I offer an interpretation of the puzzle posed by Greenberg’s failure to come to terms with the explosion of postmodernist experimentation in the 1960’s. Greenberg, one of the most influential critics of the immediately preceding period and a strong supporter of New York abstract expressionism and color field painting, is indelibly associated with modernist schools of painting. His short essay, “Modernist Painting”, valorized precisely these movements and was a tour de force catapulting Greenberg into critic (...) superstar status; it is still one of the central documents in debates about modernism. Because Greenberg there makes references to Kant’s aesthetics in identifying the virtues of modernism his account is usually interpreted in terms of the formalism of the period and Kant’s analytic of the beautiful. This offers a reading of Greenberg as a formalist and as identifying modernism with a concern for the formal properties of art, the flatness of the picture frame and the formal relations between the aesthetic properties. Greenberg was also celebrated as having a legendary acuteness of aesthetic appreciation—a critical eye penetrating immediately to a work’s aesthetic depth. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the kantian aspects of greenberg's theory of modernism. It is argued first that the distinctiveness of greenberg's theory lies not in a kantian-Style aesthetic formalism, But rather in an intellectualist notion of aesthetic value which greenberg associates with a kantian-Style self-Critical method. It is then argued that greenberg's use of this kantian notion of self-Criticism in order to explain the development of modernist painting, Leads him into insuperable problems.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Readymades, Monochromes, Etc.:Nominalism and the Paradox of ModernismJ. M. Bernstein (bio)If Schopenhauer's thesis of art as an image of the world once over bears a kernel of truth, then it does so only insofar as this second world is composed out of elements that have been transposed out of the empirical world in accord with Jewish descriptions of the messianic order as an order just like the habitual order (...) but changed in the slightest degree.—T. W. Adorno, Aesthetic TheoryAdorno's philosophy as a whole, and his aesthetic theory in particular, is irrevocably bound to the tradition and achievements of high modernism. Although Adorno himself did not recognize American Abstract Expression as the apotheosis of high modernism in painting, that judgment now hardly seems contentious.1 And that raises a problem: it is the problem of R. Mutt, again, the problem of the porcelain urinal called Fountain, which was refused admittance to the Society of Independent Artists' Exhibition in April 1917 in spite of the Society's proclaimed democratic slogan "No jury, no prizes"—the work whose life or after-life begins with the beautiful photograph of it by Stieglitz set against the background of Marsden Hartley's The Warriors and that appeared shortly thereafter in the new avant-garde journal The Blind Man. Whatever the immediate repercussions of Fountain, there can be little doubt that much of what is most vital in art in the second half of this century is unthinkable without it; Duchamp's readymade offers an exemplary alternative to the tradition of high modernist painting that has continued to be generative. For a modernist like Adorno, for whom authentic art is that which best rises to the demands and necessities of artistic materials, for whom internal consistency and rigor would appear to be everything, for whom, finally, aesthetic form is the "objective organization within each artwork of what appears as bindingly eloquent" [AT 143; emphasis mine], Duchamp's gesture of simply naming or claiming artistic status for an ordinary bathroom fixture must be anathema. In this respect, Adorno's aesthetic theory would seem to be in the same predicament as Clement Greenberg's modernism: inextricably bound to a tradition that history has left behind. And while the option of refuting the claim of Fountain is certainly possible, and should not be too quickly suppressed (there is something in the claim that will forever be skeptically self-defeating), nonetheless there does appear to be an exemplariness to Fountain that exceeds the narrow provocation of Duchamp's nominalist gesture; something in the readymade, in fact, seems (art historically? aesthetically? conceptually?) irresistible. If so, then modernist [End Page 83] formalism must either find a way of accommodating the readymade without departing from its internal logic or find its claim to our attention forfeited.After laying out the bold outlines of Adorno's formalism, the remainder of this essay will seek to uncover an account of the readymade in the context of what I will eventually call "the paradox of modernism" in order to locate in what way the readymade can be accommodated to a defense of Adorno's late modernism. For the purposes of this argument, I am going to assume that the best overall defense of Duchamp's gesture, which makes it foundational for the understanding of modern art, is that offered by Thierry de Duve in his Kant after Duchamp. My elaboration of Adorno's late modernism will hence proceed, in part, through a charting of some of the fault lines in de Duve's Duchamp. My contention shall be that the generativity of Fountain as readymade not only belongs within modernism, but is only intelligible within a wholly modernist and formalist frame of reference.Adorno's Formalism and the Material MotiveAdorno opens the section of Aesthetic Theory entitled "Coherence and Meaning" with the drastic sounding thesis that "Although artworks are neither conceptual nor judgmental, they are logical" [AT 136]. He continues:In them nothing would be enigmatic if their immanent logicality did not accommodate discursive thought, which criteria they nevertheless regularly disappoint. They most resemble the form of a syllogism and its prototype in empirical thought. That in the temporal... (shrink)

Trying to assess Kant's impact on contemporary aesthetics is by no means a straightforward task, for the simple reason that the subject is saturated with his influence. In all aspects of the theory and practice of art, it is possible to observe concepts and attitudes at work which are either a reflection of, or a response to, Kant's thinking. This might seem a rather overblown claim and a difficult one to substantiate but, without going into too much detail at this (...) point, one has only to consider that the central tenets of both modernism and postmodernism can be traced back to Kant's Critical thought. There is the modernist's interest in the conditions of possibility of representation – as evidenced, for example, by the push towards abstraction in the visual arts and the attempt to paint not the world but the process of painting itself – and, responding to this, the postmodernist's concern that these conditions of possibility should not become universal absolutes. (shrink)

Challenging the formalist critical legacy of Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried, this essay advocates an alternative philosophical lineage for Modernist painting through a specific focus on Barnett Newman's vertical stripe or ‘zip’. This genealogy is rooted in Newman's own self-confessed interest in painting as a disclosure of the sensation of time and Deleuze's overt break with Kant. In light of the latter, the zip takes on the function of Deleuze's Figure: the material support that generates, sustains and also (...) disperses a precise sensation. (shrink)

It is well known that in his “Author's Introduction” (1920) to the “Collected Essays on the Sociology of World Religions” Max Weber grapples with the problem of the cultural specificity of the West. He phrases his inquiry in the following way: Why is it “that in Western civilization, and in Western civilization only, cultural phenomena have appeared which (as we like to think) lie in a line of development having universal significance and value”? He continues to cite a wealth of (...) cultural phenomena — systematic theology, the rational concept, standardized methods of scientific experimentation, rational harmonious music, extensive utilization of perspective in painting, bureaucratic conduct of the organizational sphere, and the systematic rational pursuit of economic affairs — that are unique to the West and illustrative of its self-avowed universality. (shrink)

I examine a problem or dilemma of legitimation faced by the critical theorist who takes as the object of his or her critique a totality of which she or he is a part. The dilemma is that the theorist must either illegitimately exempt her critical theory from the determining influences of the totality or lose normative authority. The critics I examine in detail are: Adorno and Horkheimer; Kant; Hegel; feminist standpoint epistemologists, in particular, Sandra Harding; Irigaray; Foucault; and Arendt. ;I (...) conclude that a purely theoretical or epistemic ground for the legitimacy of totalizing critique is impossible; philosophical critique must involve an extra-rational faith or a political commitment. However, I also argue that the project of theoretical grounding should not be abandoned. I continue this project by drawing out of the critical theorists I examined some preliminary concepts and strategies that may, after further development, serve to provide a theory of the legitimacy of critical philosophy. (shrink)

Aesthetics after Modernism argues for the ongoing relevance of aesthetics to art after modernism. In it, I show that even what are typically taken to be the hardest of hard cases engage us in recognisably aesthetic ways and, as such, remain amenable to aesthetic analysis. Why, if that is true, do so many art theorists, critics and sometimes even artists appear to think otherwise? I trace the artworld's rejection of aesthetic theory to Clement Greenberg's success in co-opting the discourse (...) of aesthetics, notably Kant's aesthetics, to underwrite his own formalism about modernist art. Not only has this led to Kant being tarred with the brush of Greenbergian formalism; it has also led critics and theorists of later art to miss the resources of the aesthetic tradition, perhaps especially Kant, for capturing what is distinctive about our cognitive relation to the kinds of art that interest them. There is a tendency simply to assume that Kant's aesthetics cannot speak to the more conceptual aspects of our interactions with art. I trace the legacy of Greenberg's modernism and formalism for later art criticism and theory, before offering an interpretation of Kant's theory of art that seeks to show otherwise. I take Conceptual Art as my test case: here is a form of art that often claims to forgo sensible properties altogether. But if Kant's aesthetics can accommodate to our cognitive relation to art with no sensible features relevant to its appreciation as art then it should in principle withstand the challenge of any form of art. (shrink)

This essay attempts to provide detailed evidence for Charles Taylor’s claim that both Hegel and Merleau-Ponty follow Kant’s refutation of idealism in an effort to take a stand against Modernism’s claim that human knowledge of the world is reducible to a conceptual representation of it. For both the Hegel of Phenomenology of Mind and Merleau-Ponty throughout his career, human consciousness and knowledge must embrace and make sense of a world that is always already there. This stand will be made against (...) Postmodernism as well. (shrink)

_What, After All, Is a Work of Art? _directs our attention toward historicity, the inherent historied nature of thinking, and the artifactual, culturally emergent nature of both art and human selves. While these are familiar themes in Margolis's well-known studies of art and culture, they are largely neglected in English-language aesthetics and even philosophy in general. Margolis brings these primary themes to bear on a number of strategically selected issues: the modernism/postmodernism dispute; the treatment of modernist and "post-historical" painting (...) in Clement Greenberg and Arthur Danto; the coherence of relativism in interpreting art and the relevance of cultural relativity; the difference between artworks and persons as culturally constituted entities in contrast to natural entities and with regard to the logic of interpretation; the import of film on the theory of the relationship between understanding ourselves and understanding art, with special attention to the views of Walter Benjamin; and the propriety of the analogy between artworks and selves, as cultural entities, by way of treating the arts as a form of human "utterance." Although the argument is largely focused on certain particularly strenuous puzzles in the philosophy of art, the validity of Margolis's claims are more far reaching. If, through incorporating the reality of physical and biological nature, the emergence of art and human selves cannot rest satisfactorily on exemplars selected from nature alone, then certain fashionable views of science, of canons of understanding, conceptual resources, logic, rationality, and the like may well have to yield ground to ampler models that have been largely marginalized or overridden. In particular, the admission of historicity, the nerve of Margolis's argument, invites a decisive conceptual reorientation. _What, After All, Is a Work of Art? _is based on a series of lectures Margolis delivered at various universities in Japan in the Spring of 1997, while serving as a fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. (shrink)

Art historians interpret artworks, tell the history of art and compare diverse artistic traditions. This chapter presents one key portion of Krauss's theorizing, Arthur Danto's definition of art, and compares and contrasts their accounts. Responding to radically original contemporary art, Krauss offered a challenging philosophical argument about the nature of art. Danto offers a completely general account, one that identifies the essence of all art. His written commentaries on Warhol tell what is embodied in Brillo Box, which is a commentary (...) on the meaning of visual art in a commodity culture. Danto believes that essentialism is the only satisfactory basis for philosophy. Sometimes appealing to essentialism involves a conservative ideal that at bottom nothing ever changes. Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, a textbook that discusses a variety of philosophical writers. In the nineteenth century, Kant's and Hegel's philosophies played a crucial role in the formative development of art history writing. (shrink)

There exist at present many conceptions of postmodern(ism). But there is a certain number of differences between the conceptions of postmodernism in the arts and the conceptions of postmodernism in various spheres of social activities. In arts, people pay much attention to the significant attributes of the concept, but in spheres of social life, the term is often used as a criterion to marking time in the periodization of history. That is, while in arts the significant attributes will make the (...) criteria to define the postmodernism, in social life the concept of postmodern(ism) exists a priori and does not depend on social characteristics. That is for many people, the postmodern era is simply taken for granted as the period after the Second World War. At the same time, we have to recognize that thearbitrary and easy use of this term in the social life has spread contagiously to the artistic field. Many people simply attribute the label of “postmodern” to all creations outside the traditional realism in the second half of the 20th century, only because in their opinion, those creations appeared in the age that they called “postmodern era” for granted. Thus, in this way, “postmodern” may have too many different and indefinite meanings, but just thereby, it has also no meaning at all. This situation has brought ambiguity to defining the status of contemporary arts. I can only state that, in the field of arts, despite different conceptions of “postmodern(ism)” among many persons, we may conclude that it is more exactly to use this concept only to designate the summit or the “paroxysm” of modernism; and it still bears a temporal character to designating the second half of the 20th century. With the meaning of “paroxysm”, the term of “postmodern” can be entirely replaced with the term “modern”, or more precisely, with the term “meta-modern” or “ultra-modern”. Besides, we should be vigilant against the abuse of the concept “postmodern” which is being used fairly popularly in the current socio-political life, and most of these cases of abuse only want to make impressions of the “ultra-new” (or “ultra-modern”) character of the events. Just because of this abuse, the concept “postmodern” runs the risk of becoming platitudinous, leads to becoming meaningless because of bearing too many different and indefinite meanings, and thereby loses its effectiveness and usability. For my own part, I think that we should use the concept “postmodern(ism)” only for architecture and painting. As for other fields, especially for literature, we should not use it, and instead, we shall make use of the concept “modern(ism)” or at the most, we shall use the concept “ultra- or meta-modern(ism)” which will be precise and very appropriate. It is not necessary that, whenever to make impressions of the newest, one should have to recourse to the term “postmodern(ism)”, and then to be at a loss in making efforts to find the characteristics in order to ascribe them to the term to demonstrate its legitimate existence, but in fact, these characteristics are not of its own. (shrink)

Can Kant’s theory of fine art serve as a theory of modern art? It all depends on what ‘modern’ means. The word can mean current or contemporary, indexed to the time of use, and in that sense the answer is yes: Kant’s theory of genius implies that successful art is always to some extent novel, so there should always be something that counts as contemporary art on his theory. But ‘modern’ can also be used adjectively, perhaps more properly as ‘ (...) class='Hi'>modernist’, to refer to art of a particular moment, in some cases superseded by postmodern art. Kant’s theory is not a theory of modernist art in at least one prominent form, the formalism of Clement Greenberg. But other theories, such as those of George Dickie and Arthur Danto, although triggered by particular works of modernist art and meant to accommodate them, were meant to be theories of what art was always doing, and Kant’s is too. In that sense it can be considered a modern theory of art but not a theory of modern art. (shrink)

One typically thinks of the relevance of Kant’s aesthetic theory to Western art in terms of Modernism, thanks in large part to the work of eminent critic and art historian Clement Greenberg. Yet, thinking of Kant’s legacy for contemporary art as inhering exclusively in “Kantian formalism” obscures a great deal of Kant’s aesthetic theory. In his last book, Arthur Danto suggested just this point, urging us to enlarge our appreciation of Kant’s aesthetic theory and its relevance to contemporary art, (...) because, for Danto, “Kant had two conceptions of art.” In this essay, I support and build on Danto’s claim that there are really two conceptions of art at work in Kant’s third Critique, and that the second conception offers a non-Modernist/formalist way that Kant’s aesthetic theory remains relevant to post 1960s art. My ultimate aim is to highlight another facet in the continuing relevance of Kant’s aesthetic theory to post-Expressionist contemporary art, namely, the explicit attention to the differential aesthetic values of nature and art respectively. I shall do this by putting it in dialogue with the art practice of Latvian-American artist, Vija Celmins whose illustrious career since 1960s has made her an ‘artist’s artist’ but who has also recently garnered much wider attention with a retrospective titled “To Fix the Image in Memory.” Celmins takes up artistically a problematic that is quite central philosophically to the concerns of the third Critique, and thus her work illustrates another way in which Kant’s aesthetic theory is of great continuing relevance to the artworld today. (shrink)

At least two recent collections of essays – Postmodernism and the Enlightenment and What’s Left of Enlightenment?: A Postmodern Question – have responded to postmodern critiques of Enlightenment by arguing that Enlightenment philosophes themselves embraced a number of post-modern themes. This essay situates Kant’s essay Was ist Aufklärung in the context of this recent literature about the appropriate characterization of modernity and the Enlightenment. Adopting an internalist reading of Kant’s Aufklärung essay, this paper observes that Kant is surprisingly ambivalent about (...) who might be Enlightened and unspecific about when Enlightenment might be achieved. The paper argues that this is because Kant is concerned less with elucidating his concept of Enlightenment and more with characterizing a political condition that might provide the conditions for the possibility of Enlightenment. This paper calls this political condition modernity and it is achieved when civil order can be maintained alongside fractious and possibly insoluble public disagreement about matters of conscience, including the nature and possibility of Enlightenment. Thus, the audience for the Aufklärung essay is not the tax collector, soldier or clergyman, but rather the sovereign. Kant enjoins and advises the prince that discord and debate about matters of conscience need not entail any political unrest or upheaval. It is in this restricted sense that the Enlightenment essay is Kant’s Machiavellian moment. (shrink)

The use and abuse and critique of Kant has generated a huge literature among contemporary political theorists; his work has been surreptitiously kept by some critics of the Enlightenment to exeplify starndards of modernity. Kimberly Hutchings reevaluates Kant's work in terms of its significance in the writings of Habersmas, Arendt, Lyotard and Foucault. This is not an exercise in the history of ideas; through her extremely lucid presentation of Kant's critical philosophy, Hutchings reveals the critique to be a complex, ambiguous (...) political practice. The common Kantian heritage in the thought of the four contemporary theorists challenges orthodox distinctions between modernist and postmodernist theorizing. Kant, Critique and Kant addresses why Kant's legacy is inescapable for current debates about both "critique" and politics. This reading sheds a new light on continental and political philosophy, international relations theory and feminist theory. (shrink)

Adrian Stokes , long admired by a small, highly distinguished, mostly English circle, was the natural successor to Pater and Ruskin. But though his place in cultural history is important, what is of particular interest now to art historians is his theory of the presentness of painting, a theory which offers a challenging critique of the practice of artwriting. From Vasari to the present, the most familiar rhetorical strategy of the art historian is the narrative of “the form, prophet-saviour-apostles,” in (...) which the first artist poses some problem that his successors develop and their successors solve.1 Such very different books as Art and Illusion and Art and Culture deploy that plan. The three periods of naturalism in E. H. Gombrich’s narrative—antiquity, Renaissance religious narrative, nineteenth-century landscape—function like Clement Greenberg’s sequence—old master art, early French modernism, American abstract expressionism. Gombrich and Greenberg disagree about how to narrate art’s history and about which works to include in that narrative—Gombrich asserts that cubism closes the canon while for Greenberg analytical cubism anticipates Jackson Pollock—but in each case, the art historian aims, as the novelist does, to tell a satisfying story and achieve narrative closure, and so how we think of the artworks the historian discusses depends in part upon the structure of the narrative. In a certain mood, we may find this fact intolerable. Why should a mere text tell us how to see the painting we may stand before?Stokes’ attempt to respond to this mood belongs to a tradition of early twentieth-century antihistorical thinking. For Rainer Maria Rilke, Rodin’s sculpture aimed to “refer to nothing that lay beyond it.” For Ezra Pound, an image “is real because we know it directly”; Henri Gaudier-Brzeska could read Chinese ideograms without knowing that language because those ideograms are transparently meaningful images. For Wyndham Lewis, a musical piece is inferior to a statue, “always there in its entirety before you.”2 Such an artwork need not be interpreted because it contains “within itself all that is relevant to itself.”3 All art is accessible to the gifted observer, and time is, in an interesting double sense, irrelevant. We see directly the meaning of works even from distant cultures; the visual artwork is experienced all at once, outside of time. If these claims are correct, what is the artwriter to do? Speaking of the Tempio Malatestiana, Hugh Kenner points to this issue:There is no description of the Tempio in accordance with good Vorticist logic: one art does not attempt what another can do better, and the meaning of the Tempio has been fully explicated on the spot by Agostino di Duccio with his chisel.4 1. Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition 1350-1450 , p. 75.2. Rainer Maria Rilke, Rodin, trans. Jessie Lemont and Hans Trausil , p. 19; Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir , p. 86; Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man , p. 174.3. Frank Kermode, Romantic Image , p. 107.4. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era , p. 428. David Carrier, associate professor of philosophy at Carnegie-Mellon University, is coauthor, with Mark Roskill, of Truth and Falsehood in Visual Images and author of the forthcoming Artwriting, a study of recent American art criticism. He is working on a history of art history. (shrink)

Hicks’s impressive grasp of the history of philosophy over the past few centuries enables him to explain postmodernism by identifying its signposts. He lets sensitive analysis of the memorable episodes of post-modernism speak to the essential issues that drive it. His treatment of the importance of Kant’s skepticism in getting the postmodernist engine going down the track is especially instructive. However, Hicks understates, or perhaps does not see, that the origins of postmodernist skepticism are already in what he calls “modernism.” (...) Postmodernists and historians of postmodernism often overlook this because they want to play on the device that modernism really is different in kind from post-modernism. And certainly the latter differs in its radicalization of modernist assumptions. But modernist assumptions nonetheless—whether one calls them “Enlightened” or not—are the remote reasons for post-modernism. Mortimer Adler made this point some years ago in his book, Ten Philosophical Mistakes, in which he argued that the seeds of radical irrationalism, epistemological relativism, and antihumanist nihilism were planted when Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume disconnected the intellect from real, extramental things and made ideas, states of intramental consciousness, the objects of knowledge. If anti-realism is implicit in modernism, then postmodernism is a working out of modernist assumptions, not a philosophical movement different in kind from modernist philosophies. Postmodernism unmasks modernism, making explicit and radical what is implicit and undeveloped. (shrink)

Moving from the grand tradition of Delacroix to the images of modern life made by Constantin Guys, this movement from "high" to "low," from the unified world of correspondances to the fragmented images of contemporary city life, motivates Baudelaire's equivalent to the post-1968 turn away from formalist art criticism.

It is an irony perhaps worthy of John Ashbery that the critics who made his reputation as our premier contemporary poet have virtually ignored the innovations which in fact make his work distinctively of our time. The received terms show us how Ashbery revitalizes the old wisdom of Keats or the virile fantasies of Emersonian strength but they do so at the cost of almost everything about the work deeply responsive to irreducibly contemporary demands on the psyche. Such omissions not (...) only distance Ashbery from the urgencies of the present, they also make it far more difficult to appreciate just how the best contemporary art actually defines the challenges and possibilities created by that present. By banishing writers like Ashbery to literary tradition, we leave the domain of the postmodern to two dominant discourses. One is driven by post-structural theory’s idealization of the nomadic, the undecidable, and the profusion of simulacra. The other champions Marxist values which cast as the most significant contemporary art the rather slight oppositional devices of artists like Sherrie Levine, Hans Haacke, and Barbara Kruger. These critical idealizations then ignore what might be the central historical problem facing contemporary art. Can it continue to elaborate new dimensions of that late fifties postmodernism which set the values of Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, and Robert Rauschenberg against the increasingly formalist versions of modernism that then dominated the art world and the poetry workshops? Or does the age demand the emergence of a new sensibility, strands of which are being woven in post-structuralist mills? Charles Altieri is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Washington. Author of books on contemporary poetry and literary theory, he has just completed a book on abstraction in modern poetry and painting. This essay lays some groundwork for a book, Bourgeois Utopians, attempt to keep the arts central to our discussion of postmodernism. (shrink)

For Hans Hofmann and Clement Greenberg, flatness–more specifically, “re-created flatness,” a term Greenberg adopted after hearing it used in the painter’s important 1938– 39 lectures–became a key term in their accounts of pictorial meaning. In this paper, I articulate what is significant about that idea and draw out its implications for understanding what Hofmann meant by artistic expression. Ultimately, I suggest that the concept of re-created flatness, and its pictorial realization, implies or entails a certain view of expression: (...) namely, that what is expressed by an artwork is the artist’s meaning (in contradistinction to the arbitrary meanings that may be imputed to her work by a viewer). This paper has three principle objectives. First, I overview Hofmann’s unpublished writings and lectures on aesthetics. So far, the critical analysis and evaluation of these materials have had little visibility in modernist studies. I aim not only to contribute a more specific account of Hofmann’s concepts as they were introduced through his program of aesthetic education but also to situate them in a wider intellectual and critical context. Second, I interpret the significance of those ideas for modernist criticism by focusing especially on the concept of re-created flatness as it appears in the writings of both Hofmann and Greenberg. Finally, I hope to demonstrate that Hofmann’s closely associated notions of flatness, depth, and the picture plane are deeply implicated in the issue of modernist painting’s autonomy, especially as formulated by Greenberg. (shrink)

Recently criticism and theory have maintained that Kant's aesthetic theory is central to modernism, and have used Foucault's archaeology to interrogate that modernism. This paper suggests that archaeology ultimately cannot escape Kant's hold because it depends on Kantian theses. The first section will consider how a recent exponent of an 'archaeological' viewpoint characterizes Kant's theory and will set out the critical role Kant ascribes to art. The second section compares Kant and Foucault to argue that despite appearances their projects turn (...) out to be substantially coterminal. My interest in comparing these critics is not only to be provocative but also to show that post-modernist thinking, at least in the guise of Foucault, needs and uses standards that Kant proposes. (shrink)

Emmanuel Levinas’ aesthetics has been critically discussed much less than other components of his philosophy. In one way, this is not surprising, given Levinas’ wider post-war project. Nevertheless, in the late 1940s, the very time his influential later philosophy was taking shape, Levinas published a series of papers on literary criticism, and on the nature of art. istents and Existence, the text where Levinas first announces his project of “leaving the climate” of Heidegger’s thought, contains in its heart a remarkable (...) discussion of modernist painting. 2 Levinas’ aesthetics, moreover, represents a provocative standpoint within modern aesthetic theory in its own right. As such, it stands as a partial corrective to the comparative and surely surprising – dearth of phenomenological analyses of art, which at the same time contrasts markedly with Heidegger’s renowned position in “The Origin of the Work of Art.” From a critical perspective, however, an examination of Levinas’ aesthetics is interesting in another, and perhaps deeper way. As critics have intimated, 3 Levinas’ aesthetics arguably marks what could be called a “supplement” within his texts. As is well known, Levinas’ post-war works defend his own post-Husserlian version of what Kant called “the primacy of practical reason” which he calls – in a more classical vein – “ethics as first philosophy.” 4 In this light, Levinas’ texts feature an axiological devaluation of aesthetics in comparison with the ethical encounter with the Other. What this paper will argue – in line with but beyond Derrida’s masterful “Violence and Metaphysics” 5 – is that aesthetic experience as analysed by Levinas has an uncanny structural proximity to his analyses of “ethics.” And recognition of this primacy might well cause us to reconsider Levinas’ classically “Greek” as much as Judaic devaluation of aesthetics as one dimension of human experience. Part I takes a poem as the basis to construct Levinas’ account of the aesthetical or art-quality of artworks. Part II examines what Levinas takes his analysis of the work of art to point towards in terms of a more general [de]ontology, wherein the reality given in phenomenological perception is doubled by its own “shadow.” Part III questions not Levinas’ aesthetics but how it signifies in terms of his avowed project of elevating ethics as “first philosophy.” –. (shrink)

This book examines the social relevance of philosophy as this problem is posed in the contemporary Modernism-Postmodernism debate. Manuel P. Arriaga critically investigates the two sides of the debate in their various presuppositions and their equally diverse ramifications in fields ranging from political theory, philosophy of religion, and theory of knowledge, among others.

Despite widespread pessimism about the radical thrust of Adorno's modernism and Adorno's own reservations, his work has been held up as prefiguring the rebirth of a more engaged politics. This argument has taken several forms. Russell A. Berman maintains that if Adorno's modernism was bound to exhaust itself (as Adorno himself anticipated), the end of modernism would inevitably result in a return to everyday life. Yet this union of art and life would simply relocate political struggle and change within the (...) cultural arena: “After the completion of the avantgarde project, works of art have lost their privileged status and are no longer a safe harbor for the utopian image of a successful civilization, but the principle of aestheticization expands throughout society as a crucial medium of manipulation…. (shrink)

This essay asks why modernist art history has been unable to account for the career of the African American painter Rose Piper. One of the most gifted painters of her generation, Piper was also amo...

This revised and expanded second edition of Cahoone's classic anthology provides an unparalleled collection of the essential readings in modernism and postmodernism. Places contemporary debate in the context of the criticism of modernity since the seventeenth century. Chronologically and thematically arranged. Indispensable and multidisciplinary resource in philosophy, literature, cultural studies, social theory, and religious studies.

The paper highlights the urgent and radical questions and problems which postmodernism poses for educational studies in general, and the philosophy of education in particular. First, it outlines and interrelates the legacies of modernism in social and cultural theory. Next, it describes the reactionary anti-modernism of the Right, and contrasts this with traditionalism. It is argued that the current political and economic context of education is largely anti-modernist, not traditionalist. The stirrings of radical doubts about modernism are described and (...) contrasted with the antimodernism of the Right. A salient theme to this point is the variety of conceptions of the relationship between knowledge and power. Mature postmodernism is characterised centrally in terms of a reconceptualisation of that relationship. The metamorphosis of the concept of the self in postmodernism is described and related to new problems about ethics and a newly emerging importance for the aesthetic. Finally, the paper argues that while the fundamental issues for philosophy of education are unchanged - problems about instrumentalism and various issues of autonomy - these are radically recast in postmodernism, and present new difficulties. (shrink)

This revised and expanded second edition of Cahoone's classic anthology provides an unparalleled collection of the essential readings in modernism and postmodernism. Places contemporary debate in the context of the criticism of modernity since the seventeenth century. Chronologically and thematically arranged. Indispensable and multidisciplinary resource in philosophy, literature, cultural studies, social theory, and religious studies.

This research paper comparatively assesses Deleuze’s and Lyotard’s post-Kantian thought on the sublime. Initially, I argue that their unfaithful treatment of Kant bears consonance in dramatizing the heterogeneity of the transcendental faculties, relegating determinate thought to a subsidiary consideration, and conceiving of aesthetics as an excessive mode of production rather than a reflective form of judgement. However, they diverge in the details regarding aesthetic production in their writings on modernist painting. In conclusion, I maintain that these accounts require a (...) paradigmatic shift in thought away from determinate judgement toward a fidelity to events. The significance of drawing these two thinkers together in this regard is in the recognition and elucidation of an event-oriented ontology, whereby the subject is actively transformed through creative responses to singular events in a process of rupture and regeneration. This rests upon the postulate that reality is not exhausted by experience, and carries with it an ethical imperative to resist limiting the future to the present conditions of experience. (shrink)

The book explores two radical changes of cultural and social paradigm that determined the World after 1945 - Modernism and Postmodernism. From the cataclysmic atmosphere emerged the second wave of Modernism. In art this attitude was manifested in the form of a radical break with the aesthetic and stylistic characteristics of prior generations. In architecture the International Style was born, meanwhile similar "universality" was also a characteristic of musical serialism. From the beginning of the 1970s the wheels again began to (...) turn in the other direction. The powerful destructive will of modernism increasingly waivered, and the period after modernism - postmodernism - began. The book answers questions related to the reasons for these turnarounds, their consequences and their implications. (shrink)

In this overview of twentieth-century American poetry, Jennifer Ashton examines the relationship between modernist and postmodernist American poetics. Ashton moves between the iconic figures of American modernism - Stein, Williams, Pound - and developments in contemporary American poetry to show how contemporary poetics, specially the school known as language poetry, have attempted to redefine the modernist legacy. She explores the complex currents of poetic and intellectual interest that connect contemporary poets with their modernist forebears. The works..

_Five Faces of Modernity_ is a series of semantic and cultural biographies of words that have taken on special significance in the last century and a half or so: _modernity_, _avant-garde_, _decadence_, _kitsch_, and _postmodernism_. The concept of modernity—the notion that we, the living, are different and somehow superior to our predecessors and that our civilization is likely to be succeeded by one even superior to ours—is a relatively recent Western invention and one whose time may already have passed, if (...) we believe its postmodern challengers. Calinescu documents the rise of cultural modernity and, in tracing the shifting senses of the five terms under scrutiny, illustrates the intricate value judgments, conflicting orientations, and intellectual paradoxes to which it has given rise. _Five Faces of Modernity_ attempts to do for the foundations of the modernist critical lexicon what earlier terminological studies have done for such complex categories as _classicism_, _baroque_, _romanticism_, _realism_, or _symbolism_ and thereby fill a gap in literary scholarship. On another, more ambitious level, Calinescu deals at length with the larger issues, dilemmas, ideological tensions, and perplexities brought about by the assertion of modernity. (shrink)

We could ask: how national could be a culture or another? The modernist or postmodernist perspectives seems to be unilateral here. Could be transmodernism the right sollution? The distictions between modernism, postmodernism and transmodernism are actually a pretext to set into discussion again the old dispute between Culture, regarded as a humanity universal feature and national cultures, perceived as a human community tradition symbol (community that claims a territory, a language, a religious belief and a certain government form).

Some postmodernists criticize the view that the logics of Western thought can be employed universally. In doing so, they assume without adequate proof that different human societies have greatly different rationalities and employ completely different logics. This essay argues that, on the contrary, widely different cultures often share noteworthy similarities in rationality.

Many modernists and postmodernists have adduced moral and political considerations in attacking the views of the other side and defending their own. In the face of the multiplicity of these claims and the ardor with which they are expressed, it is surprising that no attempts have been made to systematically examine the nature and validity of the arguments, nor to ask whether it is useful to engage in them at all. This paper provides such an analysis and demonstrates that in (...) spite of the wide (and growing) use of these arguments, their employment is highly problematic. (shrink)

This article examines how the work associated with Henry de Bracton functioned in early modern political and legal thought as an ideograph, a one-word summation of arguments deployed by communities in support of ideological goals. The first part explains the medieval and early modern milieu of 'Bracton' and discusses key folios in context. In the second section the authors discuss in detail the ways in which Civil War Royalists and Parliamentarians made De Legibus pertinent to their antithetical causes. The third (...) part explores 'Bracton's' role in the disputes of the late Stuart period, when attempts to alter the succession in Charles II's reign and at the Glorious Revolution brought a reprise of civil war theorizing. Finally, whereas many early modernists see in seventeenth-century England a break with the medieval past, we follow the lead of those medieval scholars who treat the history of political ideas from the twelfth to the seventeenth century as a single epoch. In so doing we hope to contribute to the ongoing discussion of how seventeenth-century political literature can best be read and understood. (shrink)

This article develops a Wittgensteinian treatment of the relationship between art and entertainment, combining universal and historically conditioned featu.

ABSTRACT: Since its inception in the eighteenth century, the discipline of the history of science has served a motley collection of extrinsic disciplinary interests, philosophical ideas, and cultural movements. This paper examines the historiographical implications of modernism and postmodernism and shows how they influenced positivist, postpositivist, and sociological interpretations of the Chemical Revolution. It also shows how these interpretations served the disciplinary interests of science, philosophy, and sociology, respectively, and it points toward a model of the history of science as (...) history. (shrink)

In the layered and deeply modernist approach, this chapter explores the tension between Westworld as an entertainment commodity and Westworld as “high art” utilizing the kind of self‐reference that typifies aesthetic modernism. To do this, elements of the series are connected to classic works of aesthetic theory by Immanuel Kant, Clement Greenberg, Theodor Adorno, and Arthur Danto. Michael Crichton's original Westworld film of 1973 selected the Western as the prime focus of the amusement park, grounding the story in (...) the very notion of kitsch consumerism and heteronomous commodification. Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy's reworking of The Original, the first episode of Westworld, presents further layers ‐ a developed production team, engineers, “narrative and design department”, and corporate executives. Thus the show explicitly draws on the kitsch elements of the Western to highlight entertainment art as commodity. (shrink)

In Aesthetic Legacies, Lucian Krukowski traces the influence of three nineteenth-century theories of art through twentieth-century modernism and into the postmodernist present. Following the theories of Kant, Schopenhauer, and Hegel, Krukowski first discusses how each philosopher locates the aesthetic within the framework of the philosophical system. He then identifies each theory through a dominant theme and traces the transformations of these themes into later thought and practice. The Kantian legacy originates in the theme of beauty and continues through an examination (...) of aesthetic taste into the modernist concern with artistic form. Schopenhauer's legacy moves from the dynamics of will into the themes of creative expression and artistic intentionality. Hegel's identification of art as a symbol of spirit's evolution is traced through the themes of artistic progress and cultural criticism. Krukowski interprets late modernism as a period in which the continuing transformation of aesthetic themes is arrested and congeals into dogma. This precipitates the reaction we now call postmodernism. The author first examines postmodernism through its various rejections of modernist dogma and, in the book's concluding section, evokes the alternative ideologies and practices that characterize present-day art. (shrink)