This article aims to acknowledge the bodily complexity of the drawing experience by regarding bodily movement as a teaching modality. Theoretically and methodologically, the article explores the didactic potential of variation in relation to phenomenography, artistic practice, and the Feldenkrais Method of movement. Two interdisciplinary drawing workshops were held, combining drawing with Feldenkrais intraventions. The participants’ drawings were analyzed, with the assumption that changes in the bodily experience of drawing would be discernable in the lines on the paper. The results (...) indicate that the Feldenkrais intraventions affected the bodily experience of drawing. Changes in the bodily experience were discerned and described in terms of proprioceptive presence, with reference to Jennifer Fisher's concept of haptic aesthetics. Two kinds of presence were brought to the fore: a presence defined as being present in the moment, and a presence defined as an increased sensibility towards three-dimensional volume and space. Both kinds are subtle qualities of bodily performativity that tend to go unnoticed in educational settings, in favor of visual or more explicitly performative bodily expressions. A relational epistemological approach is put forth as a way to acknowledge performative qualities of the drawing experience in teaching and learning. (shrink)

The Italian term sprezzatura refers to making what one does appear nonchalant and effortless when it in fact involves calculation and effort. This notion, which comes from Baldassare Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier, captures a practice that permeates many areas of our aesthetic lives, from the performing arts to everyday social interactions, and is useful for criticism and appreciation. However, this concept has received little attention in philosophical aesthetics. By filling out and making more precise Castiglione's casual and indirect (...) remarks about sprezzatura, I show how this concept both points to heretofore underappreciated aesthetic values and helps us see important aesthetic and moral differences between cases that otherwise seem alike. (shrink)

As an essential institution of social public aesthetic education, the art museum has always undertaken the primary function of social aesthetic education. The digital art museum expands the role it is not able to play based on the space constructed by the physical art museum. Although the digital construction of domestic art galleries has been carried out for many years, its special significance and unique advantages are difficult to show under the usual operation and exhibition mode. The sudden epidemic has (...) changed people's life track and way of thinking to a certain extent, which will undoubtedly provide a significant development opportunity for the digital art museum. Based on the broad background that the country adheres to building morality and cultivating people, attaches great importance to aesthetic education, and vigorously carries forward the spirit of aesthetic education, this article compares and combs the current digital development achievements of art museums at home and abroad, and it considers the construction and potential problems of the cloud model of digital art museums in China's postepidemic era. This article attempts to provide a theoretical basis for accelerating the renewal of the educational model and ways of contemporary social aesthetic education. (shrink)

In 2017, British shock-artist Damien Hirst released a coffee-table book with photographs from his Venice Biennale exhibition, Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, featuring artifacts retrieved from a Roman-era shipwreck in the Indian Ocean. The following year, a “documentary” was released on Netflix featuring the backstory of the wreck's excavation, showing how all those coral-encrusted antiquities made their way from the seafloor to the art scene. At this same time and elsewhere in Britain, a practitioner of art history, art, (...) and maritime archaeology was in the process of developing the concept of “hauntography” as an object-oriented artistic method that represents (visually or otherwise) the ontological absent-presence of shipwrecks, that is, as objects that defy complete phenomenological access, while inspiring speculation into the uncanniness of being a thing of anthropogenic origin, but which persists beyond anthropos. Because both hauntography and Hirst's project make claims regarding epistemological and phenomenological limits pertaining to underwater wreckage, this article answers the question first posed by the author's students as to whether Hirst's satirical take on shipwreck archaeology ought to be considered the first hauntograph. By examining the relationships between two contemporary art projects, underwater archaeology, and object-oriented philosophies, this article considers how art objects might nudge epistemological limits without resorting to a post-truth dismissal of objective reality. (shrink)

Experience and interpretation are two key topics of twentieth-century aesthetics that remain central today. Although aesthetic experience forms the core of John Dewey's Art as Experience, the book neglects the issue of interpretation. My essay explores this surprising lacuna in Dewey's aesthetic masterpiece. Dewey's pluralism, fallibilism, and critique of the quest for certainty should make the concept of interpretation very appealing, because fallibility and openness to plurality of perspectives are precisely what define the concept of interpretation and traditionally distinguish it (...) from fact or truth. Dewey's neglect of interpretation in Art as Experience is even more puzzling when we recall that his early views on art and philosophy did not share this disregard but instead embraced the centrality of interpretation. My essay explores the possible reasons for this change of attitude, after demonstrating this change by comparing Dewey's dismissive view of interpretation in Art as Experience to his early essays where interpretation plays an important role. (shrink)

Despite resisting easy translation into the cadences of analytic philosophy, certain parts of John Dewey's thought have something important to offer analytic aesthetics. One way to show this is to consider how an account that makes no reference to Dewey might have been benefited from taking on board some of the insights from Art as Experience. To that end, this essay will consider Vid Simoniti's recent study of socially engaged art, with a particular focus on Simoniti's comments about the work (...) of Theaster Gates and on the gap between what Simoniti says about the work and what Gates himself says. It is of course possible for artists to say misleading, indefensible, and even incoherent things about their own work, but it is also possible for them to say fairly straightforward things that philosophers have trouble hearing over the din of their own theoretical commitments. The argument will be that a Deweyan sensibility makes it easier to register aspects of Gates's comments that Simoniti missed and, as a result, to arrive at a less puzzling account of the artistic enterprise that Gates represents. (shrink)

This slim text (184 pages, including endnotes, references, and an index) makes a useful addition to the literature on K–12 curricular matters, specifically on the place of the arts and aesthetics in the curriculum. The book is, as the author proclaims, a manifesto that advocates for the teaching of the arts to “all school-aged students” (p. 1), more specifically, “aesthetic education... ought to be a compulsory part of education for all students” (p. 2). That is, for Dr. D'Olimpio, aesthetic education (...) is the central concern, but she argues that the arts are the best avenue through which to introduce those concerns, both in practice (making/performing) and in reception (perception/interpretation). She does acknowledge that the arts are not the only avenue to aesthetic engagement, but they are the most reliable. D'Olimpio takes the position that the aim/purpose of education is ultimately to nurture individual “flourishing,” her interpretation of the Aristotelian notion of eudaimonia. Inclusion of aesthetic education may well contribute to a reorientation in curricular practice that has a wider focus and is more receptive to alternative perspectives (other than utilitarian, consumerist orientations) that might point to multiple avenues to the good life. (shrink)