality, and challenges understandings of perception/knowledge as a form of mastery. (shrink)

The main idea behind this article is that in order to understand themeaning that Kant’s political philosophy is rendered to by the givensocio-historical context of a community we need to turn for help toartistic genius whose subjective “I” holds a general feeling of the worldand life. It is in this sense that authors of great novels can help us in twoways. First, their works summarise for our imagination artistic truth aboutman’s capacity for humanity, the very thing that Kant considers to (...) bethe scientifically improvable “fact of reason”. Second, works of greatwriters offer for our insight destinies of individuals who decide to pursuemoral dictate in a society, thus actualising the potential that lies hiddenin all of us, making us worthy of respect. As we lack objective scientificstandard of measurement, artist’s universal feeling of the world is impressedupon us through a narrative about a man who, in a given society and ina given moment, decides to exercise his autonomy and seek the divinein himself. Contemporary social scientists’ attempts to prove historicalprogress is characterised by the very lack of humbleness. Referring tothe great novelists’ works in this article is aimed to remind scientists ofrestraint and self-control demanded from them by the citizen of Konigsberg. (shrink)

For Georg Simmel, humans confront their basic contradiction in the city, and such contradiction warrants critical assessment to help in the long tradition of articulating the problematic development of cities or metropolises, and hopefully advocate for the kind of life we want. This contradiction is a corollary to the modern visual aesthetics of young, contemporary artists such as Iza Caparas, Farley del Rosario and Daniel Aligaen. Their works not only depict the city or urban living; also their styles or (...) sense of aesthetics are informed on a larger scale by the geopolitics of the ’70s up to the present, the influence of the early modernist artists, and their own estimation as well of what is happening in the country. This paper uses visual impairment or blindness as a trope for modernist aesthetics. The contradiction of city life produces this particular problematic vision that is then appropriated by these young painters. In this paper I am guided by three important questions: How do I understand the city and its contradictions? How is the city depicted in the paintings of young contemporary artists? How do I talk about modernist paintings and aesthetics in terms of the dynamics of city or urban life? (shrink)

For a long time, ‘culture’ appears only to be an effect of the power of discourses and media in Friedrich Kittler’s works. But in his Berlin lecture series on the cultural history of cultural studies, he discusses the historical formations in which a discrete science of culture could emerge. His perspective not only highlights the historical foundations but also the blind spots of cultural studies.

The term psychopathy refers to a personality disorder associated with callous personality traits and antisocial behaviors. Throughout its research history, psychopathy has frequently been described as a peculiar form of moral blindness, engendering a narrative about a patient stereotype incapable of taking a genuine moral perspective, similar to a blind person who is deprived of proper visual perceptions. However, recent empirical research has shown that clinically diagnosed psychopaths are morally more fit than initially thought, and the blindness-analogy now comes (...) across as largely misleading. In this contribution, the moral-blindness analogy is explored in an attempt to qualify anew its relevance in psychopathy theory and research. It is demonstrated that there are indeed theoretically relevant parallels to be drawn between blindness and psychopathy, parallels that are especially illuminating when accounting for the potential symptomatology, dimensionality, and etiological nature of the disorder. (shrink)

The main idea behind this article is that in order to understand the meaning that Kant?s political philosophy is rendered to by the given socio-historical context of a community we need to turn for help to artistic genius whose subjective?I? holds a general feeling of the world and life. It is in this sense that authors of great novels can help us in two ways. First, their works summarise for our imagination artistic truth about man?s capacity for humanity, the very (...) thing that Kant considers to be the scientifically improvable?fact of reason?. Second, works of great writers offer for our insight destinies of individuals who decide to pursue moral dictate in a society, thus actualising the potential that lies hidden in all of us, making us worthy of respect. As we lack objective scientific standard of measurement, artist?s universal feeling of the world is impressed upon us through a narrative about a man who, in a given society and in a given moment, decides to exercise his autonomy and seek the divine in himself. Contemporary social scientists? attempts to prove historical progress is characterised by the very lack of humbleness. Referring to the great novelists? works in this article is aimed to remind scientists of restraint and self-control demanded from them by the citizen of Konigsberg. nema. (shrink)

In this essay, I discuss Korean artists’ multi-layered, internal motives for engaging in artistic practices: their artistic devotion derives from their desires for moral self-cultivation, self-enjoyment, and self-forgetting. I speculate that these tendencies were intensified in Korean cultural traditions by distinctive sociopolitical circumstances of the Joseon period under the dominance of Neo-Confucianism, such as a fixed social hierarchy and Sino-centrist perspectives. This interpretation provides a useful lens for better understanding contemporary Korean artistic practices in both the fine and popular (...) arts. (shrink)

The Artist and Religion in the Contemporary World Although we begin with the words of the poet Henry Vaughan, it is the visual artists above all who know and see the mystery of the Creation of all things in light, suffering for their art in its blinding, sacrificial illumination. In modern painting this is particularly true of van Gogh and J.M.W. Turner. But God speaks the Creation into being through an unheard word, and so, too, the greatest of musicians, (...) as most tragically in the case of Beethoven, hear their sublime music only in a profound silence. The Church then needs to see and listen in order, in the words of Heidegger, to learn to "dwell poetically on earth" before God. To dwell thus lies at the heart of its life, liturgically and in its pastoral ministry, as illustrated in the poetry of the English priest and poet, David Scott. This can also be seen as a "letting go" before God and an allowing of a space in which there might be a "letting the unsayable be unsaid" and order found even over the abyss. This is what Vladimir Nabokov has called "the marvel of consciousness" which is truly a seeing in the darkness. The poet, artist and musician can bring us close to the brink of the mystery, and thus the artist is always close to the heart of the church's worship and its ministry of care where words meet silence, and light meets darkness. Such, indeed, is the true marvel of consciousness in the ultimate risk which is the final vocation of the poet and artist, as it was of Christ himself, and all his saints. The church must be ever attentive to the deeply Christocentric ministry of art and the creative power of word and image in the letting the unsayable be unsaid. With the artist we may perhaps stand on Pisgah Height with Moses with a new imaginative perception of the divine Creation. The essay concludes on a personal note, drawing upon the author's own experience in retreat in the desert, with a reminder of the thought of Thomas Merton, a solitary in the community of the Church. (shrink)

Artistic representation is an instrument of historical memory that, unlike history, serves to transfer the emotional imprint that historical records leave behind for the sake of objectivity. Art memorializes achievements and success, but also tragic moments of death and destruction. Cultural differences between China and the West lead to varied perspectives and patterns of expression in the Fine Arts. This paper offers several examples showing how art has dealt with epidemic and pandemic. No one is immune to such tragedies in (...) our increasingly globalized world. By looking back at the memories recorded in artistic representation, we can learn from the past and cooperate in order to face future crises successfully. However, cooperation is only possible if we are aware of cultural differences. This paper provides a brief example on how Chinese and European art face inter-artistic plague narratives in different ways. (shrink)

This article analyses Camille Henrot’s 2013 film Grosse Fatigue in relation to the histories of hypermedia and modes of interaction with the World Wide Web. It considers the development of non-hierarchical systems for the organisation of information, and uses Grosse Fatigue to draw comparisons between the Web, the natural history museum and the archive. At stake in focusing on the way in which information is organised through hypermedia is the question of subjectivity, and this article argues that such systems are (...) made ‘user-friendly’ by appearing to accommodate intuitive processes of information retrieval, reflecting the subject back to itself as autonomous. This produces an ideology of individualism which belies the forms of heteronomy that in fact shape and structure access to information online in significant ways. At the heart of this argument is an attention to the visual, and the significance of art as an immanent mode of analysis. Through the themes of transparency and opacity, and order and chaos, the article thus proposes a defining dynamic between autonomy and automation as a model for understanding the contemporary subject. (shrink)

Thucydides, the patron saint of Realpolitik, continues to be read in many fields outside of classics. Why did his History succeed in setting the pattern for future scholars where Hereodotus's earlier Histories failed? In this fascinating study of the construction of intellectual authority, Gregory Crane argues that Thucydides was successful for two reasons. First, he refined the language of administration: Who was in charge? How much money was spent? How many people were killed? Second, he drew upon the abstract philosophical (...) rhetoric developing in the fifth century, one in which the state and the public, rather than the family and the individual, stand at the center of the world. Ironically, it was through deeply personal alliances that aristocratic Greeks had defined themselves and exerted power. Thucydides's discursive practice was therefore fundamentally incompatible with his ideological goals. (shrink)

Thucydides, the patron saint of Realpolitik, continues to be read in many fields outside of classics. Why did his History succeed in setting the pattern for future scholars where Hereodotus's earlier Histories failed? In this fascinating study of the construction of intellectual authority, Gregory Crane argues that Thucydides was successful for two reasons. First, he refined the language of administration: Who was in charge? How much money was spent? How many people were killed? Second, he drew upon the abstract philosophical (...) rhetoric developing in the fifth century, one in which the state and the public, rather than the family and the individual, stand at the center of the world. Ironically, it was through deeply personal alliances that aristocratic Greeks had defined themselves and exerted power. Thucydides's discursive practice was therefore fundamentally incompatible with his ideological goals. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Artist as Professional in JapanKazuyo Nakamura and Akio OkazakiThe Artist as Professional in Japan, edited by Melinda Takeuchi. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004, 262pp., $45.00 cloth.With the increase of cross-cultural academic exchange in our time, more accurate information on art from other cultures has become more easily available, and curriculum development of art education directed toward multiculturalism has been brought to realization. There is need emerging (...) among art educators for academic resources for teaching cross-cultural subject matters, and The Artist as Professional in Japan provides historical information helpful in gaining a critical understanding of the nature of Japanese art discourse. The volume is edited from a fresh sociocultural perspective by Melinda Takeuchi, professor of Japanese art at Stanford University.Takeuchi, noticing that few scholarly books on the profession of Japanese artists are available to students of art history in the United States, set about the volume in concerted efforts with her colleagues. The volume consists of individual case studies on different Japanese artists; they are well-known sculptors, painters, potters, printmakers, and architects and are recognized in Japan as representative in different eras from the seventh to the twentieth century. Running through the individual studies, there is a concern for political forces that shaped art discourse and the identity of the Japanese artist. The following questions are asked: What degree of control did the artists exercise over their métier? What were some of the dynamics operating in the production, consummation, and evaluation of art and artist? How was the image of the artist formed during various periods? Working with these questions, seven case studies address issues of canon formation of art by looking into the terrain of the meaning of a critical word, Shoku-nin; it literally means people (nin) with an occupation (shoku) and denotes the collective artisan class.Different art historians and art theorists take a unique approach for developing each case study in the volume. Donald F. McCallum's study in chapter 2 is on the Buddhist Icons of the Shaka Triad during the Asuka Period (ca.590-ca.650), and it is asked what were the political forces working on the production of the [End Page 118] icons. In contrary to orthodox view, it is argued that the icons were produced not by an individual sculptor named Tori-busshi but by the guilds of which the supervisor was Tori. Also, it is argued that the icons were produced with the patronage of soga clan, the dominant political force of the time, not by the imperial family, including Shotoku Taishi.Karen L. Brock in chapter 3 examines the case of E'nichibo Jonin (active ca.1211-ca.1243), the painter of Saint Myoe. The case shows that the ateliers of temples, such as Kozanji in Kyoto, played a central role in producing and distributing sacred images. This study makes clear that few individual painters, such as those named ebusshi, participated in the formation of the canon of Japanese painting, but collective political forces, such as Kozanji ateliers, exercised power in bringing out sacred objects.In chapter 4 Melinda Takeuchi takes up the case of Tosa Mitsunobu (1434-ca.1523), an artisan painter active in Kyoto court circles. It shows a historical fact particular to Japanese art discourse—that later artists manipulated the names of earlier ones for professional or cultural merits. Taking notice of the fact that Mitsunobu's name late became synonymous with a production unit that shares secret techniques of products, Takeuchi concludes, "In the end, the name of an artist transcends time, space, materiality, and ultimately discourse itself" (101).The study of Louise Allison Cort in chapter 5 is on the case of Morita Kyuemon in the seventeenth century, a warrior trained as a potter and running the Odo pottery in the Tosa domain. By exploring the motivations of the Tosa domain in trying to transform local products into refined and stylish pottery worthy of formal presentation to other domain rulers (daimyo), to government officials, and to the shogun in Edo, this chapter demonstrates how both the potter and the ruler actively sought to join the aesthetic mainstream of their own day.In... (shrink)

Focusing on the aesthetic representation of trauma, George Smith outlines the nexus points between poetics and hermeneutics and shows how a particular kind of thinker, the artist-philosopher, practices interpretation in an entirely different way from traditional hermeneutics. Taking a transhistorical and global view, Smith engages artists, writers, and thinkers from Western and non-Western periods, regions, and cultures. Thus we see that poetic hermeneutics reconstitutes philosophy and art as hybridizations of art and science, the artist and the philosopher, subject and (...) object. In turn, the artist-philosopher's poetic-hermeneutic reconstitution of philosophy and art is meant to transform human consciousness. This book will be of interest to artists and scholars working in studio practice, art history, aesthetics, philosophy, cultural studies, history of ideas, history of consciousness, psychoanalytic studies, myth studies, and literary studies, and creative writing. (shrink)

In The Artist-Philosopher and New Philosophy, Smith argues that Western Metaphysics has indeed come to what Heidegger describes as ¿an end.¿ That is hardly to say philosophy as such is over or soon to disappear; rather, its purpose as a medium of cultural change and as a generator of history has run its course. He thus calls for a New Philosophy, conceptualized by the artist-philosopher who ¿makes¿ or ¿poeticizes¿ New Philosophy, spanning literary and theoretical discourses and operating across art in (...) all its forms and across culture in all its locations. To this end, Smith proposes the establishment of schools and social networks that advance the training and development of artist-philosophers, as well as global digital networks that are themselves designed toward this ¿ever-becoming community.¿. (shrink)