Abstract

My project is to develop a new critical category of the artificial sublime. This is not a nostalgic move to re-enchant art with the reintroduction of a romantic sublime nor is it a reductive move to locate the sublime at the border of the beautiful. I introduce the concept of the artificial sublime as a way of making sense of a certain historical moment in artmaking and to help make sense of certain works that confound aesthetic analysis. I articulate three modes of the contemporary artificial sublime, 'the vacant sublime', 'the obscure sublime' and 'the rude sublime'. In constructing the concept of the artificial sublime, I develop a parallel genealogy: a genealogy of the concept of the sublime from the eighteenth century pre-romantic sublime of Edmund Burke through to its recent reactivation as a vital theoretical concept in philosophical aesthetics, and a genealogy of artmaking through the development of the medium and modernism to the current theoretical dimension of art where anything imagined can potentially be an artwork. Artmaking has moved from working within the limits of the medium to the post-medium convention of 'working the medium'. I call the tactic of dialectically using art theory, art practice, art history, other artworks and the artworld itself 'employing theory as strategy'. ;I argue that certain artworks are multiplicities that contain temporally active 'parts' that are in fact series, each exhibiting a temporal mechanics: a shifting, changeable, ruptured state that is under constant construction and revision. Such artworks are continuums that contain zones that operate like manifolds, containing a succession of discrete elements that do not collectively constitute a stable whole. I use Kant's concept of imaginative regress of sublimity to describe the psychic mechanism of the artificial sublime. I use Deleuze's concept of orgiastic representation---awareness of unanalyzable difference at a moment---to describe the formal structure of certain artworks strategically constructed to function as unstable multiplicities. ;I claim that the sublime has cognitive content since it involves the awareness of indeterminate differences. I develop a detailed analysis of sublime strategies of contemporary artmaking that jointly applies and tests the theory