The paper considers the philosophical relationship between the form and the shape through the meaning of conceptualist art, which Arthur Coleman Danto emphasizes in his aesthetic theory. Even though modern art from the beginning of the 20th century signalled the break between the form and the shape, it has fully come to life in the postmodern sense. It will be shown that conceptual artists have understood how it is possible to keep the shape of a thing without changing its form, (...) with the idea displacing it from a predetermined function. For conceptual, postmodern art, it will be decisive to keep the shape while changing the form in which such a work of art is created, changing the character of things that were not a work of art until then. According to Hartmann’s aesthetic theory, this creates a unique aesthetic object that does not rest on the work of art itself but its perception. Danto exemplified such a path with Duchamp’s Fountain and Warhol’s Brillo Box, which witnessed a change of the form while retaining the shape, establishing postmodern aesthetics as essentially conceptual. (shrink)

The paper begins with analysing Schmitt’s essential work Political Theology, 100 years after its publication. In it, the German legal philosopher formulated the concept of political theology, which indicates the relationship between the state of exception and decisionism as a form of legal-political thinking. The contribution of the paper is reflected in its emphasis on the importance of a twofold understanding of the concept of the state of exception: in the first place, as a notion of the exception that funds (...) the philosophy of law and legal theory, and in the second as the state of exception that marks the constitutional category of the state of emergency. Schmitt will insist that the question of the state of exception is not a question of a mere state of necessity or emergency but a broader philosophical-legal concept based on the metaphysical origin of voluntary decision. The sovereign is not the one who decides “in” but “on” the state of exception, which means that, according to the decisionist model, he is just establishing it. Schmitt’s controversial book rarely left anyone indifferent, so it was supported by both right-wing and left-wing political theorists and philosophers, and it must be reconsidered today as a warning about the danger of the concept of the state of exception (state of emergency), which is increasingly becoming a political issue. (shrink)

The paper aesthetically examines the connection, that is inseparability between art and ‘madness’. Madness as a psychological and psychiatric term does not exist, and it is a social construct and a qualification that is often used to by the social majority to disqualify social minority or individuals who deviate from values majority cares about. In this paper, I interpret how art, in this sense given, is madness because to have an original artistic creation, it is necessary to have eccentricity that (...) often leads to condemnation. Madness in art is considered in two primary ways. The first way is on the level of objectivistic aesthetics where madness is a theme or the object of artwork, and the second way is on the level of subjectivistic aesthetics where madness is the subject, i.e. the author of artwork. I will refer to many masterpieces from renown world artists who suffered from certain mental illnesses, from which they gained ever greater inspiration. I conclude that art in both objective and subjective terms is a necessary eccentricity inseparable from madness, which is thereby a presupposition for artwork. (shrink)