This interview was conducted on 8 October 2011 at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. It was held during a symposium that reflected on the work of Rancière and was a part of a broader engagement with the concept of autonomy and its relation to art organized by an umbrella group of universities and arts organizations under the name of ‘The Autonomy Project’. A number of the symposium’s participants – Peter Osborne, Gerald Raunig, Isabell Lorey, Ruth Sondregger, Kim Mereiene and Adrian Martin (...) – contributed questions that formed the basis of this interview. The interview took place at a time when the longer-term possibilities of the Arab Spring and Occupy/Indignados movements were under general scrutiny. It was also a moment when the Van Abbemuseum itself was compelled to reflect on its own position of political autonomy in relation to neoliberal state directives, political populism at the local level and its own critique of aesthetic autonomy. Rancière’s work on aesthetics and politics has been as much appreciated as a clearance strategy against prevailing visual prejudices as it has served as a platform for rethinking the emancipatory potential of creative practice. (shrink)

ABSTRACTBased on an overview of the ways in which politics and the political have been thought in critical discourse analysis, the author calls for a focus on the metapolitical dimension of discourse. The author develops his notion of metapolitics on the basis of post-foundational insights into politics, the political and processes of politicization. Metapolitics refers to projects and struggles where conflicting modes and models of politics clash. Metapolitical debates potentially reshape the structure of the public realm as (...) well as the entities, borders and processes that constitute it. The author differentiates his descriptive and analytic use of the term from the way this signifier has been used programmatically by the anti-democratic New Right and its heirs. He demonstrates that metapolitical projects can be democratic as well as anti-democratic. In order to facilitate discourse analyses of metapolitical projects, debates and struggles, the author suggests that the metapolitical dimension of contemporary debates can be explored further by integrating insights from governmentality studies, studies of political rationality and the discourse theoretical logics approach with CDA. Moreover, a further exploration of the linguistic and textual underpinnings of metapolitics constitutes a promising pathway for future investigation. The study of metapolitics should be part and parcel of the transdisciplinary domain of critical discourse studies so that our understanding of the linguistic and non-linguistic features of metapolitical projects can be developed in equal measure at multiple levels of abstraction. (shrink)

This book covers the field of and points to the intersections between politics, art and philosophy. Its hero, the late Sir Roger Scruton had a longstanding interest in all fields, acquiring professional knowledge in both the practice and theory of politics, art and philosophy. The claim of the book is, therefore, that contrary to a superficial prejudice, it is possible to address the philosophical issues of art and politics in the same oeuvre, as the example of this (...) Cambridge-educated analytical philosopher proves. Accordingly, the book has a bold thesis on the general, theoretical level, mapping the connections between politics, art and philosophy. However, it also has a pioneering commitment on the level of the particular, offering the first full-length study into the philosophical legacy of Roger Scruton, probably the most important British conservative philosopher of the late 20th and the first decades of the 21st century. It also allows reader to look into the philosopher’s fascination with Central European art and culture. Finally, it also provides a daring analysis of the late Scruton’s metaphysical inspirations, connecting the arts, and especially music, with religion and the bonds of love. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by:Art and Politics in Roger Scruton’s Conservative Philosophy by Ferenc HÖRCHERD. N. ByrneHÖRCHER, Ferenc. Art and Politics in Roger Scruton’s Conservative Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. vii + 404 pp. Cloth, $129.99The intellectual legacy of Sir Roger Scruton defies the conventional wisdom that conservatism is a mood or sensibility rather than a systematic body of ideas. Then, as Hörcher indicates, Scruton was never a particularly conventional (...) thinker. Against the current that equated intellectualism with political critique, Scruton espoused traditionalism, community ahead of individualism, and order against pluralism. Against the current as well, he took his reflections to the court of public opinion rather than to the halls of academe. (shrink)

This article reconstructs the forgotten friendship between Georges Bataille and the Russian émigré poet and philosopher Boris Poplavsky. Comparing their solar metaphysics, I focus on conceptions of friendship, sacrifice and depersonalisation. First, I retrace Bataille’s relationship to early Surrealis and Russian circles in interwar Paris, with a focus on his friendship with Irina Odoevtseva. I then offer a novel reading of Poplavsky’s poetry through the lens of Bataille’s philosophy, analysing a recurring motif that I call ‘dark solarity’. Uncovering a hidden (...) intertextual dialogue between Poplavsky and Bataille, I argue for Poplavsky’s lasting impact on Bataille’s anti-Icarian sun cult. Finally, my paper demonstrates how Poplavsky’s writings on solar sacrifice, excess and friendship left marks on Bataille’s vision of a solar community, embodied in the secret society Acéphale. The dialogue between Poplavsky and Bataille, I finally suggest, is a missing piece in the entangled history of Russian and French philosophy, as well as an original contribution to discourses on friendship in twentieth-century continental thought. (shrink)

Lindroos constructs an alternative interpretation on history, time, politics and art, approached through the moment of the Now (Jetztzeit). In the first section, she elaborates the critique of chronologic-linear way of understanding history. Through a close reading of Benjamin's "Work of Art" essay, the second section examines the problems of origins, authenticity and traditions of art through the ideas of artistic avant-garde and politicization of aesthetics. The end of the book discusses the concept of image and the new images (...) as an Image-Space (Bildraum) of action. (shrink)

Jacques Lacan coined the term “subjective destitution” to describe the concluding moment of a psychoanalytic treatment. This concept can also usefully be applied to art and to politics. In art, subjective destitution can be defined as a passage from being-towardsdeath to undeadness, in other words to the position of the living dead – this passage takes place between Shostakovich’s 14th symphony and his final symphony, the 15th. In politics, subjective destitution designates the passage of a political subject to (...) a radical de-subjectivization, to becoming an object of a political cause. (shrink)

The inclusion of ethics and politics into artistic creation process is for many contemporary creators/artists an essential motivation while they consciously act in an aesthetic space polluted with the realities of a world in crisis. Art, which produces visible and sensible forms, can reveal aesthetic ideas and fundaments through aesthetic objects: drawing, video-installing or poem/poetry. And artists can make someone feel with their creations—whether these are beautiful, sublime, tragic, or ironic—ethical contentions violated by human action or the exertion/exercise of (...) political power. Works of art that are not only guided by the categories signed by beauty, because in artistic languages, violence and suffering also make/create form. And times of crisis are the ideal sphere/dimension for an art that gives a vivid way of seeing/watching the uncertainty, the perversion, the terrible. In bringing these philosophical—ethical, aesthetic and political—topics, I do it from an approach that departs form artistic creations and curatorial research. I try to penetrate the narrow thread between an ethical topic and the plastic form in which it incarnates/embodies itself, or between a political action and the aesthetic structure of language as a creative, expressive consequence. (shrink)

Resumen: Este artículo estudia el poder de la visualidad en la política. Entre aquello que está permitido ver y aquello que está prohibido mostrar, el régimen escópico se define por la intervención del poder institucional respecto de la mirada del espectador. Este estudio se desarrolla entre la tradición filosófica y otras aportaciones multidisciplinares (estudios visuales, comunicación social, estética, historia del arte, teoría del arte) que evidencian a) el control político en los regímenes escópicos de la mirada del espectador; b) la (...) consolidación de una cultura visual que condiciona el modo de vida de los individuos y las sociedades; c) el dominio del espacio social por medio de la regulación del espacio visual; y d) la manipulación de los afectos por medio de la experiencia visual. En este estudio destacamos la apertura de la consciencia crítica en la modernidad a la estetización de la política. Abstract: This article studies the power of visual aesthetics in politics. Between what is allowed to see and what is forbidden to show, the scopic regime is defined by the intervention of institutional power on the viewer's gaze. This study is developed between the philosophical tradition and other multidisciplinary contributions (visual studies, social communication, aesthetics, art history, art theory) that show a) political control in the scopic regimes of the viewer's gaze; b) the consolidation of a visual culture that conditions the way of life of individuals and societies; c) the domain of social space through the regulation of visual space; and d) the manipulation of affects through visual experience. In this study we highlight the opening of critical consciousness in modernity to the aestheticization of politics. (shrink)

Time is more than a line drawn from the past to the future. It is a form of life, marked by the ancient hierarchy between those who have time and those who do not. This hierarchy still governs a present which clings to the fable of historical necessity and its experts. In opposition to this, Jacques Rancière shows how the break with the hierarchical conception of time implies a completely different idea of the modern. He sees the fulfilment of this (...) in two arts of movement, cinema and dance, which at the beginning of the twentieth century abolished the opposition between free and mechanical people, and exposed the rift between the revolution of artists and that of strategists. (shrink)

The Situationist International have become a canonical reference point when discussing artists’ participation in political action or activism. This article attempts to decentre the SI from this position, by tracing their theories and representations of political agency and labour. I argue that their notion of agency is deeply conflicted, epitomized by the dual invocations ‘never work/all power to the workers’ councils. I examine how the SI’s representations of agency betray an attraction to and fascination with 1960s reactionary fantasies around brainwashing, (...) conditioning, control and torture. Their practical descriptions of a constructed situation, which ‘makes people live’ are, in fact, closer to torturous state control than total liberation. The notions of agency they mobilise draw on colonial and classist sources, which actually deny the agency of radical movements. As a result, the SI produce a series of weak fantasies of participation, in which agency is denied and ‘demanding the impossible’ is actually a demand to constitute and police the impossible. Artistic-political agency was both guarded centre and constituent other. The SI’s policing of their identity, tied in name to the agency of ‘situations’, involved the ongoing exclusion and repression of other artists’ more practically-engaged labour within social movements. (shrink)

Michel Foucault showed by his genealogical method that history is random. It comprises sites of disarray and dispersal. In those sites, Simone de Beauvoir wrote philosophy through lived experience of woman as Other in relation to man as the Absolute. Here lies a fecund site for revisionist analysis of female cultural production and its relevance to a philosophy of education. The paper works with a feminist approach to the politics of knowledge, examining textual and political strategies in the recording (...) of history and the ‘othering’ of women through dominant cultural discourses. Infusing this discussion is a feminist politics of interrogation on cultural change for women. The paper investigates contributions of women to fields of art, politics, education and philosophy, and to the ways their contributions have been considered, received, positioned. Different approaches to feminism become apparent in the different conditions of knowledge under discussion. This leads to a final consideration of femi... (shrink)

Review of Lynn Gwenn-Aël and Debra Parr (eds) (2021) _Olfactory art and the political in an age of resistance. _New York: Routledge, ISBN 9780367544751.

This book shows that the metaphor of the quintessentially feminine art of weaving in Homer's Odyssey, Aristophanes' Lysistrata, and Plato's Statesman and Phaedo conveys complex and inclusive teachings about human nature and political life that address the concerns of women more effectively than commonly believed.

After the collapse of the totalitarian regimes, participation into public matters has been an objective of democratic theory. Judging by a variety of instances from the sixties to today, it can be said that finding new means for encouraging audiences to participate in their works has become the major concern for contemporary art as well. Therefore, we can say that the problem of participation is the focal point of art and politics.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Attic Document Reliefs: Art and Politics in Ancient AthensWilliam C. WestCarol L. Lawton. Attic Document Reliefs: Art and Politics in Ancient Athens. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. xxii 1 167 pp. 96 pls. Cloth, $100. (Oxford Monographs on Classical Archaeology)Although long recognized as a distinct genre, the reliefs on documents have not been collected comprehensively and studied for their own sake. They are set above the texts (...) of honorary decrees, alliances and documents concerning [End Page 465] foreign affairs, decrees concerning cults, accounts and inventories, public dedications, and other inscriptions. Previous work on the subject (Binnebössel 1932; Meyer 1989) sought to relate the reliefs to other genres of art. Lawton notes that the document relief is “the only genre of Greek art that explicitly and consistently refers to contemporary events in the political sphere” (4). The style of the sculpture of the reliefs is shown to be conservative, “following rather than setting the sculptural trends of their own day” (73).The aim of illustrating documents with reliefs seems to be the desire to highlight certain relations to the text (deities as representative of cities; heroes, personifications of Demos, Boule, and Demokratia; individuals honored set amid the appropriate divinities, etc.). Expenses for inscribing were sometimes shared, as by cities of the empire or by individuals who received honorary decrees, but the cost of inscribing probably also included the reliefs (23–24). They would have been commissioned by authority of the secretaries of the assembly (or other political group such as deme or tribe) in consultation with sculptors and masons. Thus the relief contributes to the artistic display, just as certain features of the layout of the text on the stone (stoichedon style, intentional use of vacat, chequer pattern) serve to articulate the elements of the text and create an attractive monument. Lawton asserts that most of the document reliefs had a votive function, as they were set up in sanctuaries (29).Lawton presents a catalogue of 187 reliefs, arranged in two parts (dated and undated) and listed in chronological order within each part. Each item is accompanied by a lemma giving its most accessible publication, location, measurements, iconographical description, and bibliography. Thus 62 are classified as dated and 125 as undated. Although they range from the middle of the fifth to the second half of the second century B.C., the overwhelming preponderance fall in the fifth and fourth centuries. Statistics make the point effectively: fifth century, 28 total (12 dated, 16 undated); fourth century, 148 total (46 dated, 102 undated). Five are classified “late 5th-early 4th century,” bringing the grand total to 181. Of the dated group in the fourth century, only 9 can be put after 323 and only 4 after 318/17. One might justifiably conclude that the document relief is a phenomenon of the classical period, continued occasionally after it.Lawton offers excellent analyses, with concise discussion of relevant interpretations, in terms of type of inscription, iconography, style, and chronology. Where problems in interpretation still persist, she is careful to note the probabilities.Possibly the earliest surviving document with a relief is the Miletos decree (no. 63 = IG I3 21), which is put by Meritt and others about 450 because it uses the three-bar sigma, but in the 420s by H.B. Mattingly. Lawton summarizes fairly the arguments for both datings but does not insist on either. Rather, she notes the frequency of document reliefs from the 420s onward.IG I3 68 (no. 1), on the collection of tribute, is presented as the earliest securely dated inscription. Perhaps here the case is stated too positively, as the date 426/25 depends on the identification of the proposer Kleonymos with the man [End Page 466] who proposed a decree favoring Methone in the first prytany of that year (Meiggs and Lewis, no. 68, p. 188). Hence the date is probable, rather than certain. Secure dates for several decrees of the fourth century come from the name of the archon in the heading, but in cases where insufficient text is preserved for certainty (as in IG II2 133, no. 30) it should be noted that the stoichedon pattern provides... (shrink)

This paper considers Jacques Rancière’s influential theory of the relation between aesthetics, politics, and art. First, it synthesizes Rancière’s theory. Second, it offers a critical perspective of Rancière’s conception of the autonomy of art in relation to his theory of politics and aesthetics. In doing so, the purpose is to work towards the development of a theoretical base in which we may follow Rancière’s theory of the relation between aesthetic experience and politics whilst avoiding compliance with his (...) relatively fixed and structural notion of the autonomy of art as an attribute of what he calls the aesthetic regime of art. Drawing a distinction between the autonomous experience of the work of art and the ideology of the autonomy of art, this paper argues that the prior comes about both within and in opposition to the latter: the autonomy of art hinges on a relative and relational production of a singularity, not on a structural and defining separation of art from the world of habitual aesthetic experience. (shrink)

Identifying the limitations in earlier attempts for comparing Euro-American philosophy with Indian, the paper distinguishes its approach and makes a case for an alternative approach. This consists of bending the Euro-American philosophy, without breaking it, for use in India. Following the discussion of major and minor literatures by Deleuze and Guattari in the context of Kafka in Europe, the paper shows the variance between its claims in the context of minor literature and the reality. In this context, it establishes a (...) close relation between modernity and art and literature in Europe, where the latter is sought to reclaim what is rejected by the modern. Modernity rejected the premodern as embodying non-reason. Without abandoning this relation between minor and major, it seeks to show its relevance in India through Indian National Movement and M. K. Gandhi. This paper, thus, discusses an instance where alien is a better ground for growth and relevance than the origin. (shrink)

This article explores projects of art and biology as joyful acts of insurrection. It presents critical and creative perspectives to generate alternative structures of subjec-tivity. These alternative structures gain relevance when intersectional variables of privilege and discrimination as political tools are set in crisis by a postanthropocen-tric awareness. The thesis of this article is that in order to understand and develop postanthropocentric intersectional positions, the microbial posthuman joins thecartographies of the posthuman as a material possibility from microscopic biologicalmatter and philosophical (...) and artistic thought. This microbial posthuman also allows for a reframing in the light of microbiopolitics, a redistribution of pain, life and deathwithin a broader notion of life. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 38.2 (2004) 116-120 [Access article in PDF] Art History in the Age of Bellori: Scholarship and Cultural Politics in Seventeenth-Century Rome, edited by Janis Bell and Thomas Willette. Cambridge: Cambridge Universtiy Press, 2002, 396 pp. Giovan Pietro Bellori is a name familiar to all who have studied seventeenth-century Italian art. His magisterial book, The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (Le (...) vite de' pittori, scultori, ed architetti moderni), published in Rome in 1672, continued in the grand tradition of artists' biographies established by Giorgio Vasari in the sixteenth century, while at the same time espousing a classical theory of artistic creation that has often been seen as the foundation of academic classicism, popular well into the nineteenth century. He is, in other words, an immensely significant figure, as a source of information on artists' lives, and, more importantly, as a cogent, early spokesperson for one of the dominant aesthetic modes of Western European culture.Given this importance, the relative dearth of publications dedicated toBellori, especially in the Anglo-American world, is surprising. PerhapsBellori's famously negative assessment of Caravaggio, or his complete avoidance of two of the most successful Italian artists of the seventeenth century, Pietro da Cortona and Gian Lorenzo Bernini, account for the scarcity ofscholarly treatments, or maybe his supposed insistence that all great art should be grounded in rules is to blame. The reasons are hard to pin down, but the volume of essays under consideration here goes some significant way towards rectifying the situation. Stemming from a 1996 conference organized by the Association for Textual Scholarship in Art History and held at the American Academy in Rome, the volume is divided into two roughly equal sections, one on "Bellori and the Republic of Letters in Seventeenth-Century Rome," and the other on "Bellori's Lives: History, Criticism, Theory." It comprises twelve essays, including a long and very useful introduction by Janis Bell, one of the editors of the book. The overall goal of the collection is to treat Bellori's activity as a whole, rather than focus single-mindedly on the Lives. After all, as Bell points out, the preponderance of Bellori's publishing was not dedicated to aesthetic theory, or even artists' biographies, but to antiquarian studies. In this, the present volume is very different from the other major new work on Bellori, a two-volume cataloguepublished in 2000 to accompany anexhibition held at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, L'idea del Bello: viaggio per Roma nel Seicento con Giovan Pietro Bellori. The exhibition did acknowledge Bellori's antiquarian interests, but was aimed principally at something else: making visible his aesthetic theory. Unfortunately, the authors of Art History in the Age of Belloriwere not able to take into account fully [End Page 116] the conclusions of this important study,although it should be noted that several authors are represented in both publications.The first group of essays in the book, six in number, treats a wide range of themes, with the intention of crafting a context, both literary and political, for understanding Bellori's achievement. Giovanna Perini's essay, the first of section one, describes Bellori's career trajectory, and, more significantly, how this path had an impact on his life as a scholar. Bellori did not come from the wealthiest stratum of society. On the contrary, he was of relatively modest means, which meant that he had to rely on employment income. One implication of being economically beholden to his employers was that his writing had to conform to their political agendas. The Vite, for instance, are famous for lionizing the French artist Nicolas Poussin, of obvious appeal to his Francophile patrons. Diego Velázquez, however, was not included in the Vite, perhaps because he was Spanish and would thus have appealed to the opposing political faction in Rome at the time, which was linked to Spain. At the same time, Perini convincingly argues that Bellori's own voice was not drowned out in the process... (shrink)

This article engages with the immuno-political juxtaposition of the healthy self and the pathogenic other to critically examine the representation of Nazis and Jews in Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel _Maus_ (1996). Written as a postmemory narrative, _Maus_ recounts the horrors experienced by the author’s father Vladek Spiegelman as a survivor of the Holocaust that claimed an approximate six million Jewish lives. Beginning with the years leading up to World War II, Spiegelman’s novel reimagines the discrimination, dislocation, and dehumanization (...) suffered by Vladek and his family at various prison camps in Nazi-occupied Poland before being transferred to Auschwitz. Deploying an immuno-political reading of _Maus_, this article investigates how the Third Reich undertook a systematic extermination of the Jewish race by construing them as _immunological nonself_ or pathogenic others. It further argues that Nazism’s fantasy of constructing a racially aseptic German identity by eradicating the Jews as vermin or parasites was reinforced by the late nineteenth-century eugenicist ideologies of racial hygiene. This article finally considers how policies of excessive immunization that was deployed by Nazi biopolitics against the Jewish community, as well as exercised by the Jews to survive the Holocaust, eventually assumed the form of an autoimmune pathology that culminated with the attempted destruction of the entire medico-juridical infrastructure of the German Reich on the one hand and the fostering of suicidal tendencies by the Jewish survivors on the other. (shrink)

In order to discuss our problem I propose to adopt a definition of art as an ensemble of man-made objects of specific character, of materials, tools and institutions, of people—those who produce and those who commission or look at works of art—and of techniques and skills mastered by the artists. Art—so broadly understood—has no sharp limits, it is an area connected by hundreds of links with the whole of social, economic, intellectual and spiritual life. It is exposed to various disturbances (...) since any one occurring in those other areas with which art is connected must of necessity affect art and its development to a greater or smaller degree. Lack of demand for some kind of artistic products must lead to the extinction of the corresponding kind of production. For instance, images of saints disappeared in those parts of Germany which adopted the Reformation. One can say in general, that, since various factors of social and economic character influence the life of art, it must reflect the results of those crises which affect social, political or economic life, although the way art reacts on various disturbances may be varied. It may seem natural that in a period of unemployment and of high prices society cannot afford to devote as much money to invest in the goods of culture as it does in times of prosperity, and often it is so indeed. (shrink)

Jacques Rancière’s work has become a major reference point for discussions of art and politics. However, while Rancière’s negative theses are becoming widespread and well understood, his positive thesis is still poorly understood, owing partly to Rancière’s own formulation of the issue. I first clarify Rancière’s account of the links between politics and art. I then explore a gap in this account; Rancière has stuck too closely to a politics of art’s reception. I argue for a (...) class='Hi'>politics of art production, which would expand the possible engagement between politics and art. (shrink)

PREFACE It became clear to me in the past few years that any human quest or endeavor — whether it is in art, religion, business, politics, science, ...

In this beautiful meditation on the history of art and the problem of style, Henri Focillon describes how art forms change over time. Although he argues that the development of art is reducible to external political, social, or economic determinants, one of his great achievements was to lodge a concept of autonomous and organic artistic creation within the shifting domain of materials and techniques. Focillon emphasizes the universal presence of contradictory tendencies that give all styles manifold, stratified character.The Life of (...) Forms remains one of the most brilliant and important applications of biological metaphors to the study of art. It has been superbly translated by Yale art historian George Kubler, whose book The Shape of Time was strongly influenced by Focillon. (shrink)

Posthumanism has come to synthesize philosophical, literary, and artistic responses to the pressures of technology, globalization, and mass extinction in the Anthropocene. It asks what it can mean to be human in an increasingly more-than-human world that has lost faith in the ideal of humanism, the autonomous, rational subject, and it models generative alternatives cognizant of the demands of social and ecological justice. Posthumanism in Art and Science is an anthology of indispensable statements and artworks that provide an unprecedented mapping (...) of this intellectual and aesthetic shift in a global context. It extends across a broad range of fields such as art theory, media studies, continental philosophy, natural science, literary studies, aesthetics, psychoanalysis, environmental humanities, social and political theory, and animal studies. The reader features a diverse sampling of major thinkers including Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Michael Marder, Karen Barad, Alexander Weheliye, Jay Prosser, Anna Tsing, Graham Harman, Timothy Morton, N. Katherine Hayles, Jane Bennett, Bruno Latour, Francesca Ferrando, and Cary Wolfe, as well as innovative, acclaimed artists and curators such as Yvonne Rainer, Chus Martínez, William Wegman, Nandipha Mntambo, Cassils, Pauline Oliveros, Doo-sung Yoo, and Gavin Steingo. Their provocative and compelling works, including previously unpublished interviews and essays, speak to the ongoing conceptual and political challenge of posthuman theories in a time of unprecedented cultural and environmental crises. An essential primer and reference for educators, students, artists, and art enthusiasts, this volume offers a powerful framework for rethinking anthropocentric certitudes and reenvisioning equitable and sustainable futures. (shrink)

This paper draws on insights from Jacques Rancière's writing on politics and aesthetics to offer new perspectives on debates in education and the arts. The paper addresses three debates in turn; the place of contemporary art in schools and gallery education, the role of art in democratic education and the blurring of boundaries between participatory art and community education. I argue that Rancière's work helps to illuminate some essentialist assumptions behind dichotomous arguments about contemporary art in the classroom—both over-hyped (...) claims about its value, and exaggerated fears about its threat to educational values alike. On democratic education I argue that his work highlights the importance of the aesthetic dimensions of democratic learning and, on art and community education, I issue caution against readings of Rancière's work that frame his contribution as a ‘rehabilitation‘ of the aesthetic. Although each debate is tackled discretely, the paper advances the overall argument that attention to equality in Rancière's work—both aesthetic and political—is vital when applying his philosophy to debates that occupy the boundaries of education, politics and art. (shrink)

Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, Volume 21, Issue 3, Page 223-239, July 2022. Contributing to the debate on decolonising the curriculum, this reflective article questions: What does a safe space in a decolonised classroom mean? For whom is it safe? And at what cost? Must we redraw the parameters of ‘safe’? Prompted by a real-life ‘n-word incident’ in the classroom, this article unpacks the collision of decolonising the curriculum to continue making teaching and learning more pluriversal and inclusive, with (...) the enactment of the ‘wounded attachments’ of identitarian politics and the playing of ‘Privilege or Oppression Olympics’. Using snippets from British parody and satire on decolonising the university, we query how far wokeness in a university setting can become political correctness taken to extremes that threaten decolonising efforts. In its concluding reflections, the article makes tentative recommendations for setting up safe spaces, away from self-silencing or censoring, and backing away from contention and provocation in the classroom. (shrink)

Our life with art is suffused with trust. We don’t just trust one another’s aesthetic testimony; we trust one another’s aesthetic actions. Audiences trust artists to have made it worth their while; artists trust audiences to put in the effort. Without trust, audiences would have little reason to put in the effort to understand difficult and unfamiliar art. I offer a theory of aesthetic trust, which highlights the importance of trust in aesthetic sincerity. We trust in another’s aesthetic sincerity when (...) we rely on them to fulfill their commitments to act for aesthetic reasons — rather than for, say, financial, social, or political reasons. We feel most thoroughly betrayed by an artist, not when they make bad art, but when they sell out. This teaches us something about the nature of trust in general. According to many standard theories, trust involves thinking the trusted to be cooperative or good-natured. But trust in aesthetic sincerity is different. We trust artists to be true to their own aesthetic sensibility, which might involve selfishly ignoring their audience’s needs. Why do we care so much about an artist’s sincerity, rather than merely trusting them to make good art? We emphasize sincerity when wish to encourage originality, rather than to demand success along predictable lines. And we ask for sincerity when our goal is to discover a shared sensibility. In moral life, we often try to force convergence through coordinated effort. But in aesthetic life, we often hope for the lovely discovery that our sensibilities were similar all along. And for that we need to ask for sincerity, rather than overt coordination. (shrink)

Redner (politics, Monash U., Melbourne, Australia) builds on the thesis that crucial changes in human cultural history correlate with fundamental transformations in modes of representation. He traces human development from primitive culture to that of the present age to construct a comprehensive theory of culture. His theory challenges some established approaches in disciplines such as philosophy, semiotics, sociology, political theory, aesthetics, and history itself. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

We humans are a curious species. Of all the life forms that inhabit the earth, we alone strive to make sense of the world in which we find ourselves. For thousands of years we understood the world through stories. Our ancestors told stories of how the world began, how our people originated and came to be at this place, and how those people across the river or beyond the mountains came to be where they are. Some stories were of animals (...) and plants in our neighborhood, and their powers to help us, feed us, or cure our ailments. But in the last few centuries, starting in Europe and spreading throughout the world, a new way of understanding began competing with storytelling as a means of comprehending our world. Science supplanted storytelling largely because it empowered us to transform the world in ways that were unimaginable to our ancestors. We understand the world scientifically by describing the world instead of by telling stories about it. The stories our ancestors told no longer explain the world, but are data within the world, part of the world that science describes. Our stories have become myths, cultural artifacts that may be interesting and a subject of study, but cannot possibly be true. Yet even in societies that have thoroughly embraced science as a means of understanding the world, myths remain a powerful force. Myth and science exist side by side, often creating confusion and conflict. (shrink)

The Anatoly Bakushinsky’s Seminarium (1917–1926) at the Tsvetkov gallery in Moscow became one of the first experimental and most influential venues to develop approaches to the perception of art in Soviet Russia. In it, Bakushinsky, an art critic and the head of the Physical-Psychological Department of the State Academy of Artistic Sciences (GAKhN), incorporated the practice of formal art history into a methodology based on materialism, psychology, and experimental aesthetics widely practiced at the GAKhN. Today, this combination of approaches is (...) perceived as an isolated historical example of an outmoded eclecticism. I argue, however, that Bakushinsky’s methodology should be studied in the context of the complex institutional structure of the Academy that was designed to ensure multidisciplinary work in art studies and its almost immediate implementation into art practice. This institutional and material nexus of the GAKhN’s history opens up a new direction in studying the intellectual legacy of Soviet humanities of the 1920s, which is otherwise often reduced to biographical narratives. (shrink)