The subject of the study is the epistemological specificity of art through the «prism» of the Paleolithic and modern eras. The focus of the research is aimed at analyzing the phenomenon of «eidetism», which is a link between modern and primitive art. The purpose of the article is to comprehend the epistemological specifics of art, which began with the «psychophysiology» of the primitive world and developed into forms of «practical philosophizing» of the modern era. The research methodology includes a (...) class='Hi'>review of literary sources, a dialectical approach to historical and art historical reconstruction, analysis of paleopsychological data, comparative analysis, elements of systems psychology and sociology. An element of novelty is the author's position that already in the lower, early layers of its evolution, the status of art «as one of the most ancient forms of human activity» is enriched by the status of «a form of practical philosophizing». The generalization is made that the art of the XX-XXI centuries, on the one hand, abandoned both mimesis and humanism, on the other – it continued the path of «practical philosophizing» begun in ancient times, based on the perceptual-empirical method of cognition of reality. The evolution of art from its primitive origins through archaic, classical to its modern state is, at the same time, the transformation of human consciousness, and the comprehension through artistic and creative activity of one's being and place in the universe, etc. - the development of its «depth» (the content of art). This is the development of art «in breadth» (the development of artistic form): the proliferation of its types and genres, the growth of stylistic and technological polyphony, etc. As a result, «art has come a long way from its purely psychophysiological hypostasis to «practical philosophizing». Artistic and creative activity itself as a whole continues to be the most important component of the global «mechanism» of mastering reality. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Art as PerformanceMichael WehArt As Performance, by David Davies. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004, 278 pp.If we accepted the claims that David Davies makes in his Art as Performance, we would have to rigorously revise our conception of what kinds of entities artworks are. Art as Performance is a study in the ontology of art, and whereas other well-known theories about the ontological status of artworks say that artworks are (...) to be identified with, forexample, types, classes, or kinds, Davies holds that they are performances that lead to the production of a "focus of appreciation" — the latter being the objects we usually take to be artworks. So according to Davies, a painting presented in a museum or a novel we can buy in a bookshop is in fact not the artwork x.The artwork is rather the performance that cumulated in bringing x into existence.Davies characterizes our "common sense theory" of art as including views about the epistemology, ontology,axiology, and definition of art. It maintains that in order to appreciate an artwork, a direct experiential encounter with it is sufficient; that artworks are those things that are exhibited in our museums or performed on stages; that the value of artworks lies in immediately experiencing them; and that artworks differ from other objects by virtue of possessing aesthetic properties. But the common sense theory conflicts with many, if not most, of the art phenomena of the twentieth century. The puzzlement of audiences in the face of certain contemporary pieces of art is caused by the incompatibility of the common sense theory with those artworks. A philosopher of art can try to solve this problem by either accommodating modern art to the common sense theory or by dismissing the theory as inappropriate. With his performance theory, Davies goes for the [End Page 114] second option, while at the same time constraining his theory to the principle that an ontology of art should not contradict our dealing with art — at least after we have critically revised it — too excessively.Davies's first major step in elaborating his theory is a discussion of whether it is necessary to take contextual properties of artworks into account in order to be able to appreciate and understand them. Defenders of "aesthetic empiricism" (a term coined by Gregory Currie) deny that an artwork's history of production is relevant and would be the philosophical business partners of the common sense theory. According to empiricism, only an artwork's manifest properties matter. The context of an artwork's making is at best of art-historical interest. Building upon the works of Currie, Jerrold Levinson, Arthur Danto, and others, Davies forcefully argues against empiricism in defense of a contextualist epistemology of art. And since he takes an artwork's history of production to be epistemologically indispensable, Davies infers that it also has to be considered concerning the ontology of art.Davies's ontology of art is monistic. He claims that all artworks are not the products of creative activities, but rather "intentionally guided generative performances that eventuate in contextualized structures or objects...or events...performances completed by what I am terming a focus of appreciation" (p. 98). The focus of appreciation, in turn, is defined as "an artistic statement as articulated in an artistic medium realized in a vehicle" (p. 60). Davies understands an artistic medium as a set of social conventions or understandings of how to describe the way an artist articulated his statement — for example by manipulating a physical object. The vehicle can be — as in the case of painting — exactly that physical object, or, for example, an action in the case of conceptual art. The main point is that the focus of appreciation is not the artwork. The focus of appreciation — for example, the object Les Demoiselles d'Avignon — completes the performance that was carried out by the artist, and that performance is the artwork.If artworks are performances, it is clear that artworks possess the properties on whose existence contextualism insists and that are ignored by empiricism. But though Davies emphasizes the role of the properties an artwork has due to its provenance, he is also concerned about the weaknesses of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:AngloModern: Painting and Modernity in Britain and the United StatesJane DuranAngloModern: Painting and Modernity in Britain and the United States, by Janet Wolff. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003, 172 pp.AngloModern, Janet Wolff's scintillating attempt to limn the construction of modernity in the visual arts, is more than worth reading for a number of reasons. In this work, she details how modernity positioned itself against a number of strands (...) of development, and then, by a process of exclusion, formulated its own stance. As poststructuralist theory has taught us, the procedures of building an excluded body against a center, when closely examined, frequently tell us more about a rubric or label than we could otherwise have imagined.Wolff is primarily concerned with three areas of exclusion/construction for the turn in the visual arts, painting in particular, that began at the opening of the twentieth century. Toward the beginning of the work, she notes that there was always a continuous realist and figurative genre at work even in modernist circles, but it seldom achieved anything like the recognition that the more typically abstract works we associate with the rise of modernism gained. She associates this area of nonrecognition with the work of women in particular, and these two areas alone — the realist/figurative and any work done by a woman artist — constitute two of her most important foci in AngloModern. In addition, and with some difficulty, since it adds a layer of complication, she is concerned about the exclusion and marginalization of Jewish artists during thisperiod — both in galleries and in thecommentary generated by the art world — although it is clear that many of the major "abstract" works associated with modernism were, in fact, produced by Jewish artists.Wolff is at her best in laying out in precise detail how it is that the culture of the art world throws up nearly insurmountable barriers against those deemed unworthy at a fairly early point in the construction of any new movement. The single strongest chapter in the work may well be the second, "Questions of Discovery: the Art of Kathleen McEnery," in which Wolff shows how various processes of categorization kept the work of this extremely talented woman from receiving anything like the recognition it deserved for a long period of time. Wolff sums up her overall project, and how it will relate to an artist such as McEnery, in her Introduction, when she writes:The story of modern art that is challenged [in her book] is the narrative tracing the development of Western painting from France to the United States, in a lineage more or less running from Manet and Post-Impressionism, by way of Cubism and Surrealism, to Abstract Expressionism. It is a story produced and reinforced by critics, academics, curators, and museum directors.(p. 3)Women artists, for example, were frequently excluded not only becausethey were women, but because they may have tended to engage in painting that was more realist, which itself [End Page 118] became coded as "feminine," and so forth. McEnery's intriguing portraits of the early two decades of the twentieth century were "discovered," as Wolff notes for the l987 inaugural exhibition of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, despite the fact that McEnery had at one point been fairly well-known (pp. 41-42). A woman at work in a figurative tradition, and working in suburban circles far away from the geographical centers of the art world, she was quickly at the mercy of the canonical forces of art historical construction.As we attempt to educate our students about rubrics, social movements, and the relationship of the arts to the political events of an era, we can do little better than to cite, for illustrative purposes, a number of interesting cases, and Wolff does just that. In sharp and incisive prose, she not only investigates McEnery's disappearance from the approved version of the early American modernist scene, but she also examines the construction of the early group displayed at the Whitney, the notion of the "feminine" in the work of Simmel and Benjamin, and, finally, the notion of the "Jewish artist." As her exemplar for the... (shrink)

This essay does not aim to investigate film-novel relationships per se, although the fact that the two genres now share certain generative procedures may be further evidence that fiction in print and on film lie to a great extent in a unified field not only of diegesis but also of structure. A diachronic or historical approach to the theory of fictional generators would show that, with the shifts which have occurred on present-day aesthetic thought, much of what once was (...) considered to be a static analysis of retrospective rules or established forms could now be regarded as the disguised beginning of generative theory. Aristotle's seemingly static doctrines of dramatic structure, involving such notions as peripeteia, discovery, or unity of action, to the extent that dramatists had consciously or unconsciously followed such doctrines, obviously served the production of their works, as well as their later analysis. In fact, any sort of artistic intentionality constitutes a kind of "generator," as does the deliberate adherence to outward forms as rhyme schemes, stanzas, cantos, or chapters. As we shall see, it is not always easy to distinguish between generative formulas and self-imposed forms or limits, such as the sonnet with its fourteen lines, its quatrains, and its tercets. Although the most advanced practitioners of generative theory, like Jean Ricardou, seem to view their work as a radical break with the past and the discovery of an entirely new domain of fiction, literary history would provide innumerable examples of precedents, from antiquity through the Grands Rhétoriqueurs, the Gongorists and Baroque poets, and many subsequent groups of writers down to and including the pre-modern and modern periods. Bruce Morrissette has published widely on French fiction of the classical period, Rimbaud and the Symbolist movement, the Nouveau Roman and Robbe-Grillet, and on contemporary film. He is the Sunny Distinguished Service Professor and Chairman of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago. He translated Alain Robbe-Grillet's "ARTISTS ON ART: Order and Disorder in Film and Fiction" for the Autumn 1977 issue of Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

According to Arthur Danto, post-modern or post-historical art began when artists like Andy Warhol collapsed the Modern distinction between art and everyday life by bringing “the everyday” into the artworld. I begin by pointing out that there is another way to collapse this distinction: bring art out of the artworld and into everyday life. An especially effective way of doing this is to make street art, which, I argue, is art whose meaning depends on its use of (...) the street. I defend this definition and show how it handles graffiti and public art. (shrink)

Not-I/Thou: The Other Subject of Art and Architecture is a series of essays delineating the gray areas and black zones in present-day cultural production. Part One is an implicit critique of neo-liberal capitalism and its assault on the humanities through the pseudo-scientific and pseudo-empirical biases of academic and professional disciplines, while Part Two returns to apparent lost causes in the historical development of modernity and post-modernity, particularly the recourse to artistic production as both a form of mnemonics and (...) periodic (and renascent) avant-garde agitation. In-between these twin systems of taking the measure of things, Art and Architecture, as forms of speculative intellectual capital, emerge from the shadow-lands of half-conscious and half-unconscious forces to become gestures toward a type of knowledge that has no utilitarian or generic agency. Defying the tendencies of such discourses to fall prey to instrumental orders that effectively neuter the inherent radical agenda of both, Art and Architecture are represented in this series of essays as noetic apparatuses, operating at the edge of authorized systems of knowledge, quietly and secretly validating and valorizing the shadowy and recondite, collective and personal operations of intellect in service to no particular end. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.2 (2002) 462-464 [Access article in PDF] The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell and the Epistemology of Modernism,by Ann Banfield; 452 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, $55.00. We have grown accustomed to reading Woolf philosophically. Lucio Ruotolo, Mark Hussey, Gillian Beer, and Pamela Caughie are just a few notable scholars who have used philosophical texts and themes to shed light on Woolf's novels and life, (...) but Ann Banfield's The Phantom Table marks the beginning of a new approach. Contrary to the poststructuralist readings of the last two decades, Banfield treats Woolf as a "philosophical realist" (p. 294), an interpretation that presupposes that "Truth, although logically constructed, remains nonetheless objective, a discovery, as opposed to a creation, of the mind" (p. 94). To justify this approach, Banfield makes a case for privileging Bertrand Russell's "symbolic logic" (p. 42) as "a key if limited influence on Woolf's thinking about language" (pp. 42-43). Simply appropriating elements of Russell's rigorous epistemology, however, is not enough to determine Woolf's thinking, for as Banfield claims: "Woolf's philosophically inflected aesthetic is not one Russell would have foreseen" (p. 54). Roger Fry's astute reflections on Post-Impressionism aesthetics complement Russell's philosophical approach and thereby provide Woolf with a framework for the "novel's realism [which] must relate two competing realities, the private world and the public persona" (p. 324). Through an extraordinarily insightful analysis of the work of Russell and Fry, Banfield offers an intelligent interdisciplinary interpretation of the rigorous epistemological presuppositions at the base of Woolf's aesthetic.Central to Banfield's project is the conviction that reality is mind-independent (p. 101). On this view, "modern fiction ultimately aims to describe a reality beyond privacy" (p. 298), but to understand how we can access that reality we must carefully distinguish sensations, sense-data, and sensibilia. According to Russell, sensations are the private experiences or awareness of a subject, whereas a sense-datum is "that external object of which in sensation the subject is aware" (p. 70). Sensibilia, the lynchpin of Russell's and Banfield's theory, have the same ontological status as sense-data, though they are not necessarily data to a specific mind. Banfield cleverly articulates the ontological priority of sensibilia by reversing Berkeley's famous dictum: "What brings about" sensibilia's "actualization is the perspective's occupation by a subject and the corresponding interception of sensibilia by sense-organs located in time and space" (pp. 74-75). Sensibilia need not be perceived to exist, which places the perceiving subject at the mercy of sensibilia, rather than making sensibilia ontologically dependent upon the perceiving mind.Given the primacy of sensibilia, the epistemological "goal is now to leave one's perspective and imaginatively project oneself into other perspectives, even the possible ones inhumanly occupied, to experience the world as it would be without the thinker" (p. 213). According to this system, the perceiving [End Page 462] subject and the modernist artist become irrelevant because they can inhibit our experience and/or understanding of sensibilia. Eliminating the subject and effacing the author, therefore, become necessary so that "artistic creativity" (p. 173) is given free flow, which means that for art to achieve its goal of seeing "the world 'as far as possible as it is in itself, and not merely through the distorting medium of personal desire'" (p. 382), the death of the subject is mandatory—though this death of the subject differs considerably from Roland Barthes's, Michel Foucault's, and Paul de Man's. Once the subject is eliminated, which occurs in Woolf's novels according to Banfield, the novelist will be able to create a "method of multiple perspectives" which functions as a "route to wider knowledge" (p. 312) of sensibilia.In the last part of the book, Banfield examines how "Fry's aesthetic derives from analytic philosophy" (p. 248) and then argues that Woolf incorporates much of this aesthetic into her work. Fry makes a clear distinction between Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. Impressionism represents the "totality... (shrink)

I argue that scientific and poetic modes of objectivity are perspectival duals: 'views' from and onto basic natural forces, respectively. I ground this analysis in a general account of objectivity, not in terms of either 'universal' or 'inter-subjective' validity, but as receptivity to basic features of reality. Contra traditionalists, bare truth, factual knowledge, and universally valid representation are not inherently valuable. But modern critics who focus primarily on the self-expressive aspect of science are also wrong to claim that our knowledge (...) is or should be ultimately mediated by ourselves. In objective science, we represent nature as a field of phenomena determined by and within explanatorily-basic physical structures that encode the causal impact of elemental physical forces. These causally-basic forces hence ground the possibility of objective scientific theory, even though (I argue) they are systematically excluded from its representational contents. I show how my notions of force and field emerge partly through my effort to naturalize concepts of 'God' and 'Laws' in 17th-century natural philosophy. In science, we use the structure of basic forces' impact to see corresponding objects. We do not see these forces themselves—and this relates to the 'transcendence' of 'God'. I supplement this historical analysis by critiquing standard accounts of objectivity, and by synthesizing elements from neo-Kantian epistemology and current 'structural' realism into a view that I call 'dynamic structuralism'. Finally, I argue that physics systematically relies on passive characterizations of phenomena like inertia and impressed force. Dynamic alternatives that are just as empirically adequate are possible, but they are non-scientific. Poetic objectivity involves a direct presentation of nature as an order of interacting forces. I elaborate first by developing a novel theory of the relation between beauty and sublimity, mediated by a basic category of 'sensory force' (e.g. a 'singing' tone in a beautiful melody). I then describe the interaction between sensory and affective dimensions of aesthetic experience, in relation to an original historical analysis of passion and 'disinterestedness' in Kant, Schiller and Nietzsche. I synthesize these lines of analysis into a critique of the role of 'expression' in art. I also resist 'spectator'-centric aesthetics, in this connection, by developing an account of artistic objectivity in dialogue with Ruskin's critique of the 'pathetic fallacy'. I contrast artistic objectivity with Romantic ideals of self-expression, while elaborating its positive relation to certain currents within Victorian and Modernist aesthetics, including Imagists' stress on 'exteriority'. My project creatively extends Nietzsche's view that philosophical and scientific theories are 'perspectival' expressions of theorists' drives. It is a virtue of Nietzsche's account that he takes the outlet of strong human drives in creative acts of theorizing to be just one among many higher modes of 'will to power' in nature—many of which are totally impersonal. But Nietzsche is still too focused on self-expression or willing one's own power. Objective science involves external forces' 'expression' in and through us, not just 'expressing' our own powers. And Nietzsche's vitalistic 'will to power' must be replaced by a basic ontology that better accommodates inorganic phenomena, like the 'lawful' order of celestial motions. Thus I aim to de-anthropomorphize and 'de-organicize' post-Kantian notions of willful striving and organic development, while preserving for force the primary ontological and evaluative status that theorists from Schiller and Goethe to Schelling and Schlegel to Emerson and Nietzsche attributed to will or to life. (shrink)

MARINA PAOLA BANCHETTI-ROBINO is Associate Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Florida Atlantic University. Her areas of research include phenomenology, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, and zoosemiotics. Her publications have appeared in such journals as Synthese, Husserl Studies, Idealistic Studies, Philosophy East and West, and The Review of Metaphysics. She has also contributed essays to The Role of Pragmatics in Contemporary Philosophy (1997), Feminist Phenomenology (2000), and Islamic Philosophy and Occidental Phenomenology on the (...) Perennial Issue of Microcosm and Macrocosm (2006). She co-edited Philosophies of the Environment and Technology (1999) and is currently working on a book-length project entitled The Birth of Science Out of the Spirit of Myth: A Historico-Phenomenological Re-Examination of the Crisis of the European Sciences. BERNARD BOXILL was born in Saint Lucia, West Indies where he received his primary and secondary education. He studied philosophy at the University of New Brunswick, Canada and at the University of California, Los Angeles where he was awarded a doctorate in philosophy in 1971. He has published numerous articles, a book, Blacks and Social Justice (1992), and is professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. ED BRANDON was born and educated in England, studying philosophy and linguistics at The University of York, England, and later philosophy at The University of Oxford with the late John Mackie. After teaching in Sierra Leone and briefly in England, he went to teach philosophy of education at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica in 1978. From 1992 he has been attached to a policy unit of the Vice-Chancellery, based at the Cave Hill campus in Barbados, where he has been assisting since 2000 with a new major in philosophy. His academic work can be accessed from http://cavehill.uwi.edu/bnccde/epb/personalpage.html CAROLYN CUSICK is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. She is a founding member of the Phenomenology Roundtable. Her research focuses on feminist epistemology, Africana philosophy, and phenomenology. LEWIS GORDON is President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. He is Laura H. Carnell Professor, the most distinguished chair, at Temple University, where he holds appointments in philosophy, religion, and Judaic studies and directs the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought and the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies. He is also Ongoing Visiting Professor of Philosophy and Government at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica. He is the author of several books, including the award-winning Her Majesty's Other Children: Sketches of Racism from a Neocolonial Age (Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times (Paradigm, 2006), An Introduction to Africana Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), and co-editor of A Companion to African-American Studies (Blackwell, 2006) and Not Only the Master's Tools: African-American Studies in Theory and Practice (Paradigm, 2005). CLEVIS HEADLEY is currently Associate Professor of Philosophy at Florida Atlantic University, director of the Ethnic Studies Certificate Program, as well as director of the Master's in Liberal Studies. Professionally, he serves as the Vice-President and Treasurer of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. Professor Headley has published widely in the areas of Critical Race Theory and Africana philosophy. He has also published in Analytic philosophy, focusing specifically on Gottlob Frege. PAGET HENRY is Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies at Brown University. He is the author of Caliban's Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy, Peripheral Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Antigua, and the co-editor of C. L. R. James' Caribbean. Professor Henry also serves as the editor of the C. L. R. James Journal, and has published numerous articles on the political economy of the Caribbean as well as on African, African-American, and Afro-Caribbean philosophy. ESIABA IROBI is Associate Professor of International Theatre/Performance Studies at Ohio University, Athens. His groundbreaking book: A Theatre for Cannibals: Resisting Globalization on the Continent and Diaspora since 1441 will be published by Palgrave Macmillan, London, in 2007. He has been invited to be an External Resident Fellow at the prestigious Dartmouth College Humanities Institute for the 2007-2008 academic year. CHIKE JEFFERS is a graduate student in the Ph.D. program of the Philosophy Department at Northwestern University. His interests are in Africana philosophy, social and political philosophy, ethics, philosophy of religion and aesthetics. He is originally from Toronto, Ontario, Canada. CATHERINE JOHN is Associate Professor of African Diaspora Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Her book Clear Word and Third Sight: Folk Groundings and Diasporic Consciousness in African Caribbean Writing was co-published by Duke University Press and UWI Press in 2003. She has published several articles on Caribbean literature and culture and her current book project is entitled The Just Society and the Diasporic Imagination. She spends her summer working in Woodside, St. Mary, Jamaica helping with a summer school for children and participating in the community's emancipation celebration. KENNETH KNIES is a doctoral student in philosophy at Stony Brook University. His areas of focus are phenomenology and ancient philosophy. He is also a contributing editor for Political Affairs magazine. EDIZON LEN is a photographer and coordinator of the Fondo Documental Afro-Andino at the Universidad Andina Simòn Bolivar in Quito, Ecuador. In 2006, he was curator of the photo exhibit "The Color of the Diaspora" presented at the Cultural Center of the Catholic University of Ecuador and the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. He is currently completing his doctorate at the Universidad Andina Simòn Bolivar with a focus on Maroon thought. REKHA MENON is Associate Professor of Art History at State University of New York, Buffalo State. She is the author of Seductive Aesthetics of Post Colonialism (forthcoming). Her area of research focuses on current philosophical investigations in colonial and neocolonial aspects of Indian art, artistic/cultural practices and philosophies and their relationship to Western arts and philosophies. Her manuscripts under review are: Ashamed of Our Nakedness, Is There Ever a Naked Body? Ambivalence in Contemporary Indian Expressive Aesthetics and Insatiable Desire. MICHAEL R. MICHAU is a Ph.D. candidate in the Philosophy and Literature Program at Purdue University, and during the 2006-2007 school year, a lecturer in the Department of Comparative Studies and Department of Philosophy at Ohio State University. He is the co-founder and co-secretary of the North American Levinas Society. CHARLES W. MILLS is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He works in the general area of oppositional political theory, and is the author of numerous articles and three books: The Racial Contract (Cornell University Press, 1997), Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Cornell University Press, 1998), and From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). MABOGO P. MORE is currently Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. He has published articles on African philosophy and social and political philosophy in a number of academic journals, such as South African Journal of Philosophy, Dialogue and Universalism, Alternation, Theoria, and African Journal of Political Science. MARILYN NISSIM-SABAT, Ph.D., M.S.W. is Professor Emerita and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy, Lewis University. Dr. Nissim-Sabat is also a psychotherapist in private practice. She is the author of numerous book chapters and papers in the fields of philosophy (Husserlian phenomenology), psychoanalysis, feminism, and critical race theory. Citations of her works can be found on her website: marilynnissim-sabat.com. FREDERICK OCHIENG'-ODHIAMBO is a Senior Lecturer of Philosophy and Coordinator of the discipline at The University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados. His major research areas are African philosophy and social philosophy. He has published several articles on philosophic sagacity. IVAN PETRELLA is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Miami. He is author of The Future of Liberation Theology: An Argument and Manifesto (SCM Press, 2006) and editor of Latin American Liberation Theology: The Next Generation (Orbis Books, 2005) as well as co-editor of the series Reclaiming Liberation Theology (SCM Press) RICHARD PITHOUSE is a research fellow at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa. He is editor of Asinamali: University Struggles in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Africa World Press, 2006). SATHYA RAO is Assistant Professor in French translation at the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies, University of Alberta, Canada. His research fields include: theory of translation, continental philosophy, postcolonial studies, discourses on Africa, and Francophone cinema and literature. He has published articles in various peer-reviewed journals and written chapters in several collective books such as: De l'Ecrit Africain a l'Oral le Phenomene Graphique Africain, Simon Battestini (Ed.) (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2006) and Thèorie-rèbellion. Un Ultimatum, Gilles Grelet (Ed.) (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2005). He has a co-edited a book on Francophone African cinema L'Afrique fait son cinema (Montreal: Memoires d'encrier, forthcoming). Sathya Rao is vice-president of the International Non-Philosophical Organisation (INPhO), member of the Canadian Association of Translatology (CATS), coordinator of the research team Poexil, and Secretary of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. He is co-founder of an online journal Alternative Francophone. CATHERINE WALSH is Professor and Director of the doctoral program in Latin American Cultural Studies at the Universidad Andina Simon Bolivar in Quito, Ecuador. Her research interests include the geopolitics of knowledge, interculturality and concerns related to the Afro-Andean Diaspora and the production of decolonial thought. Among her recent publications are Pensamiento crìtico y matriz colonial (Quito: Abya Yala, 2005), "Interculturality and the Coloniality of Power. An 'Other' Thinking and Positioning from the Colonial Difference," in Coloniality of Power, Transmodernity, and Border Thinking, R. Grosfoguel, J.D. Saldivar, and N. Maldonado-Torres (Eds.) (Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming) and "Shifting the Geopolitics of Critical Knowledge: Decolonial Thought and Cultural Studies 'Others' in the Andes," Cultural Studies (forthcoming). KRISTIN WATERS has published widely in the areas of race and gender. Her anthology Enlightened Conversations: Women and Men Political Theorists (Blackwell, 2000) challenges political theorists to be more inclusive of race and gender in their research and teaching. Her book Black Women's Intellectual Traditions: Speaking Their Minds, co-edited with Carol Conaway (University of Vermont Press, forthcoming), addresses the varied intellectual traditions of black women's thought that spans more than two hundred years in North America. She is currently Professor of Philosophy at Worcester State College and Visiting Research Associate at Brandeis University. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.2 (2003) 478-480 [Access article in PDF] The German Aesthetic Tradition,by Kai Hammermeister; xv & 259 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002; $60.00 cloth; $22.00 paper. In some ways, aesthetic theory has become a thing of the past. With the exception of a kind of fascination with works such as T. W. Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, as a project, as a tradition, aesthetics has surrendered its once (...) monolithic and grandiose position as the philosophical contemplation of art and the notion of artistic beauty to more diminutive fields such as literary theory, poetics and cultural studies. In some ways, this is due to the very function of aesthetics: the philosophical investigation not simply of what is beautiful, but the formulation of prescriptive ideas about works of art and the judgement them according to these prescriptive ideas. This, in turn, has been looked upon with a certain degree of scorn with the rise of a more pluralistic art world and the bold denial that art needs the guidance of philosophy let alone have any prescriptive function or be able to be classified as "good" or "bad."But Kai Hammermeister's The German Aesthetic Tradition takes a very different view. A bold and difficult project, Hammermeister traces the complex and oftentimes abstruse contours of German aesthetic philosophy from its inception with Baumgarten in the eighteenth century through Adorno in the twentieth. In the process, he not only provides us with an excellent historical-philosophical account of the development of German aesthetic philosophy, he also implicitly argues for the relevance of aesthetics as a way not only of comprehending art, but of understanding the cohesive links between art, society, culture and philosophy.The German aesthetic tradition, as Hammermeister refers to it, was a prolonged intellectual argumentation with classical conceptions of art and beauty inherited from classical Greek thought during the eighteenth century. Classical aesthetics was dominated by two opposing conceptions of art and its function. For Plato, art mirrored the outside world (mimesis) and the judgement of good works of art was based on how well this mirroring of the objective world was carried out. Aristotle's idea was that art served a purgatory function (katharsis), cleansing the emotions of the individual through the identification of the observer with the work of art. All of the thinkers in the German tradition wrestle with this dual conception of art in some form privileging one over the other or, more often than not, combining them and extending their explanatory reach. But as in any tradition, they also struggle with the ideas and philosophies of previous thinkers within the tradition itself making Hammermeister's task more complex, one that he handles with adroitness and precision.The book's overarching argument and structure is triadic. Hammermeister sees the eighteenth century through German Idealism and Romanticism as [End Page 478] articulating a set of different paradigms for interpreting art. These are subsequently attacked in post-Hegelian philosophy and are then revived in different ways in the twentieth century as a reaction to Nietzsche's aestheticization of philosophy. Two paradigms emerge as central for the subsequent unfolding of the tradition. First, there is Immanuel Kant's conception of art as wholly separate from epistemology and from morality. For Kant, the work of art is centered in the experience of the subject and, in terms of form, exists outside its social context. This Hammermeister calls the "first strong paradigm of aesthetics" (p. 40). Next, there is the position of Friedrich Schiller who sees a connection between the work of art with culture, thought and morality. "[T]he culture of beauty demonstrates the freedom of man to turn himself into whatever being he envisions while remaining under the law of morality" (p. 57). For Schiller, there exists a kind of spillover effect of art into other domains of human thought and action—specifically in morality and politics—and this represents a crucial deviation from Kant's paradigm and another tendency within the tradition of German aesthetics, i.e., the aestheticization of other domains of human existence.Schelling and Hegel represent two other... (shrink)

Modern Thai art and its historical development are not a symbol of modernism restricted to preconceived Western notion. But modern Thai art has its own genealogy whose complexity and system of meaning signify an expression of an ethical need to embody the denseness, structure and complexity of moral experience. Believing in this conviction causes Modern Thai artists to dig deep into materiality of their medium to find forms combining of matter or signs of solid substance. Accordingly, it becomes a (...) yearning process of heroic aspiration to secure Thai artists’ identity, and, somehow, the identity and ethical structure of the nation. Therefore works of art in Thailand have been produced not for the sake of aesthetic pleasure, but for moralistic contemplation within very established institutional domains. In turn, Thai contemporary artistic movement after 1990s has been inclined to suggest some emerging alternative of creative competency quite differently from artistic progress in the prior periods. This creates a political dialogue that can be critically understood in terms of the process of cultural hybridity that gives rise to something different, something new, transitional and unrecognizable – a new area of negotiation of meaning and representation taking place - in a third space. This kind of space is politically practical because it is a productive space of the construction of culture as different, in the spirit of alteration or otherness embedded in everyday idioms of artistic practices in various fashions. From this perspective, artistic practices in this period become a new terrain of practice as a site of contestation. Furthermore, in my study, the research methodology will encourage epistemological overlapping terrains for interrogating that of foundational dualism, which implicitly underpins the study of the social constitution of reality rigidly bounded on cultural identities of Thai nation state. (shrink)

Art historians have long viewed southern Italy, especially the Salento region in Apulia, as a Byzantine artistic province even centuries after Byzantine rule ended there in c. 1070. The Orthodox monastery of Santa Maria di Cerrate, near Lecce, is widely considered to possess some of the region’s “most Byzantine” paintings (twelfth to fourteenth centuries). Yet a close examination of these frescoes reveals significant iconographic and stylistic differences from alleged Byzantine norms. A historiographic synopsis and review of problematic definitions of (...) “Byzantine” art are followed in this article by a critique of reductionist labels. Embracing the concept of vagueness offers an alternative way to think about Cerrate and similar borderline cases—not in terms of fixed categories (“Byzantine” or “Western”), but as points on an art-historical continuum that is enriched by acknowledging complexity. (shrink)

The review of activity of local governments of Leningrad on the solution of social problems is presented in article in the period of the Great Patriotic War and restoration of municipal economy during the post-war period. The considerable attention is paid to questions of ensuring activity of the population and the main directions of social policy. Consequences of the public regress caused by war, which detained for many decades development of the social sphere in the country, are not (...) studied yet. In this regard, the judgment of process of overcoming of these consequences, research of the principles of work, methods and forms of administrative activities for the organization of full-fledged life of citizens during the recovery post-war period and in the next decades is of special interest. Completion of World War II entailed changes in a control system of the country - as it is known, extraordinary bodies of authority and management of a wartime in the capital and on places were abolished. Management of restoration and maintenance of full functioning life support system of the cities and areas transferred to local governments of the Soviet power - to city and regional councils of deputies and their constantly operating executive committees. The role of the social sphere in modern conditions more and more increases in improvement of economy, development of democratic processes. The scientific analysis of activity of the central and local authorities for protection and providing the population in years of war and the post-war period gives more deep understanding of role and importance of social questions in life of society. It reveals historical experience of creation, development and implementation of effective mechanism of such activity, that experience is useful for modern management practice of state and local authorities. The considerable case of sources, among which analytical and research works of applied and theoretical character is analyzed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy of Music Education Review 12.1 (2004) 89-93 [Access article in PDF] Richard Shusterman, Performing Live: Aesthetic Alternatives for the Ends of Art (New York: Cornell University Press, 2000) Performing Live can be ascribed to post-modern American pragmatism in its widest expression. The author's intention is to revalue aesthetic experience, as well as to expand its realm to the extent where such experience also encompasses areas alien (...) to traditional aesthetics (for example, popular art or the somatic arts of self-improvement), reaching "the art of living" and reclaiming life itself as performance.After the introduction, titled "Aesthetic Renewal for the Ends of Art: An Overture," the text is organized in two main parts: "Aesthetic Experience and Popular Art" and "Soma, Self, and Society." Along with its ambitious title, the book's organization and structure promise a consistency of approach and narrative that somewhat dissolves during the reading. Shusterman recognizes that the stylistic problems that arise from a compilation of articles spanning ten years, mixing newly written and revised articles, but appeals to the reader's appreciation of the "quality of the mix" (11). Despite this feature, he is a lucid and thoughtful communicator and his writing style is excellent.In order to propose new or revitalized alternatives for the ends of art, Shusterman [End Page 89] explores the crisis in traditional visions of art, pointing to the compartmentalization and lack of credibility in current artistic thought and practice. Hegel, Walter Benjamin, Gianni Vattimo, and Arthur Danto provide him with the philosophical arguments accounting for the modern "exhaustion" of art. He supports a dialectical approach, both naturalistic and historicist, and builds a solid case for the possibility of alternatives in aesthetic thought and experience. He proposes two alternatives in his introduction: The two most prominent sites for today's aesthetic alternatives are clearly the mass-media popular arts and the complex cluster of disciplines devoted to bodily beauty and the art of living as expressed in today's preoccupation with aesthetic lifestyles. (7) It is unclear why these alternatives are "clearly" "the two most prominent." The author does not build a case for this assumption or for the "newness" of these alternatives. The "compilation style" mentioned above and this lack of justification for one of the most original elements in the book make this text often read as a philosophical drafting board. Keeping these characteristics in mind and also critically pondering the degrees of success in the enterprise, the reader must give Shusterman credit for taking risks while suggesting concrete examples for an experiential, holistic philosophy. In this sense, he mentions (in a different context) that "all of us [are caught] between conceptual history and futuristic speculation" (145), and he takes to heart this situation and its challenges.The first chapter in Performing Live aims to redeem or revalue the concept of aesthetic experience. For Shusterman, the loss of "felt experience" in art makes the interest in this concept utterly relevant for art's survival. He traces the lineage of this aesthetic philosophy to John Dewey, Monroe Beardsley, Nelson Goodman, and Arthur Danto. Besides focusing on these authors, his analysis revisits some of the main currents of thought in Western philosophy on the topic (for example, Plato, Hume, Kant, Dickie, Adorno, Benjamin, Gadamer). He concludes that a pragmatic approach to aesthetics, applying the concept of aesthetic experience directionally (as a means towards the actual experience rather than as a definable concept), can provide new paths for revitalizing art. Throughout the text this concept is also used expansively. The post-modern justification of the proposed aesthetics, by allowing the extension of aesthetic experience to embrace "the art of living," can leave the reader wondering if Shusterman has not simply turned Kierkegaard's existentialist stages to self-realization upside down.The second chapter is an open defense of popular art, carried out by contesting the main complaints found in current art criticism. Shusterman's defense is not directed to the products of popular art, but against the claim that popular art is aesthetically "worthless." His definition of "popular art... (shrink)

Hegel’s assertion that, for us moderns, art is a matter of the past has obscured his genuine interest in the art of his time and modern art in general. This article attempts to correct this situation. First, it contextualizes the claim in its historical and conceptual aspects; second, it returns to Hegel’s approaches to modern art, neglected hitherto by interpreters. This revision implies clarifying what for Hegel is the modern, whose concept comes from the freedom and autonomy of thought, (...) and does not conform to what, in developments of Aesthetics, after Hegel, represent tendencies and prescriptions such as the avant-garde or turns such as aesthetic modernity and postmodernity. Modern art is the product of an artist who freely disposes of the means and content of art since he places himself above them. (shrink)

Books reviewed in this article: The Bible and Postmodern Imagination: Texts Under Negotiation. By Walter Brueggemann. In the Throe of Wonder: Intimations of the Sacred in a Post‐Modern World. By Jerome A. Miller. Interpreting Hebrew Poetry. By David L. Petersen and Kent Harold Richards. Exegetical Dictionary of the New Testament, Volume I: Aαρωυ‐Eυωχ. Edited by Horst Balz and Gerhard Schneiders. The Secretary in the Letters of Paul. By E. Randolph Richards. Revelation. By Wilfrid J. Harrington. Conversion to Christianity: (...) class='Hi'>Historical and Anthropological Perspectives on a Great Transformation. Edited by Robert W. Hefner. The Metaphor of God Incarnate. By John Hick. Disputed Questions in Theology and the Philosophy of Religion. By John Hick. The Nature of God. By Gerard J. Hughes. The Animals Issue: Moral Theoy in Practice. By Peter Carruthers. Philosophy and Theology in the Middle Ages. By G. R. Evans. Modalities in Medieval Philosophy. By Simo Knuuttila. Da Descarres a Spinoza: Percorsi della teologia razionale nel seicento. By Maria Emanuela Scribano. Tra Descartes e Bayle: Poiret e la teodicea. By Gianluca Mori. Kierkegaard and the Limits of the Ethical. By Anthony Rudd. Kierkegaard on Art and Communication. Edited by George Pattison. Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan Volume 10: Topics in Education. Edited by Robert M. Doran and Frederick E. Crowe. A Theology of Reconstruction: Nation‐building and Human Rights. By Charles Villa‐Vicencio. Religious Methods and Resources in Bioethics. Edited by Paul F. Camenisch. Theological Developments in Bioethics. Edited by Andrew Lustig et al. Marriage in the Western Church: The Christianization of Marriage During the Patristic and Early Medieval Periods. By Philip L. Reynolds. Marriage in the Early Church. Translated and edited by David G. Hunter. The Clash of Gods: A Reinterpretation of Early Christian Art. By Thomas F. Mathews. A History of Religion in Britain: Practice and Belief from Pre‐Roman Times to the Present. Edited by Sheridan Gilley and W. J. Sheik. The Conversion of Henri IV: Politics, Power and Religious Belief in Early Modern France. By Michael Wolfe. English Polemics at the Spanish Court: Joseph Creswell's ‘Letter to the Ambassador from England’, The English and the Spanish Texts of 1606. Edited by Albert J. Loomie. (shrink)

In this paper, we present a review of research on the role of traditional and indigenous forms of visual artistic practice in promoting physical health and psychosocial well-being, particularly as it relates to the discipline of art therapy. Using extant literature we present an overview of how art making has historically had a therapeutic role in human lives and how it can inform the modern interpretation and profession of art therapy. Thereafter, we provide a critical review of specific (...) studies that reference traditional and indigenous art forms in art therapy in order to invite discussion, dialogue, and awareness of the role of the arts in human development and the therapeutic role of the arts. Gaps in research areas for further study are proposed. Implications for clinical practice including expanding the scope of traditional forms of creative self-expression and promoting an informed and respectful understanding of the role of these artforms in the profession of art therapy worldwide, are also discussed. (shrink)

Nine letters on art, written to friends from exile in France in the 1980s. Starting from earlier materialist approaches to art, Negri relates artistic production to the structures of social production characteristic of each historical era. This enables him to define the nature of both material and artistic production in the era of post-modernity and post-Fordism - the era Negri characterizes as that of immaterial labour. Negri then seeks to define artistic beauty in this new era, and (...) this he does in terms of concepts that have become fundamental to his thinking - singularity, multitude, abstraction, collective work, event, the biopolitical, the common. Art is living labour, and therefore invention of singularity, of singular figures and objects. But this expressive act only achieves beauty when the signs and language through which it expresses itself turn themselves into community, when they are contained within a common project. The beautiful is not the act of imagining, but an imagination that has become action. Art, in this sense, is multitude. (shrink)

Modern Philosophy, the third volume in the history of philosophy series edited by Etienne Gilson, is a comprehensive critical study of philosophical thought from Descartes to Kant. Containing detailed discussions of individual figures, both major and minor, it treats not only their metaphysical and epistemological views but also their philosophies of art, religion, morals, and politics. It presents the historical settings in which they wrote and shows the dialectical interplay among their views. As Gilson and Langan point out, there (...) inevitably is some arbitrariness in deciding what to include or emphasize in a volume such as this, but, in my opinion, it would be difficult to give a more balanced and complete survey than theirs. (shrink)

Many forays have been made by psychoanalysts into the aesthetic realm, particularly in the form of interpretations of works of art and discussions of the particular or general pathology that may predispose individuals toward artistic creativity. Likewise, occasional philosophers have commented on the usefulness of psychoanalysis as a way of approaching areas of mutual interest. This study aims to contribute to this ongoing interdisciplinary dialogue, primarily through a focus on pathography, the term and method originated by Freud in his 1910 (...) monograph on Leonardo da Vinci. ;The thesis begins with an attempt to establish grounds for a dialogue between aesthetics and psychoanalysis by offering a selective review of the literature, identifying three fundamental problems in aesthetics and three basic approaches within psychoanalytic theory, and presenting a discussion of the application of these three modes of psychoanalytic thought to problems of form and content in modern art. ;Next, it is established that pathography, which attempts to probe associations between works of art and the minds that created them, derives from the nineteenth century critical tradition to which Freud was heir. Pathography is subjected to a critique in terms of the ongoing debate in aesthetics concerning problems of intention and expression; finally, its special contributions and limitations are explored. Three models of pathography are presented in detail. Each model with its differing context, motive for interpretation and methodology is scrutinized from an interdisciplinary perspective. ;Beyond pathography, we consider finally the contribution of several post-Freudian theorists who have emphasized the importance of preoedipal development and illuminated certain more general problems of aesthetic interest, i.e., issues centering on response to works of art, creativity and the importance of the external object. The possibility of a developmental line for aesthetic experience is considered, and relevant contemporary infant research is summarized. ;The Appendix offers, beyond pathography, yet another approach of psychoanalysis to art in which the work of art is considered sui generis, not, as in pathography, tied inextricably to the mind of its creator. A statement concerning the vicissitudes of interdisciplinary scholarship concludes the study. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Mapping Beyond Measure: Art, Cartography, and the Space of Global Modernity by Simon FerdinandDavid TooheyMapping Beyond Measure: Art, Cartography, and the Space of Global Modernity BY SIMON FERDINAND Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019Mapping Beyond Measure is a geographical and theoretical critique of map art and the tradition of modern mapmaking. The book focuses in depth on a few related examples of map art and departs from critical (...) theory and post-Marxist readings of space. Simon Ferdinand emphasizes fine art and art-film as appropriate counterweights to the authoritarian calculation in modern cartography and, unexpectedly, map art’s critique of mapmaking.Mapping Beyond Measure follows the well-trodden path of critiquing a medium, mapping, and map art as irredeemably authoritarian.1 Situated in this approach, Ferdinand argues that map art reproduces modernist cartography’s assumptions even while critiquing mapping. Aiming to subvert this shortcoming, Ferdinand explores Peter Greenway’s semi-abstract map art films that do not prioritize science over artists. Greenway’s films, especially A Walk Through H, are shown as being as close to an idea of mapping beyond calculation as possible. Indeed, for Ferdinand, Greenway’s map art films are an improvement on “postmodern” theorists.Mapping Beyond Measure explores a small, though logically (and practically) related group of map artists. The first three chapters explore differing approaches to map art, from Soviet painting that unintentionally [End Page 126] heralds globalization and map art’s latent desires to dominate the world, to more contemporary map art about looming societal collapse through the death of nature and mass casualties from aerial bombardment of cities. The following two chapters focus on how mapping creates nation-states. These chapters elucidate the tragic inability of map artists to escape globalization and calculation, the latter exasperated by G.I.S. techniques. These map artists serve as an ensemble that spotlights what, to Ferdinand, are inevitable difficulties that ethical practitioners of map art face in escaping the pitfalls of calculation in mainstream mapping.In chapter 6 Ferdinand explains how Greenway’s film A Walk Through H gets as close as possible to challenging map art through semi-abstract, two-dimensional additions to maps and using movie cameras to create an illusion of movement. Thus, the hierarchy of scientists over artists is partially dismantled. Indeed, Ferdinand lauds Greenway for creating alternatives to established political theorists. Interestingly, Ferdinand replaces ontology with the concept of “chorein” suggesting a more fluid conception of mapping that is not available in theories of space or cartographic practices of calculation. Nonetheless, compared to one of the articles referenced, Ferdinand downplays the destructive nature of chorein as a militaristic, colonial use of maritime space to emphasize its creative potential.2Ferdinand’s examples are primarily Eurocentric, even, surprisingly, in the exception: his focus on Japanese map artist Satomi Matoba. Here Ferdinand departs from Eurocentric examples only to focus on Japan—the most privileged nation-state in Asia. Even in this focus on Japan, which also includes Hawai‘i, Ferdinand does not depart from a frame familiar to Europe: World War II. Indeed, the discussion of Pearl Harbor (a U.S. military base) focuses on U.S. foreign policy, not on Hawai‘i. This thematic choice is relevant to other map artists in Ferdinand’s book. Ferdinand’s critique of calculability is based mainly on the consequences of Nazism, as theorized by Stuart Elden. However, Ferdinand’s theoretical interventions on uneven development in maps and map art would have been more substantial with the addition of detailed, localized, narrative accounts of violence suffered by non-white populations in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and various European cities. Instead, we get an anonymous logic of maps that uses the idea of the past and potential [End Page 127] future destruction of cities to assume that everyone suffered to the same extent in World War II.While I am reluctant to criticize a book for not offering a solution to what it critiques, to a certain extent, the solution offered by Ferdinand contradicts his normative critique of calculability. In exploring Alison Hildreth’s map art, Ferdinand praises nuanced, temporally layered artistic explorations of ecological destruction and extinction. Likewise, A Walk Through H, is... (shrink)

Siopis has always engaged in a critical and controversial way with the concepts of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ in South Africa. For politically sensitive artists whose work has involved confronting the injustices of apartheid, the current post-apartheid situation has forced a reassessment of their practice and the terms on which they might engage with the fundamental changes which are now affecting all of South African society. Where mythologies of race and ethnicity have been strategically foregrounded in the art of any (...) engaged artist, to the exclusion of many other concerns, the demise of apartheid offers the possibility of exploring other dimensions of lived experience in South Africa. For feminists, this is potentially a very positive moment when questions of gender – so long subordinated to the structural issue of ‘race’ under apartheid – can now be explored. Penny Siopis’ work has long been concerned with the lived and historical relations between black and white women in South Africa. The discussion focuses on the ambivalent and dependent relationships formed between white middle-class women and black domestic labour during apartheid. Siopis’ work engages with how the appropriation of black women's time, lives, labour and bodies has shaped her ‘own’ history. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Invention of Art History in Ancient Greece: Religion, Society, and Artistic RationalisationJohn C. McEnroeJeremy Tanner. The Invention of Art History in Ancient Greece: Religion, Society, and Artistic Rationalisation. Cambridge Classical Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. xvi + 331 pp. 62 black-and-white ills. Cloth, $99.In his introductory chapter, Jeremy Tanner quotes J. J. Winckelmann's eighteenth-century description of the Apollo Belvedere: "Among all the works of antiquity which (...) have escaped destruction, the statue of Apollo is the highest ideal of art... In the presence of this miracle of art, I forget all else, and I myself take a lofty position for the purpose of looking on it in a worthy manner" (6). Tanner makes it clear that Winckelmann, widely regarded as the founder of modern art history, was not simply recording a personal reaction. Instead, Winckelmann's notion of artworks as autonomous objects of aesthetic experience was deeply rooted in the transformation of the basic institutions of art during [End Page 423] the Enlightenment. These included changes in patronage and production, and the introduction of the new philosophy of aesthetics. The new conception of art as a form of individual expression was tied not only to the notion of personal liberty but also to the growing obsession with national identities. Winckelmann's rapturous response to the Apollo Belvedere is understandable only as a part of this broader set of social and intellectual currents.The kinds of art history that Tanner is concerned with in this book are quite distinct from Winckelmann's and belonged to profoundly different cultural networks. Tanner lays out three goals for the book: first, to analyze art as a form of material culture that was both shaped by society and, in turn, helped to shape society; second, to develop an analytic framework for comparing classical and modern art history without conflating the two; third, to move art history to the explanatory level, exploring not only how classical art developed over the long term, but why. Tanner's approach is sociological, drawing especially on the work of the once influential American sociologist, Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) and the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914). As a result, Tanner shifts from the traditional focus on artists to the interaction of artists, patrons, and viewers.In chapter 2 ("Rethinking the Greek Revolution," 31–96) Tanner addresses one of the central problems in art history, the apparently sudden transformation from abstraction to naturalism in Greek art in the beginning of the fifth century B.C.E., famously described by E. H. Gombrich as "the Greek Revolution." Why, after generations of continuity within the Archaic style, did Greek artists, alone among the artists working in the broader Middle Eastern tradition, develop the naturalistic style of art represented in, for example, Polykeitos's Doryphoros? For Gombrich, the "Greek Revolution" was fundamentally a matter of artists breaking from ingrained patterns and attempting, as individuals, to match the appearance of their statues with the natural world. Other writers, including several contributors to Diana Buitron-Oliver, ed., The Greek Miracle: Classical Sculpture from the Dawn of Democracy (Washington, D.C., 1992), have described the change in terms even more deeply grounded in Winckelmann: the revolution in style was a product of the birth of individuality and personal freedom that accompanied the birth of democracy in classical Greece.Tanner is specifically concerned with what the "Greek Revolution" meant for cult statues. While he rejects the simplistic equation democracy = naturalism as an explanatory device, Tanner nevertheless holds that political changes, marked by the Kleisthenic reforms, had profound effects on both the makers and the viewers of art. Through most of the sixth century B.C.E., the aristocracy was in firm control of religious art. Through the forms of the kouros and kore, aristocrats merged their identities with those of the gods. Through their sponsorship and control of the sanctuaries, they controlled the access ordinary viewers had to images of the sacred. While the immediate effects of the Kleisthenic reforms may have been more complex than Tanner implies, over the course of a generation the authority of the traditional aristocracy declined, and the sponsorship of cult images was... (shrink)

At the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries. When integrated into the European art space, the countries of Eastern Europe take the path of creating a new model of cultural development in a post-pandemic society. Added to the world of theater innovations and, in particular, post-modern theater practices, it makes it necessary to search for new types of communication with the audience, creating such a balance between the actor and the audience that would meet new historical (...) realities, shape its cultural landmarks, moral values, and provide meaning for current events. Consequently, the new historical realities require theatrical culture to change the artistic trajectories of development and at the same time determine the cultural reflection on its place and role. In culturological and art studies, the theater, as a rule, is considered as a system component of the cultural space. This corresponds to the generally accepted approach: the definition of culture as a set of spheres, each of which has its own specifics. These areas are combined by certain socially significant factors, according to which they must coordinate their way of existence. Now, in a post-pandemic society, there is not enough research that examines the latest formations at the place of origin and is perceived as the products of the local experience of the individual and the society to which he belongs. (shrink)

The Post-Modern Reader edited by Charles Jencks An Anthology of a World Movement Post-Modernism has been debated, attacked, and defended for a generation, but only in the last few years has it come into focus as a coherent way of thought embracing all areas of culture. This is the first anthology that presents the synthesising trend in all its diversity, a convergence in architecture and literature, film and cultural theory, sociology, feminism and theology, science and economics. It is (...) however, a synthesis with a difference; it is one which stresses a contested pluralism, the ‘dialogic' that underlies the growth of sciences as well as the development of other art forms such as the novel. Some of the key historical texts are reprinted in part - those of Daniel Bell on the post-industrial society and Jean-François Lyotard on the post-modern condition. The new cultural logic of contested pluralism is analysed in seminal papers by Andreas Huyssen and Jim Collins. The fundamental ideas on post-modern literature are defined by Umberto Eco, John Barth and David Lodge and the theories they present challenge the notion of post-modernism as an ultra avant-garde movement and the expression of a consumer society. New Cultural Theory Late Modernism Literature, Art, Architecture and Film Sociology, Politics and Geography Feminism Science and Religion Tito Arecchi, John Barth, Jean Baudrillard, Daniel Bell, Charles Birch, David Bohm, Jim Collins, Norman K Denzin, Umberto Eco, Edward Goldsmith, David Ray Griffin, Jürgen Habermas, David Harvey, Ihab Hassan, Linda Hutcheon, Andreas Huyssen, Charles Jencks, Heinrich Klotz, Hans Küng, David Lodge, Jean-François Lyotard, Robin Murray, Craig Owens, Paolo Portoghesi, Margaret Rose, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Edward W Soja. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of AestheticsChristopher McClintickThe Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics, by Martha Woodmansee; 200 pp. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, $29.50.Martha Woodmansee’s book The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics deftly employs a historical, materialist focus to trace the growth of the middle-class in eighteenth-century Germany and to analyze its (...) startling, significant effects on literary aesthetics and the construction of canon, genre, and treatment of gender. The first five chapters are devoted, essentially, to an outline of the development of German aesthetics and the concluding chapter to the English reception of Kant. Woodmansee’s study offers much insight into the period and helps greatly to demonstrate “how a cultural formation that evolved as recently as ‘art’ could have entrenched itself so thoroughly that we imagine it always to have existed” (p. 8).Woodmansee’s central contention is that populist theories of aesthetics in Germany and England, which in many ways anticipated important elements of materialist or cultural studies emphases, were muted by canonized writers of the eighteenth century like Schiller, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. These writers propagated instead the Kantian notion of art as a realm separate from other human activities and the distinction between high and low art forms. The first three chapters are particularly strong and provide the historical and methodological underpinning for Woodmansee’s rereading of the history of German aesthetics. Chapter One begins with a discussion of the little-studied German writer Karl Philipp Moritz who, she says, “gave the first unequivocal and systematic expression to what I have called our modern conception of the arts” [End Page 176] (p. 11). Woodmansee points particularly to the fact that Moritz champions the notion of art as having an intrinsic value, an idea that five years later, in Kant’s Critique of Judgment, “came to fruition” (p. 12). In Chapter Two, “Genius and Copyright,” Woodmansee lucidly discusses texts such as Lessing’s essay “Leben und leben lassen,” clarifying the tensions regarding “the emergence in the eighteenth century of writers who sought to earn their livelihood from the sale of their writing to the new and rapidly expanding reading public” (p. 36). The survey includes Herder, Wieland, Fichte, and Goethe, and reveals how these writers’ concerns about the often exploitive relationship of authors and publishers, the growth of a middle-class readership, and the integration of literature into the general economy, greatly contributed to the establishment of the author as the main focus of any critical undertaking.It is Schiller, however, as the archinterpreter and proponent of Kantian aesthetics who is singled out for a particularly thorough rereading. In Chapter Three, Woodmansee writes that Schiller does not represent the kind of political liberality he is purported to in works like On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1793) but instead, “at a historical moment when so much discursive activity was being carried on in the name of the people, sought to write them out of his model of poetry” (p. 75). Schiller’s relationship to the middle-class market and its role in his transcendental aesthetic is graphically traced—from his attempts to penetrate the market and, failing this, his acceptance of, and dependence on patronage, and consequent dismissal of the reading public.In Chapter Six Woodmansee devotes her attention to English criticism, ending somewhat abruptly her discussion of German aesthetics with neoclassicism. Here she clarifies the great influence of Kant on Addison, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, who perpetuated the notion of art as an ideal realm, as well as the idea that criticism is a task which has “essentially to do with the recovery of a writer’s meaning” (p. 55). Woodmansee scrutinizes Wordsworth’s ostensibly nonmaterialist artistic motives partly by discussing the poet’s indefatigable efforts to get parliament to extend copyright laws in order to reward high art projects which, Wordsworth believed, the public could not properly appreciate until a later date. Woodmansee’s materialist focus seriously challenges the contention, as many would have it, that Wordsworth was a champion of the working people.Chapter Five, “Engendering Art,” does not adequately develop the... (shrink)

Rather than focusing on German philosophy or the French avant-gardes, as many books on the history of aesthetics do, Teukolsky takes up British responses to modern art controversies, thus providing a unique view on the development of artistic forms and art history. She considers the plentiful archive of Victorian "art writing"-essays addressed to the visual arts- to reveal the key role played by nineteenth-century writers in the rise of modernist Anglo-American aesthetics. Though Victorians are most often associated with realism, certain (...) art writers promoted a formalism that would come to dominate canons of twentieth-century art. Teukolsky analyzes the canonical writing of authors like John Ruskin, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde alongside texts belonging to the rich field of Victorian print culture--gallery reviews, scientific treatises, satirical cartoons, advertisements, and early photography monographs among them. Spanning the years 1840 to 1910, her argument also adds substance to our understanding of the transition from Victorianism to modernism, a period of especially lively exchange between artists and intellectuals, here narrated with careful attention given to the historical particularities and real events that stamped their imprint on such interactions. (shrink)

"Directly following the internationally acclaimed Art & Discontent, Thomas McEvilley argues in Art & Otherness for an advanced anthropological perspective that contravenes conventional thinking in the visual arts, and leads to a concept of artistic globalization. The description of Western culture as superior and in opposition to other cultures of the world preoccupied our aesthetic philosophy for at least 200 years, whether or not explicitly stated. That argument was undertaken in various guises, especially as the historical determinism of Hegel (...) which proposed to quantify human "progress." Recently, however, the term "multiculturalism" has come to signify a post-Modern understanding of how visual arts transgress artificial boundaries, and of how there may now exist, perhaps for the first time in history, a post-colonial globalism in the arts freed of ethnocentric value judgements. In these ten crucial essays, McEvilley clarifies how the presentation of art can determine its reception, how "influence" can be bi-directional, how "otherness" serves to define "self," and how art need not necessarily lose its meaningfulness when stripped of badges of universality. Once again illustrating his argument by drawing upon an array of sources and cultures, Thomas McEvilley demonstrates that the post-Modern crisis in cultural identity demands an imaginative, integrating response."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved. (shrink)

“The contemporary” is a phrase in frequent use in artworld discourse as a placeholder term for broader, world-picturing concepts such as “the contemporary condition” or “contemporaneity”. Brief references to key texts by philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Rancière, and Peter Osborne often tend to suffice as indicating the outer limits of theoretical discussion. In an attempt to add some depth to the discourse, this paper outlines my approach to these questions, then explores in some detail what these three theorists (...) have had to say in recent years about contemporaneity in general and contemporary art in particular, and about the links between both. It also examines key essays by Jean-Luc Nancy, Néstor García Canclini, as well as the artist-theorist Jean-Phillipe Antoine, each of whom have contributed significantly to these debates. The analysis moves from Agamben’s poetic evocation of “contemporariness” as a Nietzschean experience of “untimeliness” in relation to one’s times, through Nancy’s emphasis on art’s constant recursion to its origins, Rancière’s attribution of dissensus to the current regime of art, Osborne’s insistence on contemporary art’s “post-conceptual” character, to Canclini’s preference for a “post-autonomous” art, which captures the world at the point of its coming into being. I conclude by echoing Antoine’s call for artists and others to think historically, to “knit together a specific variety of times”, a task that is especially pressing when presentist immanence strives to encompasses everything. (shrink)

RESUMO O presente estudo analisa a narrativa de Milton Hatoum utilizando como corpus as crônicas “Um sonhador” e “Margens secas da cidade”. Objetiva problematizar as características discursivas e estéticas da criação literária de Hatoum, a partir da perspectiva dialógica proposta por Mikhail Bakhtin, explorando, no discurso artístico-literário do escritor amazonense, as posições axiológicas refratadas em sua narrativa. Relaciona ainda a perspectiva epistemológica de Boaventura Santos acerca do desperdício da experiência social na modernidade/pós-modernidade, discutindo a crítica ao paradigma da racionalidade atual (...) denominado pelo autor de razão indolente. As análises iniciais alicerçadas nestas abordagens teórico-metodológicas evidenciam indícios, na narrativa cronística de Hatoum, que a aproxima de uma perspectiva contra-hegemônica e responsiva de representação literária. Pretende, assim, com esta inter-relação entre literatura, dialogismo e teoria do conhecimento, evidenciar as imbricações existentes entre o discurso sócio-histórico-econômico produzido pela crítica à modernidade/pós-modernidade e o discurso literário de Milton Hatoum. ABSTRACT This study analyzes Milton Hatoum’s narrative using the crônicas Um sonhador [A Dreamer] and Margens secas da cidade [Dry Riverbanks of the City] as corpus. It aims to ascertain the discursive and aesthetic characteristics of Hatoum’s literary creation from the dialogical perspective proposed by Mikhail Bakhtin, exploring the artistic-literary discourse of the Amazonian writer, the axiological positions refracted in his narrative. It also relates Boaventura Santos’ epistemological perspective about the waste of social experience in modernity/post-modernity, discussing the criticism of the paradigm of current rationality called by the author as indolent reason. Initial analysis based on these theoretical-methodological approaches show evidence in Hatoum’s cronistic narrative that brings it closer to a counter-hegemonic and responsive perspective of literary representation. Thus, with this inter-relationship among literature, dialogism and theory of knowledge, we intend to highlight the existing overlaps between the socio-historical and economic discourse produced by the critique of modernity / postmodernity and literary discourse of Milton Hatoum. (shrink)

This book offers an historical and critical guide to the concepts of the post-modern and the post-industrial. It brings admirable clarity and thoroughness to a discussion of the many different uses made of the term post-modern across a number of different disciplines (including literature, architecture, art history, philosophy, anthropology and geography). It also analyses the concept of the post-industrial society to which the concept of the post-modern has often been related. Dr Rose discusses the (...) work of many theorists in the area, including Hassan, Lyotard, Jameson and the architectural historian Charles Jencks, and also looks at analyses and uses of the concepts of the post-modern and post-industrial by Frampton, Portoghesi, Peter Fuller and others. (shrink)

The article aims to provide a point of view for understanding the conceptual genesis of ‘post-history’, the key idea of Danto’s theory of contemporary art. To do this, reference is made to an essay from Beyond the Brillo Box which analyzes the various forms the past has assumed in the Western tradition, from the point of view of the influence exerted from narrative structures on artists and their practices. Danto’s argument will be clarified through the notion of ‘regime of (...) historicity’ (Hartog). Based on this, the article discusses three different paradigms of the historicity of art: each is the expression of a specific experienced mediation between the temporal dimensions of the past, present and future. First of all: the relationship of imitative recovery of the past, corresponding to the pre-modern scheme of history understood as exemplary and repeatable. Later, the article focuses the link of transformation/negation of the artistic past, both corresponding to the modern, linear and vectoral view of history. Finally, it will emerge the spatialized exploration of the past, that is, a neutral relationship with it no longer marked by the principle of authority: Danto’s post-history points out a situation in which the historical past of art is an available repertory of styles to be used. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Handbook of Research and Policy in Art EducationCharles M. DornHandbook of Research and Policy in Art Education, edited by Elliot Eisner and Michael Day. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004, 879 pp., $90.00 paper.The Handbook of Research and Policy in Art Education is an 875-page compendium of articles addressing nearly every conceivable issue in the field and is, if nothing else, a valuable tour de force for any reader (...) who wants to come up to speed on issues in the field. It is not, however, either strictly a handbook or a complete exploration of either art education policy or research. This in no way diminishes its potential value as a source for policy issues and research that are of significant concern to the field.The publication presents 36 individual or joint authored chapters on (1) historical currents in art education, (2) policy perspectives impacting the teaching of art, (3) learning in the visual arts, (4) teaching and teacher education, (5) forms of assessment in art education, and (6) emerging visions of the field. Each of the six sections begins with a short introductory statement by the researcher responsible for reviewing the essays in that session. These section editors include F. Graeme-Chalmers, Ralph Smith, Anna Kindler, Enid Zimmerman, Elisabeth Soep, and Arthur Efland. Forty-one authors contributed to the book's contents, all of which have nationally recognized expertise in handling the topic discussed.Editors Elliot Eisner and Michael Day view the book as an effort to bring together research and theory, policy, and concepts that guide and give shape to what people in art education try to accomplish—which is, of course, a rather ambitious goal. Even the editors admit the Handbook meets some but not all of these competing orientations. They also claim that the Handbook serves as an assertion that art education is a scholarly field, perhaps even to a fault through mostly ignoring qualitative issues regarding goals, expressive art form, and aesthetics. Also, the editors admit that the Handbook will be a disappointment, which is true, especially with respect to its emphasis on rationales rather than policy problems, on assessment appreciation rather than policy and research, on assessment in art education history as a record of events rather than as policy windows, and on emerging visions as older forms of social and political discourse rather than policy issues, implementation, and evaluation.Nevertheless, the Handbook addresses a number of important policy issues, providing well-developed and valuable views of the field by a variety of important authors and, in some cases, with some rarely seen insights into the nature of the field. I will only review the most salient ideas of the chapter authors in each of the six sections and then comment on what I believe are promising, and sometimes somewhat troubling, directions pointed out in the chapters, including what promises have not been fulfilled. [End Page 111]Section I, on historical currents, includes chapters by F. Graeme Chalmers; Mary Ann Stankiewicz, Pat Amburgy, and Paul Bolin; and John Howell White. Chalmers provides a very thorough overview of the literature on the history of art education, including what he calls the broad perspectives on art education, history, and research interests of art education historians. Overall, he references nearly 300 publications. Stankiewicz, Amburgy, and Bolin then address specific movements in nineteenth-century art education and art, including a brief history of the social function of art, drawing instruction in schools, industrial drawing, manual training, the arts and crafts movement picture study, and progressive education with over 120 references. White, who follows, provides a similar review of major forces, focusing mainly on art education influences in the twentieth century, addressing the contributions of various art educators, arts organizational leaders, artists, government initiatives, and the critical and divergent influences of key post–WW II art education writers. He also documents his work with nearly 300 sources.Section II, on policy perspectives, contains seven chapters, including ones by Ralph Smith; Samuel Hope; Constance Bumgarner Gee; Lois Hetland and Ellen Winner; H. Gene Blocker; and E. Louis Langford and Kelly Scheffer. In Section II, Sam Hope outlines the power of policy and its effect... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European CultureDallas G. Denery IIStuart Clark. Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture. Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. xi + 415. Cloth, $75.00.A popular and pervasive historical narrative links the Renaissance development of linear perspective with Europe’s transition from a pre-modern to an early modern society. Erwin Panofsky gave this narrative its definitive form (...) early in the twentieth century and William Ivins boiled it down to a simple idea that served as the title of his most famous book. According to Ivins, single-point perspective, the artistic technique championed by Alberti and perfected in the paintings of Masaccio and Piero della Francesca, allowed for “the rationalization of sight.” In other words, it provided a mathematically and geometrically grounded method for accurately representing the external world. It is a powerful and seductive claim, one that has shaped generations of scholarly work. It is also, Stuart Clark contends in this important new book, patently wrong. Far from exhibiting a renewed or reinvigorated confidence in the accuracy and reliability of vision, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century philosophers, artists, theologians, and doctors worried that sight was susceptible, perhaps permanently so, to all sorts of debilitating derangements, displacements, and delusions.Rather than relate a history of progress, Clark offers a history of exhaustion, failure, and, ultimately, of rejection. Early modern intellectuals inherited a comprehensive theory of vision and cognition from their medieval predecessors known as perspectivist optics. This theory sought to secure the accuracy of human sense perception through regularized causal processes that linked things in the world with our various cognitive faculties. While some fourteenth-century intellectuals, most notably Nicolas of Autrecourt and Nicole Oresme, recognized structural deficiencies in this theory, their critiques were mostly ignored or treated as anomalies. Over the course of the next two and a half centuries, Clark argues, the challenges to this theory multiplied until it collapsed under their weight (20).Clark’s argument is straightforward and, as his evidence mounts, thoroughly convincing. Throughout each of the eight engrossing chapters that form the core of the book, Clark outlines a different threat, a different set of challenges that pointed out problems with the assumption that vision is trustworthy. The range and depth of those challenges are truly amazing. Doctors worried that imbalances in our humoral system, and especially in the black bile that causes melancholy, could render our visual perceptions dubious at best (ch. 2). Theologians, wary of the dangers of witchcraft and eager to prosecute its practitioners, obsessed over the cognitive threats that devils and demons posed to good Christians (ch. 4), while Protestant reformers relegated the entire tradition of Catholic miracles to the counterfeit illusions of the antichrist (ch. 5). For their part, artists believed that perspective undermined vision, depending as it does on the assumption that what we see is always relative, dependent upon our point of view (ch. 3).Clark structures much of his argument around George Hakewill’s 1608 book, The vanitie of the eye, an exposition on the natural, artificial, and demonic sources that forever render visual knowledge suspect. He could just as well have organized it around the opening pages of Descartes’s Meditations, and in many ways Clark’s book serves as a superb rumination on the sources of Descartes’s skeptical arguments. Unlike Etienne Gilson and, more recently, Richard Popkin, both of whom have done so much to open up the scholastic and early modern sources of Descartes’s skeptical thought experiments, Clark does not limit himself to philosophical lineages. Rather, he considers sources of visual skepticism that developed across an entire culture—in natural philosophy, medicine, art, religion, and literature (especially in Shakespeare’s Macbeth). Not only does the sheer volume and variety of such [End Page 103] sources help to explain Descartes’s urgent desire to overturn everything he had learned and begin again from the foundations, but it also contextualizes the specific arguments he employs. None of Descartes’s skeptical arguments were new and most were well known in the Middle Ages. What had changed over the intervening centuries, Clark contends, was how these arguments drew from... (shrink)

Purpose. The article is devoted to the analysis of corporality as an attribute of plastic art in the Ancient art, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the modernism and the postmodernism. Theoretical basis. The authors consider historical development of the art as a change of paradigms. Within each paradigm a special understanding of art is created, which is characterized both by the act of creativity itself and by the evaluation of its results. Particularly urgent is the task to identify the (...) origins of these changes, to indicate their stages, the direction of the evolution of artistic creativity. In this context, corporality as a paradigm of European plastic art is considered in the article in the concrete historical dimension from the classics to the postmodernism. Originality. Postmodern experiments stimulate blurring the borders between the traditional forms and genres of art. Review of canonical ideas about the creation and destruction, order and chaos in art illustrates conscious reorientation from the classical understanding of artistic creativity to the construction of artifacts-simulacra, which is a characteristic feature in the oeuvre of contemporary artists, ranging from the pop art to the present day. Conclusions. The ideas of postmodern philosophers found their visual embodiment in modern artistic practices. Reconstruction of the body, re-switching of its elements according to the principle of chaotic collage, the interpretation of the human body as a separate substance isolated from the individual him/herself, which is presented as a phenomenon of mass culture, became the basis of the creative method of contemporary plastic art. The ideas of postmodern philosophers have found their visual embodiment in the contemporary artistic practices. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Byzantine Matters by Averil CameronPanagiotis RoilosAveril Cameron. Byzantine Matters. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2014. xviii + 164 pp. 3 black-and-white maps. Cloth, $22.95.From C. P. Cavafy to W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and more recently, Julia Kristeva, literary authors and intellectuals have eloquently (and as a rule more effectually than academics) shown that Byzantine matters are of noteworthy relevance to broader, i.e., not only scholarly, domains of (...) (post)modern culture too. Despite (or, at times, even because of) certain rather ineluctable limitations mainly deriving from its marked genre (general survey of the state of the field), Byzantine Matters belongs to that rare group of scholarly books that contribute considerably to the promotion of the Byzantine “cause” beyond the confines of the specific research and academic area. Written by one of the most eminent and influential scholars of late antiquity and early Byzantium, this book fulfills its valuable self-imposed aims: in a commendable, as a whole, interdisciplinary manner, it outlines the research trajectories that Byzantinists should pursue today, if they wish to expand their field’s methodological self-awareness and achieve a competitive level of theoretical sophistication.An important constituent of Averil Cameron’s critique of widespread preconceptions about Byzantium even in contemporary scholarly discourses (either in [End Page 719] the specialized research field or, more explicitly, in relevant ones) is her exposure of the detrimental ideological parameters of the exoticism and exceptionalism that often inform approaches to that past culture. The author’s task is not easy; on the contrary, it is bound to cause some distress or uneasiness in conservative scholarly circles (or “schools”).Cameron begins her discussion of the present state of Byzantine studies and of the related research desiderata by diagnosing the “absence” of Byzantium from hegemonic historiographic discourses in the so-called Western world. Origins and causes of this “absence” are astutely (albeit partially) traced back to influential Anglo-centric interpretive paradigms, these being of entirely derogatory (see Edward Gibbon’s notorious “history” and more recently the dogmatic conservatism of Arnold Toynbee and Samuel Huntington) or exoticizing, Orientalizing orientation (as exemplified in the activities of, e.g., Robert Byron and David Talbot Rice). Byzantium is shown to have been reduced to the state of the historical and historiographical “subaltern” of the West (9). Although I would have preferred to describe this idiosyncratic position of Byzantium in the dominant historiographic practice and the imaginary of the West in terms of what elsewhere I have defined as “para-marginality,” I must stress that Cameron’s sensitive outline of the Byzantine “absence” from established scholarly paradigms attests to her openness to sophisticated methodological schemata that might contribute to a creative and, whenever necessary, critical dialogue of Byzantine studies with related disciplines and broader theoretical debates.In her reappraisal of current scholarly views concerning the status of Byzantium as an empire, the author rightly emphasizes the adaptability and flexibility of Byzantine sociopolitical and economic structures and mechanisms, thus exposing the widespread view of an “unchanging Byzantium” as a mere “popular myth” (35). Equally noteworthy is her focusing on the contribution of ritual occasions and performances of ideologically and politically manipulated rhetoric to the reaffirmation, communication, and effectiveness of imperial power in Byzantium.Cameron’s learned approach to Byzantine art, which is introduced with a general discussion of the attraction it held for British authors (where, however, Ruskin’s work is conspicuously missing), and to the current state of its research places a judicious emphasis on the tension between iconoclasm and iconolatry as well as on issues of periodization. Of special significance is Cameron’s reference to the performative functions of icons in Byzantium and her call for new, interdisciplinary approaches to Byzantine art. However, the opposition between the written word and the image that the author, endorsing Michael Squire’s approach (74), puts forward is an unconvincing rhetorical construct rather than an always valid hermeneutic tool. Theology and religious practice in Byzantium never really reduced the written word to a state inferior to that of the image, as is evinced not only by the frequent coexistence of text and pictorial representation in Byzantine art but also by the extremely... (shrink)

In this volume, the third in his classic series of texts surveying the history of art theory, Moshe Barasch traces the hidden patterns and interlocking themes in the study of art, from Impressionism to Abstract Art. Barasch details the immense social changes in the creation, presentation, and reception of art which have set the history of art theory on a vertiginous new course: the decreased relevance of workshops and art schools; the replacement of the treatise by the critical review; (...) and the interrelation of new modes of scientific inquiry with artistic theory and praxis. The consequent changes in the ways in which critics as well as artists conceptualized paintings and sculptures were radical, marked by an obsession with intense, immediate sensory experiences, psychological reflection on the effects of art, and a magnetic pull to the exotic and alien, making for the most exciting and fertile period in the history of art criticism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European CultureDallas G. Denery IIStuart Clark. Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture. Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. xi + 415. Cloth, $75.00.A popular and pervasive historical narrative links the Renaissance development of linear perspective with Europe’s transition from a pre-modern to an early modern society. Erwin Panofsky gave this narrative its definitive form (...) early in the twentieth century and William Ivins boiled it down to a simple idea that served as the title of his most famous book. According to Ivins, single-point perspective, the artistic technique championed by Alberti and perfected in the paintings of Masaccio and Piero della Francesca, allowed for “the rationalization of sight.” In other words, it provided a mathematically and geometrically grounded method for accurately representing the external world. It is a powerful and seductive claim, one that has shaped generations of scholarly work. It is also, Stuart Clark contends in this important new book, patently wrong. Far from exhibiting a renewed or reinvigorated confidence in the accuracy and reliability of vision, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century philosophers, artists, theologians, and doctors worried that sight was susceptible, perhaps permanently so, to all sorts of debilitating derangements, displacements, and delusions.Rather than relate a history of progress, Clark offers a history of exhaustion, failure, and, ultimately, of rejection. Early modern intellectuals inherited a comprehensive theory of vision and cognition from their medieval predecessors known as perspectivist optics. This theory sought to secure the accuracy of human sense perception through regularized causal processes that linked things in the world with our various cognitive faculties. While some fourteenth-century intellectuals, most notably Nicolas of Autrecourt and Nicole Oresme, recognized structural deficiencies in this theory, their critiques were mostly ignored or treated as anomalies. Over the course of the next two and a half centuries, Clark argues, the challenges to this theory multiplied until it collapsed under their weight (20).Clark’s argument is straightforward and, as his evidence mounts, thoroughly convincing. Throughout each of the eight engrossing chapters that form the core of the book, Clark outlines a different threat, a different set of challenges that pointed out problems with the assumption that vision is trustworthy. The range and depth of those challenges are truly amazing. Doctors worried that imbalances in our humoral system, and especially in the black bile that causes melancholy, could render our visual perceptions dubious at best (ch. 2). Theologians, wary of the dangers of witchcraft and eager to prosecute its practitioners, obsessed over the cognitive threats that devils and demons posed to good Christians (ch. 4), while Protestant reformers relegated the entire tradition of Catholic miracles to the counterfeit illusions of the antichrist (ch. 5). For their part, artists believed that perspective undermined vision, depending as it does on the assumption that what we see is always relative, dependent upon our point of view (ch. 3).Clark structures much of his argument around George Hakewill’s 1608 book, The vanitie of the eye, an exposition on the natural, artificial, and demonic sources that forever render visual knowledge suspect. He could just as well have organized it around the opening pages of Descartes’s Meditations, and in many ways Clark’s book serves as a superb rumination on the sources of Descartes’s skeptical arguments. Unlike Etienne Gilson and, more recently, Richard Popkin, both of whom have done so much to open up the scholastic and early modern sources of Descartes’s skeptical thought experiments, Clark does not limit himself to philosophical lineages. Rather, he considers sources of visual skepticism that developed across an entire culture—in natural philosophy, medicine, art, religion, and literature (especially in Shakespeare’s Macbeth). Not only does the sheer volume and variety of such [End Page 103] sources help to explain Descartes’s urgent desire to overturn everything he had learned and begin again from the foundations, but it also contextualizes the specific arguments he employs. None of Descartes’s skeptical arguments were new and most were well known in the Middle Ages. What had changed over the intervening centuries, Clark contends, was how these arguments drew from... (shrink)

Numerous theories have attempted to overcome the anti-essentialist scepticism about the possibility of defining art. While significant advances have been made in this field, it seems that most modern definitions fail to successfully address the issue of the ever-changing nature of art raised by Morris Weitz, and rarely even attempt to provide an account which would be valid in more than just the modern Western context. This thesis looks at the most successful definitions currently defended, determines their strengths and weaknesses, (...) and offers a new, cultural definition which can preserve the good elements of other theories, solve or avoid their problems, and have a scope wide enough to account for art of different times and cultures. The resulting theory is a synthetic one in that it preserves the essential institutionalism of Dickie's institutional views, is inspired by the historical and functional determination of artistic phenomena present in Levinson's historicism and Beardsley's functionalism, and presents the reasons for something becoming art in a disjunctive form of Gaut's cluster account. Its strengths lie in the ability to account for the changing art-status of objects in various cultures and at various times, providing an explanation of not only what is or was art, but also how and why the concept 'art' changes historically and differs between cultures, and successfully balancing between the over-generalisations of ahistorical and universalist views, and the uninformativeness of relativism. More broadly, the cultural theory stresses the importance of treating art as a historical phenomenon embedded in particular social and cultural settings, and encourages cooperation with other disciplines such as anthropology and history of art. (shrink)

Chapter One Introduction Serial Iteration in Modern Art This book is an analysis of the theoretical and historical relations between modern painting and seriality. While many modern artists have created and presented their works in the ...

What is Imagination? What is the relationship between aesthetics and ethics in a contemporary civilization dominated by the image? How can we reconcile the right to imagine with the right to justice? Are the claims of artistic creativity and moral responsibility compatible? With an extended foreword and an afterword chapter, and fascinating new material on the narrative imagination, Poetics of Imagining: Modern to Post-modern provides a critically developed and accessible account of the major theories of imagination in modern European (...) thought. It analyses and assesses the decisive contributions made to our understanding of the imaginary life by phenomenology (Husserl, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard), hermeneutics (Heidegger, Ricoeur), and post-modernism (Vattima, Kristeva, Lyotard). Richard Kearney achieves this with a coherent and committed approach, which displays his own passionate concern for the claims of imagination in our post-modern world of fragmentation and fracture. This is essential reading for those interested in current leading debates on the role of imagining in continental philosophy, ethics, psychoanalysis, art theory and literary criticism. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper argues for the contemporary relevance of melancholy as something different than depression or a state of mental illness. Instead, through examples of a literary, philosophical, and artistic nature, it is shown that melancholy functions as a force-field – a topos where the finite and the infinite, the earthly and the heavenly, the physical and the spiritual come together and meet in huge tension. By means of an exploration of the historical notion of melancholy and a revisit (...) of Dürer’s Melencolia I (1514), coupled to a much more recent example, Lars von Trier’s film melancholia (DK/se/fr/de 2011), this paper shows how the melancholic motif continues to play an essential role in our contemporary society. The melancholic is described as a person who lives a life on the border: who intuits the point where two worlds meet and who longs for a revelation of the beyond – an apocalypse (literally: ‘an uncovering’). It is this longing – a nostalgia for being – that increasingly pervades our contemporary world, a world that represses the heterogeneous through numerous social and political conditions. The study of melancholy here undertaken therefore provides a valuable contribution to the understanding of melancholy in our (post-) modern time. (shrink)

Theories that treat Artistic Research (AR) as their object have been experiencing a boom since the beginning of the 21st century. Increased interest in AR resulted from a historical situation interconnecting at least three fields. First, the art world, which, starting in the 90s, produced AR as a phenomenon in the first place; second, higher education policy, which, in the implementation discussions concerning the Bologna reforms from the 90s onwards, drew on reflections on AR; and third, Germanophone aesthetics, which, (...) during the 2000s, paid increased attention to heteronomy aesthetics. Within these fields, multiple factors are to be accounted for to understand both the sudden increase in pertinence as well as the concrete shape that these theories took in the Germanophone sphere. (shrink)

Joseph Masheck wants to take art, historical and modern, as a field of lively interrelations, rather than just second the motion that art history should be nonlinear; and he takes the task of art criticism to be theory in practice. Thus significant new art is represented in the thirty essays in _Modernities_, besides already "classic" modern architecture, sculpture, and photography, and contemporary painting by artists. Alternating between a comprehensive sense of art history and engagement with the new and unplumbed (...) contemporary arts, he considers himself a kind of aesthetic double agent. Because Masheck is concerned with the concrete standing of artworks, he speculates on how works of art, including Marcel Duchamp's "ready-mades," relate to other things. More general themes range from the origin of the modern sense of form in prehistoric art to the historical underpinnings of expressionism and on to latter-day "graffiti" culture. (shrink)

In a famous article published in 1900, Cardinal Mercier drew up a philosophical balance sheet of the previous century. While still showing respect for modern developments, he severely criticized anything that strayed too far from the neo-Thomistic horizon. It is very characteristic that the first object of his criticism is De Bonald’s traditionalism. Mercier says that this type of philosophy is so greatly influenced by the impotence of reason that it hurls itself into the arms of faith. But, “an act (...) of faith cannot be the primordial act of human reason. An individual could not believe unless he first saw that it was reasonable to believe.”It is philosophy that must articulate this rationality. Philosophy must then be a real science; it must pursue rational insight into reality. Unfortunately, some do not believe that philosophy is a science. Instead, they think its task lies elsewhere; it must try to speak where science remains silent. In that case, it is no longer part of science, but belongs to the domain of imagination, faith or dreams. Mercier argues that whoever accepts this, supports Comte’s positivistic prejudice that only the observed positive fact can lie at the basis of a rational and scientific discussion.Mercier stands at the end of a century of unlimited optimism. From a military point of view, the century had been calm. The new sciences that had so intrigued Mercier were marking their first big successes. The century’s optimism is recognizable in the 1889 charter establishing the Thomistic Higher Institute of Philosophy, which Mercier served as president: “far from bringing dogmas in danger, scientific insights stimulate a wondrous growth in enlightened insight; for they both come from the same God, origin of both revelation and universe.” Mercier’s tonality lies not far distant from Renan’s L’avenir de la science, where he complains that there are people who choose bon ton, superstition and frivolity above meticulous research, but predicts that their success is ephemeral and that the time of rationality will dawn.The next century, however, took an unexpected turn. Who would have thought in 1900 that history, which had been set so firmly on the track of reason, would derail so terribly? No great philosopher predicted the coming catastrophes. The only warnings came from a few nineteenth-century traditionalist Cassandras who went to extremes in linking modernity and decay: Donoso Cortes, Joseph de Maistre and Louis De Bonald. Who predicted the arrival of enlightenment criticism in intellectual history? Who predicted that we would not see history becoming reasonable, but reason historical? Who could have predicted twentieth-century contextualism and its claim that reason is not the criterion of culture but only one element within culture indebted to an entire sociocultural context? All this can be found in De Bonald’s traditionalism that has proven paradoxically more up-to-date than the naïve trust in rationality found in Mercier and Renan.Yet, De Bonald did not intend to preach a form of irrationalism. His purpose was to accent reason’s dependence, and by extension, humankind’s intellectual solidarity: thought is impossible without language, language does not exist without a listener, there is no listener without education, there is no education without social life. Using this reasoning, De Bonald ultimately wants to prove that reason intrinsically refers to revelation, since in this chain, the first word cannot come from humankind.He supports this with an epistemological argument that contextualizes reason in a way that is almost contemporary: “A person has to think his word before saying it. Therefore, he cannot find without thinking, and cannot think without signs. He is compelled to have recourse to something other than the human.” Leuven’s variant of this traditionalism emphasizes that reason develops only in and through language, thus by being included in a community. By comparison, Mercier’s realistic concept of rationality sounds old-fashioned. It is traditionalism that best fits with the contemporary accent on reason’s historicity and culture-related status.The development of ethics also runs counter to Mercier’s expectations. There has been no growth in rationality but a growing insight into the historicity of reason. In the article already cited, Mercier criticizes Kant for not being sufficiently foundational, since he does not rely on a speculative-metaphysical foundation: “What kind of ethic is it that cannot be theoretically justified?” In our time, the roles are reversed. Many ethicists condemn Kant because he tries to find this foundation! How are we to understand this turn-about in ethics? (shrink)

The present work- "MODERNITY AND POSTMODERNITY DEBATE" Related Issues and Challenges- is an outcome of reflections and deliberations over recent trends of Western philosophy. It is after contemplating seriously about the project of modernity, the attempt is made to arrange the debate between modernity and postmodernity having vital metaphysical epistemological and ethical implications. It not only discusses about ethics of globalization but also establishes the close nexus of globalization with terrorism and multiculturalism. The problematic issue of identity formation and clash (...) of identities is given fair treatment The effort is made to analyse critically Indian secularism and its future prospects. The suggestive and remedial approach towards environmental problem and issue of women empowerment has been properly worked out. The author has presented his work with conceptual clarity, lucid expression, systematic presentation and critical exposition of the subject matter. It is undoubtedly a valuable contribution which will evoke an enthusiastic response from the scholars and students of philosophy. -/- This book is Peer reviewed in Philosophical Papers (journal of the Department of Philosophy, University of North Bengal), Vol. XI, March 2015 by Prof. Debashis Guha, Department of Philosophy, University of Allahabad. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kandinsky, Kant, and a Modern MandalaKenneth BerryWhat gods are there, what gods have there ever been, that were not from man's imagination?—Joseph Campbell, "The Way of the Myth"Michele Roberts has written of the "joy of the human imagination, without which we would be unable to understand one another, and would thus wither and perish."1 This is the baseline for my discursive analysis of imagination and beauty in art as (...) it relates to the work of Kant and Kandinsky. While both accepted the forward movement of cognition in art and aesthetics, my concern is that some cognitively minded individuals neglect the part played by imaginative intuition in the creative process. Much recent art is lacking in both imagination and beauty. Although it may be rich in concept, according to Kant creative intuition is also necessary. Postmodernists' focused emphasis on the oblique, fleeting, transient, and ephemeral—short-lived, fugitive fashions or superficial trends in art and aesthetics—confuses the fleeting and moving present, rushing us forward into the future when we might do better to look back historically and constructively at the more enduring influence of Kant and Kandinsky. Of course, it might in one sense be in the "apparently unremarkable and evanescent that our lives sometimes find their greatest meaning,"2 but this does not imply that we cannot also learn from the past.Imaginative Representation in Kant and KandinskyIn his painting of 1926, Several Circles, Kandinsky depicts a group of overlapping, partially transparent discs that appear to drift freely against a black background. Will Grohmann has described this abstract scenario as a "cosmic metaphor" that points symbolically to a "limited infinite."3 Clearly, Kandinsky is concerned here with some transcendent meaning. Jung has remarked on the poetic association of the avian contour at the lower left of the painting—perhaps this is a metaphor for flight or spiritual freedom.4 The picture, he says, seems to represent a state of universalized equilibrium and harmony. This picture constitutes, to my mind, the expression, in a Kantian sense, of aesthetic ideas,5 mediating as it does between concepts and intuitions [End Page 105] and concerned as it is with the expression of artistic ideas in an imaginative, aesthetically harmonious form. On this topic Kandinsky has said: "If your imagination is not powerful enough to develop visions which are truly your own, and which, reduced to the state of ideas, can be translated into images, then go back to the study of nature"6Nature, we are told, Kant elevated above fine art in the sense that the beauty of nature's handiwork is the sole basis of the immediate interest that is taken in it7—it is untainted by desire or any concept of perfection or use (the merely agreeable), it is pleasurably imbued with "purposiveness without purpose" in the teleological implication of the "kingdom of ends." The dynamical and morally sublime, however, implied genius. Had Kant been living in our modern age, though he still might not have been a great art lover as such, he would surely not have dismissed Kandinsky's abstract compositions—as El Lissitzky did—as being mere wallpaper patterning, decorative arabesques, and the like; Kant would surely have recognized the symbolic power of these images as art!The Gestalt TheoryAccording to Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), aesthetic ideas are representations of the imagination. Following Rudolf Arnheim, a "representation" may be understood as either a man-made image or external figuration or, in another sense, as a "mental image."8 These ideas suggest that representation, through art, involves both the internal and the external. Representation in science is the means by which we generate images of the object "out there"—the basis of an objectivist epistemology. A scientific "representation" of the Giant's Causeway, supposedly built by Finn MacCool, might involve a computer simulation of columnar polygonal fractures in topographical detail. Kant, however, was concerned with representations of ideas, specifically aesthetic ideas as distinct from rational ideas. These were based on the animating principle of the soul, or Geist. In at least one language, Icelandic, which is an aesthetically pleasing language and very visual in language terms—abstract words... (shrink)

Plato’s statements on art have met with countless commentators and almost as many different interpretations. In most cases, comments and hints that are scattered through various dialogues are taken out of context and played off against each other – depending on whether the intention is to portray Plato as a modern art lover or as an ageing political reactionary. In the face of the confusing range of contending opinions, there is an urgent need to examine and clarify the textual basis (...) in Plato. For this purpose, a meticulous analysis of Book 10 of the Politeia is initially carried out – the only part of the corpus of Plato’s works that is concerned with art in detail and exclusively. The results are surprisingly clear. The corrupting and dangerous aspect of art is not attributed to individual artists or a specific artistic orientation, nor to the style of the depiction, nor to the content that is narrated or presented; instead, it is ascribed to its essential nature as the μίμησις of a μίμησις. Since even the objects of sense perception are imitations of the archetypal Ideas, which are ultimately accessible only to rational cognition, the artist is an imitator of something imitated. He merely touches on the appearance of a reality that is in turn already a defective, mutable and ephemeral imitation of the only true, immutable and eternal archetypal Ideas. As the imitation of an imitation, art is insurmountably distant from truth and knowledge, ontologically and therefore also epistemologically worthless and useless – and also damaging, because it attempts to shackle us and domesticate us at a level three steps below truth. However, it not only holds us captive, but also corrupts us even further by appealing not to reason, but to the lower part of the soul with its desires and affections. It is because of this that it is corrupting and dangerous, initially for the individual character and individual spiritual welfare, and ultimately – through the individual – also for human society as a whole. Art thus creates precisely the situation which for the philosopher represents the fundamentally distorted condition from which he is attempting to liberate people. Art is constantly re-fastening the shackles that the philosopher releases. This is why art has to be excluded from Plato’s ideal state, with philosophy alone taking its place. The condemnation of all forms of art could not be expressed more clearly. Despite this, repeated efforts have been made to weaken the condemnation or even disprove its existence, either in order to save art from Plato or, conversely, to save Plato from condemning art. To achieve this, alleged contradictions between Books 10 and 3 of the Politeia have been pointed out ; a differentiation or alteration in Plato’s understanding of the concept of μίμησις has been postulated; and reference has been made to passages in Plato’s works in which, it is claimed, the philosopher concedes that art has direct access to the world of the Ideas or in which he speaks of the artist’s divine inspiration , as well as the numerous passages that discuss Beauty . Finally, it is claimed that Plato did not condemn all art, but only a certain contemporary trend in art , or more generally, only illusionistic art in contrast to an abstract form of art – namely Egyptian art . In the second part of the study, these lines of argumentation are discussed individually and in detail and their content is tested. In each case, the findings obtained initially in the analysis of Book 10 of the Politeia are confirmed. The present study does not offer any new hypotheses; instead, its goal is to use a detailed and differentiated examination of the relevant texts to clearly distinguish Plato’s view of art from later neo-Platonic views, as well as from obfuscations created by modern interpreters, in order to obtain a secure basis for future investigations of Plato’s view of art in particular, as well as of ancient aesthetics in general. The extensive review of the secondary literature also documents part of the history of twentieth-century scholarship. (shrink)

In this article, focusing on the building blocks of art with its concomitant role and meaning, we commence with a brief evolutionary overview of the origin of land vertebrates, which culminated in the rise of our species as we view it. We then review three iconic phases of human evolution, colloquially designated as the Neanderthals, the San and the Cro-Magnons, as manifested by their artistic endeavours. We are well aware that the Cro-Magnons are currently regarded as not sufficiently distinct (...) from modern Homo sapiens to be separately designated. Therefore, the terms ‘anatomically modern humans’ or ‘early modern humans’ are suggested for these inhabitants of the Upper Palaeolithic as they shared an anatomical resemblance with us but still lacked the full complement of behavioural attributes that typify ourselves. This particular selection was chosen because these groups have partially overlapped historically, yet each represents a distinctive approach to the artistic impulse. Subsequently, we consider more contemporary developments regarding human art intertwined with our interpretation of art’s role and meaning. Then, we briefly discuss a broader account of the evolution of art in which these three phases are firmly based and through which our understanding of and engagement with the evolutionary development of these stages are elucidated and complemented. In conclusion, particular views about language and the role and meaning of art are confirmed. Particular views about language and the role and meaning of art are endorsed and supplemented by an extensive body of relevant literature.Contribution: This article explores the evolution of art and its accompanying role and meaning in an intersectional and interdisciplinary manner that fits well with the intention of this unique collection on the building blocks of our past, present and future and with the nature of this journal and our ongoing engagement with HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies. (shrink)

From ancient Greece to Renaissance Italy to the Modern period, the classical ideal, with its elusive goal of perfecting nature, has held a tenacious grip on Western culture. Nowhere has its hold on the artistic imagination been more pervasive than in France between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. The art and life of Raphael formed the bedrock of the classical tradition in French art, yet no comprehensive study of Raphael's impact on the art theory, criticism, and practice of classicism exists. (...) This book fills that gap. Transcending limited notions of artistic influence, the book demonstrates that Raphael had as much impact as a symbol as he did as a paradigm of the classical tradition. Focusing on French art and theory from the classical to the Romantic era, _Raphael and France_ is part of the ongoing revision of views of that period which has been taking place for the last twenty years. The book demonstrates that the shifts from classical to Rococo to neoclassical aesthetics were not as abrupt or as all-encompassing as has been assumed. By tracing the continuity and transformation of the classical ideal, with Raphael's art and image as central paradigms, Rosenberg achieves a broader, more accurate, and comprehensive view of French artistic developments during this period. Rosenberg draws on careful readings of primary sources, including the correspondence and lectures of the French Academy, some of which are unpublished; most of the major theoretical treatises by French and foreign authors; and contemporary criticism and works of art. In the process, he strikes a methodological balance between traditional art-historical approaches and insights provided by more contemporary approaches, such as semiotics and post-structuralism. As the notion of isolated genius as the prime force in art has given way to a broader, more contextual view of art and history, interest in past traditions once regarded as outmoded or dead has grown tremendously. This book makes a timely contribution to this widening area of inquiry. (shrink)