The Cultural Promise Of The Aesthetic

Author : Monique Roelofs
Publisher : A&C Black
ISBN 13 : 1472528832
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.34/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic written by Monique Roelofs and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2014-04-10 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aesthetic desire and distaste prime everyday life in surprising ways. The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic casts much-needed light on the complex mix of meanings our aesthetic activities weave into cultural existence. Anchoring aesthetic experience in our relationships with persons, places, and things, Monique Roelofs explores aesthetic life as a multimodal, socially embedded, corporeal endeavor. Highlighting notions of relationality, address, and promising, this compelling study shows these concepts at work in visions of beauty, ugliness, detail, nation, ignorance, and cultural boundary. Unexpected aesthetic pleasures and pains crop up in sites where passion, perception, rationality, and imagination go together but also are in conflict. Bonds between aesthetics and politics are forged and reforged. Cross-disciplinary in outlook, and engaging the work of theorists and artists ranging from David Hume to Theodor W. Adorno, Frantz Fanon, Clarice Lispector, and Barbara Johnson, The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic lays open the interpretive web that gives aesthetic agency its vast reach.

Author : Peter Uwe Hohendahl
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 0801469279
Total Pages : 200 pages
Book Rating : 4.75/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Fleeting Promise of Art written by Peter Uwe Hohendahl and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-15 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A discussion of Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory is bound to look significantly different today than it would have looked when the book was first published in 1970, or when it first appeared in English translation in the 1980s. In The Fleeting Promise of Art, Peter Uwe Hohendahl reexamines Aesthetic Theory along with Adorno’s other writings on aesthetics in light of the unexpected return of the aesthetic to today’s cultural debates. Is Adorno’s aesthetic theory still relevant today? Hohendahl answers this question with an emphatic yes. As he shows, a careful reading of the work exposes different questions and arguments today than it did in the past. Over the years Adorno’s concern over the fate of art in a late capitalist society has met with everything from suspicion to indifference. In part this could be explained by relative unfamiliarity with the German dialectical tradition in North America. Today’s debate is better informed, more multifaceted, and further removed from the immediate aftermath of the Cold War and of the shadow of postmodernism. Adorno’s insistence on the radical autonomy of the artwork has much to offer contemporary discussions of art and the aesthetic in search of new responses to the pervasive effects of a neoliberal art market and culture industry. Focusing specifically on Adorno’s engagement with literary works, Hohendahl shows how radically transformative Adorno’s ideas have been and how thoroughly they have shaped current discussions in aesthetics. Among the topics he considers are the role of art in modernism and postmodernism, the truth claims of artworks, the function of the ugly in modern artworks, the precarious value of the literary tradition, and the surprising significance of realism for Adorno.

Author : Monique Roelofs
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231550782
Total Pages : 252 pages
Book Rating : 4.89/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Arts of Address written by Monique Roelofs and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-21 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modes of address are forms of signification that we direct at living beings, things, and places, and they at us and at each other. Seeing is a form of address. So are speaking, singing, and painting. Initiating or responding to such calls, we participate in encounters with the world. Widely used yet less often examined in its own right, the notion of address cries out for analysis. Monique Roelofs offers a pathbreaking systematic model of the field of address and puts it to work in the arts, critical theory, and social life. She shows how address props up finely hewn modalities of relationality, agency, and normativity. Address exceeds a one-on-one pairing of cultural productions with their audiences. As ardently energizing tiny slippages and snippets as fueling larger impulses in the society, it activates and reaestheticizes registers of race, gender, class, coloniality, and cosmopolitanism. In readings of writers and artists ranging from Julio Cortázar to Jamaica Kincaid and from Martha Rosler to Pope.L, Roelofs demonstrates the centrality of address to freedom and a critical political aesthetics. Under the banner of a unified concept of address, Hume, Kant, and Foucault strike up conversations with Benjamin, Barthes, Althusser, Fanon, Anzaldúa, and Butler. Drawing on a wide array of artistic and theoretical sources and challenging disciplinary boundaries, the book illuminates address’s significance to cultural existence and to our reflexive aesthetic engagement in it. Keeping the reader on the lookout for flash fiction that pops up out of nowhere and for insurgent whisperings that take to the air, Arts of Address explores the aliveness of being alive.

Author : Kathleen M. Higgins
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 331943893X
Total Pages : 265 pages
Book Rating : 4.31/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Artistic Visions and the Promise of Beauty written by Kathleen M. Higgins and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-03-06 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines the motives behind rejections of beauty often found within contemporary art practice, where much critically acclaimed art is deliberately ugly and alienating. It reflects on the nature and value of beauty, asking whether beauty still has a future in art and what role it can play in our lives generally. The volume discusses the possible “end of art,” what art is, and the relation between art and beauty beyond their historically Western horizons to include perspectives from Asia. The individual chapters address a number of interrelated issues, including: art, beauty and the sacred; beauty as a source of joy and consolation; beauty as a bridge between the natural and the human; beauty and the human form; the role of curatorial practice in defining art; order and creativity; and the distinction between art and craft. The volume offers a valuable addition to cross-cultural dialogue and, in particular, to the sparse literature on art and beauty in comparative context. It demonstrates the relevance of the rich tradition of Asian aesthetics and the vibrant practices of contemporary art in Asia to Western discussions about the future of art and the role of beauty.

Author : Alexander Nehamas
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691148651
Total Pages : 198 pages
Book Rating : 4.56/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Only a Promise of Happiness written by Alexander Nehamas and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-10-17 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book imparts the fundamental legal understanding required for the purchase and sale of marketing rights for publishing house products. The aim is to enable the reader to competently deal with publishing contracts of every kind. Specific areas of focus include classic copyright and publishing law, the role of collecting societies, issues related to subsidiary rights and their exploitation, as well as questions regarding royalties.

Author : Sander L. Gilman
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780691070537
Total Pages : 422 pages
Book Rating : 4.39/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Making the Body Beautiful written by Sander L. Gilman and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nose reconstructions have been common in India for centuries. South Korea, Brazil, and Israel have become international centers for procedures ranging from eyelid restructuring to buttock lifts and tummy tucks. Argentina has the highest rate of silicone implants in the world. Around the globe, aesthetic surgery has become a cultural and medical fixture. Sander Gilman seeks to explain why by presenting the first systematic world history and cultural theory of aesthetic surgery. Touching on subjects as diverse as getting a "nose job" as a sweet-sixteen birthday present and the removal of male breasts in seventh-century Alexandria, Gilman argues that aesthetic surgery has such universal appeal because it helps people to "pass," to be seen as a member of a group with which they want to or need to identify. Gilman begins by addressing basic questions about the history of aesthetic surgery. What surgical procedures have been performed? Which are considered aesthetic and why? Who are the patients? What is the place of aesthetic surgery in modern culture? He then turns his attention to that focus of countless human anxieties: the nose. Gilman discusses how people have reshaped their noses to repair the ravages of war and disease (principally syphilis), to match prevailing ideas of beauty, and to avoid association with negative images of the "Jew," the "Irish," the "Oriental," or the "Black." He examines how we have used aesthetic surgery on almost every conceivable part of the body to try to pass as younger, stronger, thinner, and more erotic. Gilman also explores some of the extremes of surgery as personal transformation, discussing transgender surgery, adult circumcision and foreskin restoration, the enhancement of dueling scars, and even a performance artist who had herself altered to resemble the Mona Lisa. The book draws on an extraordinary range of sources. Gilman is as comfortable discussing Nietzsche, Yeats, and Darwin as he is grisly medical details, Michael Jackson, and Barbra Streisand's decision to keep her own nose. The book contains dozens of arresting images of people before, during, and after surgery. This is a profound, provocative, and engaging study of how humans have sought to change their lives by transforming their bodies.

Author : Peter Uwe Hohendahl
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 0801469287
Total Pages : 200 pages
Book Rating : 4.82/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Fleeting Promise of Art written by Peter Uwe Hohendahl and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-18 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A discussion of Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory is bound to look significantly different today than it would have looked when the book was first published in 1970, or when it first appeared in English translation in the 1980s. In The Fleeting Promise of Art, Peter Uwe Hohendahl reexamines Aesthetic Theory along with Adorno’s other writings on aesthetics in light of the unexpected return of the aesthetic to today’s cultural debates. Is Adorno’s aesthetic theory still relevant today? Hohendahl answers this question with an emphatic yes. As he shows, a careful reading of the work exposes different questions and arguments today than it did in the past. Over the years Adorno’s concern over the fate of art in a late capitalist society has met with everything from suspicion to indifference. In part this could be explained by relative unfamiliarity with the German dialectical tradition in North America. Today’s debate is better informed, more multifaceted, and further removed from the immediate aftermath of the Cold War and of the shadow of postmodernism. Adorno’s insistence on the radical autonomy of the artwork has much to offer contemporary discussions of art and the aesthetic in search of new responses to the pervasive effects of a neoliberal art market and culture industry. Focusing specifically on Adorno’s engagement with literary works, Hohendahl shows how radically transformative Adorno’s ideas have been and how thoroughly they have shaped current discussions in aesthetics. Among the topics he considers are the role of art in modernism and postmodernism, the truth claims of artworks, the function of the ugly in modern artworks, the precarious value of the literary tradition, and the surprising significance of realism for Adorno.

Author : Jacques Rancière
Publisher : Polity
ISBN 13 : 0745646301
Total Pages : 152 pages
Book Rating : 4.05/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Aesthetics and Its Discontents written by Jacques Rancière and published by Polity. This book was released on 2009-08-24 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Only yesterday aesthetics stood accused of concealing cultural games of social distinction. Now it is considered a parasitic discourse from which artistic practices must be freed. But aesthetics is not a discourse. It is an historical regime of the identification of art. This regime is paradoxical, because it founds the autonomy of art only at the price of suppressing the boundaries separating its practices and its objects from those of everyday life and of making free aesthetic play into the promise of a new revolution. Aesthetics is not a politics by accident but in essence. But this politics operates in the unresolved tension between two opposed forms of politics: the first consists in transforming art into forms of collective life, the second in preserving from all forms of militant or commercial compromise the autonomy that makes it a promise of emancipation. This constitutive tension sheds light on the paradoxes and transformations of critical art. It also makes it possible to understand why today's calls to free art from aesthetics are misguided and lead to a smothering of both aesthetics and politics in ethics.

Author : Herbert Marcuse
Publisher : Beacon Press
ISBN 13 : 0807024007
Total Pages : 110 pages
Book Rating : 4.03/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Aesthetic Dimension written by Herbert Marcuse and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2014-11-18 with total page 110 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Developing a concept briefly introduced in Counterrevolution and Revolt, Marcuse here addresses the shortcomings of Marxist aesthetic theory and explores a dialectical aesthetic in which art functions as the conscience of society. Marcuse argues that art is the only form or expression that can take up where religion and philosophy fail and contends that aesthetics offers the last refuge for two-dimensional criticism in a one-dimensional society.

Author : Timothy Aubry
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674988965
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.65/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Guilty Aesthetic Pleasures written by Timothy Aubry and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-03 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For scholars invested in supporting or challenging dominant ideologies, the beauty of literature seemed frivolous, even complicit with social iniquities. Suspicion of aesthetics became a way to establish the rigor of one’s thought and the purity of one’s politics. Yet aesthetic pleasure never disappeared, Timothy Aubrey writes. It went underground.