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Das Konzept ‚Mängelwesen‘ hat seine vielleicht bekannteste Formulierung auf dem Feld der Geisteswissenschaften durch die philosophische Reflexion von Arnold Gehlen gefunden. In seinem Buch Der Mensch. Seine Natur und seine Stellung in der Welt (1940) entwirft er die nicht unumstrittene These, dass der Mensch ein solches ‚Mängelwesen‘ sei, da er weder somatisch noch auf dem Feld der Instinkte eine adäquate Anpassung an die Welt aufweisen könne. Im Vergleich zu anderen Lebensformen und Spezies sei er zudem arm an Mitteln zur Befriedigung sinnlicher Bedürfnisse. Dies führt nach Gehlen dazu, dass der Mensch situativ stetig interagieren muss und somit seine Zwecksetzungen gestalterisch einholt, um die eigene perzeptive und instinktive Mangelhaftigkeit zu kompensieren und Erfahrungsmöglichkeiten zu modellieren bzw. ggf. erhöhen. Der grundlegend anthropologische Diskurs zur Mangelhaftigkeit scheint deshalb konstitutiv mit Formen – im Sinne von Konzepten, Praktiken und nicht zuletzt Kulturtechniken – des Gestaltens zusammenzuhängen, die sich historisch konkretisieren. Der Band Figurationen des Mangels in Ästhetik, Design- und Kunstpraktiken geht dieser Erkundung von singulären Entwürfen und theoretisch-historischen Konstellationen nach, den Erscheinungen der Mangelhaftigkeit und des gestalterischen Umgangs mit ihren medialen und sinnlich-somatischen Ausformungen. Dabei werden nicht allein traditionelle Konzepte und Denkfiguren der Philosophie wie etwa jene des Supplements, der Prothese oder der Entlastung neu analysiert, sondern auch zeitgenössische medienästhetische und designtheoretische Ansätze. In dieser Hinsicht werden gestalterische Erprobungen (auf dem Gebiet sowohl der Kunst wie des Designs) sowie Körper- und Medienkonfigurationen, die sich durch spezifische Praktiken ereignen, als Problemfelder eines Diskurses des ‚Mängelwesens‘ betrachtet.

A Primer on Theatre and Aesthetics explores the philosophy of arts from the Ancient Greeks to our contemporary world. What began as a debate in a monoculture eventually mushroomed into a vision for aesthetic diversity and inclusion as declarative statements receded in importance and subjective perceptions became fundamental. Studies in aesthetics often focus on music or the visual arts whereas this volume explores the nexus between philosophical perspectives and theatre. The purpose for theatre is wholeness (catharsis) and philosophy is the guide for that analysis.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. It is free to read at Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Wherever on the globe anyone sets foot, they find people immersed in matters aesthetic. In UNESCO's definition, there can be no culture that lacks an aesthetic life. Aesthetic life is in this sense a cultural universal. At the same time, aesthetic engagement has a geography. While all cultures have an aesthetic, no single aesthetic belongs to all cultures. The rules of aesthetic engagement vary by culture. How should aesthetics proceed if we take this fact of aesthetic diversity, rather than the presumption of aesthetic universality as our starting point? How should we theorize the cultural origins and cultural basis of aesthetic diversity? How should we think about the value and normativity of aesthetic diversity? To model what the turn toward diversity might look like in aesthetic inquiry, the four authors of this book each defend a different account of aesthetic diversity, and together they engage in a collective dialogue about these issues. The Geography of Taste will interest students in aesthetics courses as well as others interested in novel, global approaches to aesthetics.

In this book, Sólveig Guðmundsdóttir uncovers the crucial role of esotericism in the art of the Vienna Actionists—a group of Austrian neo-avant-garde artists, infamous for their transgressive performance art. Addressing this frequently overlooked aspect of Actionism, Guðmundsdóttir traces, historicizes, and examines the esoteric discourses in selected works: the collective manifesto Die Blutorgel (1962), Rudolf Schwarzkogler's text Das Ästhetische Panorama (1967/68) and the performances Abreaktionsspiel (1970) by Hermann Nitsch, and Zerreißprobe (1970) by Günter Brus. Mapping out the various discursive entanglements as they appear in the works, i.e. between esotericism and psychoanalysis, fascism, gender, sexuality, aesthetics, science, orientalism and religious discourses, the author illustrates and establishes the importance of esoteric traditions for the Actionists'art and subversive practices. The historical analysis of the artworks reflects on the cultural nexus of post-war Austria, as well as the relations between radical politics, countercultures and esotericism, and how they appear in Actionism. Guðmundsdóttir argues that to survey the historical placement of esotericism is vital for understanding not only the context of their works, but also the contradictory image of the Actionists as both anti-authoritarian and reactionary artists.

Aesthetics after Modernism defends the ongoing relevance of aesthetics to art after modernism. Diarmuid Costello traces the art world's rejection of aesthetics to Clement Greenberg's success in co-opting the discourse of aesthetics, notably Kant's aesthetics, to underwrite a formalist theory of aesthetic value. This has led to Kant's aesthetics being tarred with the brush of Greenbergian formalism; it has also encouraged subsequent critics and theorists to miss the resources in Kant's aesthetics for capturing our cognitive relation to precisely the kinds of art that interest them. There is a tendency to assume that Kant's aesthetics cannot speak to the more cognitive aspects of our engagement with art. Costello offers an interpretation of Kant's aesthetics, grounded in his theory of art, that aims to show otherwise. Conceptual Art provides an instructive test case: here is an art that, at least in its more purist forms, claimed to forgo sensible properties altogether, in favour of direct engagement with ideas. But if Kant's aesthetics can be shown to accommodate our cognitive relation to works with no sensible features relevant to their appreciation, it should be able to accommodate any work of art. Aesthetics after Modernism proceeds in three steps: Part I sets out the internal structure of Greenbergian theory, focusing on the relation between his modernism and formalism, before critiquing each in turn. Part II unpacks the afterlife of Greenbergian theory by considering one sympathetic and one antipathetic response to his modernism and formalism in turn: Michael Fried and Rosalind Krauss for the former, Thierry de Duve and Arthur C. Danto for the latter. Part III returns to Kant's aesthetics, demonstrating that Kant's account of art as an'expression of aesthetic ideas'is well placed to address the semantic content of genres such as Conceptual Art more commonly thought to exceed its grasp.

Michael Mitias presents, explains, and defends in some detail the features that make an artwork great – magic, universality, and the test of time. Although some aestheticians, beginning with Longinus, discussed these features during the past two millennia, they did not analyze them comprehensively, nor did they justify them from the standpoint of a satisfactory conception of the nature of art. In this book, the author first explains the nature of the features that make an artifact art and then proceeds to establish the validity of his thesis on firm epistemological and ontological foundations. In his endeavor to explicate the nature of this foundation, the author answers four questions. First, what is the genesis of the artwork? What makes it art? He answers this question by advancing a concept of aesthetic depth. The essence of this depth is human meaning. Second, under what perceptual conditions does this depth come to life in the process of aesthetic perception? Third, what is the role of the concept of aesthetic depth in the analysis of the nature of the great artwork? How does the concept of aesthetic depth function as a principle of explanation? Fourth, how can we justify the attribution of magic, universality, and the test of time to the great work of art? In short, an understanding of the genesis of the artwork, aesthetic depth, aesthetic value, and aesthetic perception is indispensable for an adequate conception of greatness in art.

This volume presents a selection of aesthetic and art theoretical writings by the internationally renowned philosopher Aleš Erjavec from the 1990s to the present. Erjavec was an active participant in the artistic revolt in Slovenia throughout the 1980 and became one of the most notable international theorists of late- and post-socialist developments in art. His work also extended to new, emergent forms of contemporary art and visual culture in global art and culture networks. The diverse contexts and artists with which he has engaged gives him a unique critical perspective on major debates in philosophical aesthetics and art theory.

Offering an alternative mode of visual cultural analysis to the prevalent discursive model, this book proposes to situate analysis of Image within ‘formal'analyses of culture experience.Specifically, the discussion draws on theories of affective aesthetics with the view of addressing the sensual form of culture (i.e. ‘cultural form'). Therefore, the volume puts forward a mode of formalist analysis in visual cultural research which takes purchase on the idea of ‘cultural form'. A continuum of formalist attention between Image analysis (visual media, industrial design) and probing of ‘cultural forms'establishes the theoretical underpinning of the book. These concepts are expounded through a case study which looks at formal experimentations and debates arising from 1960s avant-garde artistic practices in London.

Essays by Adorno on art and cinema, available in English for the first time. In Without Model, Theodor W. Adorno strikingly demonstrates the intellectual range for which he is known. Taking the premise of the title as his guiding principle, that artistic and philosophical thought must eschew preconceptions and instead adapt itself to its time, circumstances, and object, Adorno presents a series of essays reflecting on culture at different levels, from the details of individual products to the social conditions of their production. He shows his more nostalgic side in the childhood reminiscences of ‘Amorbach', but also his acute sociocultural analysis on the central topic of the culture industry. He criticizes attempts to maintain tradition in music and visual art, arguing against a restorative approach by stressing the modernity and individuality of historical works in the context of their time. In all of these essays, available for the first time in English, Adorno displays the remarkable thinking of one both steeped in tradition and dedicated to seeing beyond it.

Este libro aborda las principales cuestiones y retos de la estética y de la teoría del arte en el cada vez más complejo contexto de la cultura digital. Ofrece un amplio, profundo y detallado estudio de los nuevos interrogantes, categorías y conceptos emergidos en el campo artístico a consecuencia de las transformaciones provocadas por la revolución informática, poniendo especial énfasis en lo acontecido en las dos primeras décadas del siglo XXI. La perspectiva de análisis filosófico de las nuevas prácticas artísticas entabla en este escrito un continuo y muy personal diálogo con las metodologías de los Estudios visuales y de la Historia del arte. Con ello se trata de facilitar la comprensión de las principales estrategias artísticas más comprometidas con la reflexión crítica sobre la era digital, así como atisbar sus líneas de evolución en el futuro. El texto hace hincapié en problemáticas centrales en el arte reciente, como la producción de subjetividad, la diferencia, la identidad, la participación…, analizándolas en su relación específica con algunos de los nuevos desarrollos tecnológicos (redes sociales, inteligencia artificial, realidad aumentada, realidad virtual, blockchain…). Un libro, en definitiva, fundamental para la compresión del impacto que la evolución digital está teniendo sobre el desarrollo de la creación artística en nuestro presente, así como acerca de los nuevos caminos que se abren para su teorización, difusión y comercialización.

Schoonheid verschijnt in de meest uiteenlopende gedaanten. Dit boek brengt ons van een bankje in Delft en een park in Amsterdam, langs het Pantheon en de Santa Maria sopra Minerva-basiliek in Rome, tot bij een kleurrijk vogeltje in het regenwoud van Nieuw-Guinea. Toch is vandaag niet iedereen meer overtuigd van het besef dat schoonheid zo onmisbaar is. Door heel wat critici wordt ze gezien als een onhaalbaar ideaal. Erger nog, schoonheid zou vooral artificiële verlangens in het leven roepen en ficties creëren die maar weinig te maken hebben met het bestaan van alledag. Dit boek geeft een antwoord op de vraag waarom het ideaal van de schoonheid vandaag, ook in kunstmilieus, onder vuur is komen te liggen. In een snelwandeling langs een aantal grote namen uit de kunstgeschiedenis en met de hulp van talrijke illlustraties reconstrueert cultuur-en kunstfilosoof Stéphane Symons hoe concepten als het sublieme, het lelijke en het reële het begrip'schoonheid'van de troon dreigen te stoten. Bovenal reikt hij argumenten aan om het klassieke ideaal in ere te herstellen.

Why human nature is an aesthetic phenomenon—and why we need art and philosophy to understand ourselvesIn The Entanglement, philosopher Alva Noë explores the inseparability of life, art, and philosophy, arguing that we have greatly underestimated what this entangled reality means for understanding human nature.Life supplies art with its raw materials, but art, Noë argues, remakes life by giving us resources to live differently. Our lives are permeated with the aesthetic. Indeed, human nature is an aesthetic phenomenon, and art—our most direct and authentic way of engaging the aesthetic—is the truest way of understanding ourselves. All this suggests that human nature is not a natural phenomenon. Neither biology, cognitive science, nor AI can tell a complete story of us, and we can no more pin ourselves down than we can fix or settle on the meaning of an artwork. Even more, art and philosophy are the means to set ourselves free, at least to some degree, from convention, habit, technology, culture, and even biology. In making these provocative claims, Noë explores examples of entanglement—in artworks and seeing, writing and speech, and choreography and dancing—and examines a range of scientific efforts to explain the human.Challenging the notions that art is a mere cultural curiosity and that philosophy has been outmoded by science, The Entanglement offers a new way of thinking about human nature, the limits of natural science in understanding the human, and the essential role of art and philosophy in trying to know ourselves.

Sjoerd van Tuinen argues for the inseparability of matter and manner in the form of a group portrait of Leibniz, Bergson, Whitehead, Souriau, Simondon, Deleuze, Stengers, and Agamben. Examining afresh the 16th-century style of mannerism, this book synthesizes philosophy and aesthetics to demonstrate not only the contemporary relevance of artists such as Michelangelo or Arcimboldo but their broader significance as incorporating a form of modal thinking and perceiving.While looking at mannerism as a style that spurned the balance and proportion of earlier Renaissance models in favour of compositional instability and tension, this book also conceives of mannerism a-historically to investigate what it can tell us about continental modal metaphysics. Whereas analytical metaphysics privileges logical essence and asks whether something is possible, real, contingent, or necessary, continental philosophy privileges existence and counts as many modes as there are ways of coming-into-being.In three main parts, van Tuinen first explores the ontological, aesthetic, and ethical ramifications of this distinction. He then develops this through an extended study of Leibniz as a modal and indeed mannerist philosopher, before outlining in the final part a (neo)-mannerist aesthetics that incorporates diagrammatics, alchemy, and contemporary technologies of speculative design.

Erstmals liegt mit diesem Buch eine einbändige Überblicksdarstellung zur Kunsttheorie vor: von Aristoteles und Platon über Hegel und Heidegger bis zu Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag und den Kontroversen um die documenta fifteen. Eindrucksvoll stellt Hubert Locher dar, wie über Kunst im Laufe der Jahrhunderte reflektiert und geschrieben wurde. Die Kunsttheorie, also das kritische Nachdenken über Kunst, hat ihr Fundament in der griechischen Antike. Die Geschichte der Kunsttheorie als Theorie der bildenden Künste allerdings beginnt erst in der Frühen Neuzeit mit Leon Battista Alberti oder Albrecht Dürer als bedeutenden Exponenten. Mit der frühen Kunstkritik des 18. Jahrhunderts und der Adressierung eines breiteren Publikums nimmt die Diskussion eine neue Richtung, die sich an der Schwelle der Moderne weiter auffächert, wenn Künstlermanifeste aufkommen und eine abstrakte, philosophisch-wissenschaftliche Auseinandersetzung einsetzt. In der zweiten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts wird u.a. von Theodor W. Adorno und einer neuen kritischen Theorie die politische Dimension der Kunst thematisiert. Dieses umfassende Panorama vielfältiger Positionen, Theorien und Denkweisen ist das kommende Standardwerk für alle, die sich mit Kunst beschäftigen.

An engaging exploration of the meaning and power of art that looks at popular theories through the ages. One of the most astonishing aspects of the discourse on contemporary art is the firm and unwavering belief that art has the power to transform society for the better. There seems to be a consensus around the idea that art, especially visual art, is greatly suited to addressing all manner of social, political, economic, ecological, and other imbalances. Celebrated as a powerful remedy for social grievances, art finds its justification in the service it seems to provide to society. But as art historian Leonhard Emmerling contends in this timely volume, this presumptuous heroism shows willful blindness towards art's subjugation to contradictions inherent in social relations. He argues that the narrative of the power of art has its specific history. In trying to reconstruct this history in Art of Diremption, he discovers instead art's fundamental powerlessness as the foundation for art's political relevance. Art is weak, argues Emmerling. It, therefore, requires an ethics of weakness, which rejects the discourse of impact and power to enable a politics of art containing the permanence of reflection, the unreliability of thought, and the emergence of form as the event of the new. With a meticulously studied and well-argued case about the “powerlessness of art,” Art of Diremption will be an important contribution to the field of art, aesthetics, and philosophy.

Klassische Autonomiekonzepte, die Kunst als selbstbestimmt und selbstzweckhaft denken, werden einer in ökonomische, politische, soziale und ökologische Zusammenhänge verwickelten künstlerischen Praxis der Gegenwart kaum gerecht - und bleiben doch für ein Verständnis dieser Kunst unerlässlich. Aus verschiedenen disziplinären Perspektiven gehen die Beiträger•innen des Bandes den Widersprüchlichkeiten einer falschen Gegenüberstellung von Autonomie und Engagement nach und bestimmen gegen Tendenzen einer einseitigen Funktionalisierung differenzielle Strategien und heteronome Verflechtungen künstlerischer Praxis neu.

This book is aimed to explain the creation of artworks and their evaluation, and offers a new concept of aesthetics and beauty of artworks. Following and reconstructing Peircean realist epistemology, Aesthetics is one of the three normative sciences, along with Logic (Theoretic) and Ethics, which are the three different modes of representing reality. Aesthetics is the mode of artistic representation of reality, and the created artworks are judged beautiful when proven as an aesthetic true representation of reality. Artists aim to represent reality truly, and hence, beautifully, in order to enhance our knowledge of it and to afford us insights on how to better conduct our life in society.

Quasi a sua insaputa, nel corso degli anni, Umberto Eco ha scritto un autentico trattato sull'arte. Un opus magnum frammentario, discontinuo, divagante, stratificato e, appunto, inintenzionale. Vi confluiscono saggi, presentazioni, conferenze, articoli e Bustine di Minerva. Materiali eterogenei in larga parte dispersi e dimenticati che, ora, per la prima volta, sono stati ritrovati, riorganizzati e riletti da Vincenzo Trione. È un trattato segreto e sorprendente, caratterizzato dall'inconfondibile stile di Eco: un misto di originalità interpretativa, di curiosità intellettuale, di fantasia, di erudizione e di ironia. Vi incontriamo meditazioni estetologiche, studi semiologici, indagini sociologiche e incursioni militanti. E ancora: investigazioni sulle poetiche del Novecento, sulle avanguardie e su movimenti come l'Informale e l'arte programmata. Molte pagine sono dedicate ad artisti-compagni di strada (tra gli altri, Arman, Nanni Balestrini, Gianfranco Baruchello, Eugenio Carmi, Fabio Mauri, Ugo Mulas e Tullio Pericoli). Rivelatori i passaggi su alcune figure decisive: la bellezza, la bruttezza, l'imperfezione, il kitsch, la vertigine della lista. Inattesi gli interventi sullo statuto della critica d'arte e quelli, d'impronta civile, sul futuro dei musei e sul destino del patrimonio culturale. Ne emerge un involontario e inquieto teorico criticostorico dell'arte. Che sembra abbandonarsi a ininterrotte scorribande. In realtà, Eco tende a ritornare sempre sulle medesime ossessioni: l'opera come luogo aperto, destinato a essere abitato e continuato dallo spettatore; l'esperienza del fare come avventura fondata sulla centralità del “formare”. Infine, l'arte come problema, come interrogazione. Il libro è accompagnato da un'inedita galleria di ritratti di Tullio Pericoli.

This book focuses on the reconfiguration of aesthetic anthropology into an anthropological problem of cogitation, opening up a fascinating new dialogue between the domains of anthropology, philosophy, and art. Tarek Elhaik embarks on an inquiry composed of a series of cogitations based on fieldwork in an ecology of artistic and scientific practices: from conceptual art exhibitions to architectural environments; from photographic montages to the videotaping of spirit seances; and from artistic interventions in natural history museums to ongoing dialogues between performance artists and marine scientists. The chapters examine the image-work, ethical demands, and aesthetic struggles of interlocutors including artists Mathias Goeritz, Mounir Fatmi, Silvia Gruner, Joan Jonas, and Patricia Lagarde.

Is the celebrated elegance of Cycladic marble figurines an effect their Early Bronze Age producers intended? Can one adequately appreciate an Assyrian regal statue described by a cuneiform inscription as beautiful? What to make of the apparent aesthetic richness of the traditional cultures of Melanesia, which, however, engage in virtually no recognizable aesthetic discourse? Questions such as these have been formulated and discussed by scholars of remote cultures against the backdrop of a general scepticism about the prospects of escaping the conditioning of one's own aesthetic culture and attuning to the norms of a remote one. This book makes a radical move: it treats the remote observers'lack of aesthetic insight not as a hindrance to aesthetic analysis, but as a condition requiring an aesthetic theory that would make room for an aesthetic analysis independent of the model of competent aesthetic judgement or appreciation. Objects of Authority represents a rare effort at bringing together methods and concepts that are often addressed by separate disciplines. It will appeal to scholars and advanced students working on philosophical, art-historical, and anthropological theories of visual art and material culture.

A collection that tracks the astonishing impact of one vernacular aesthetic category—the cute—on postwar and contemporary art.The Cute tracks the astonishing impact of a single aesthetic category on post-war and contemporary art, and on the vast range of cultural practices and discourses on which artists draw. From robots and cat videos to ice cream socials, The Cute explores the ramifications of an aesthetic “of” or “about” minorness—or what is perceived to be diminutive, subordinate, and above all, unthreatening—on the shifting forms and contents of art today. This anthology is the first of its kind to show how contemporary artists have worked on and transformed the cute, in ways that not only complexify its meaning, but also reshape their own artistic practices. Artists surveyed includePeggy Ahwesh, Cosima Von Bonin, Nayland Blake, Paul Chan, Adrian Howells, Juliana Huxtable, Larry Johnson, Mike Kelley, Dean Kenning, Wyndham Lewis, Jeff Koons, Sean-Kierre Lyons, Mammalian Diving Reflex, Alake Shilling, Annette Messager, Mariko Mori, Takashi Murakami, Charlemagne Palestine, David Robbins, Mika Rottenberg, Allen Ruppersberg, Jack Smith, Kara Walker, Andy Warhol, Yoshitomo NaraWriters include Sasha Archibald, Roland Barthes, Leigh Claire La Berge, Lauren Berlant, Ian Bogost, Jennifer Doyle, Lee Edelman, Adrienne Edwards, Lewis Gordon, Rosemarie Garland-Thompson, Stephen Jay Gould, Lori Merish, John Morreall, Juliane Rebentisch, Frances Richard, Carrie Rickey, Friedrich Schiller, Peter Schjeldahl, Kanako Shiokawa, Angelik Vizcarrondo-Laboy, Kevin Young

What can philosophy reveal about painting and how might it deepen our understanding of this enduring art form? Philosophy of Painting investigates the complex relationship between the painted surface and the depicted subject, opening up current debates to address questions concerning the historicality of art. Embracing contemporary painting, it examines topics such as the post-medium condition and the digital divide, and the work of artists such as Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Amy Sillman and Katharina Grosse. Illustrated with 24 colour plates and highly readable throughout, Philosophy of Painting provides a philosophically rigorous defence of the relevance of painting in the 21st century, making an original contribution to the major ideas informing painting as an art. Here is a clear and coherent account of the contemporary significance of painting and the pressures and possibilities that distinguish it from other art forms.

What does it mean to look? How does looking relate to damage? These are the fundamental questions addressed in Overlooking Damage. From the Roman triumph to the iconoclasm of ISIS and the Taliban to the aerial views of looted landscapes and destroyed temples visible on Google, the relationship between beauty and violence is far more intimate than we sometimes acknowledge. Jonah Siegel makes the daring argument that a thoughtful reaction to images of damage need not stop at melancholy, but can lead us to a new reckoning. Would the objects we admire be more beautiful if they were not injured or displaced, if they did not remind us of unbearable violence? Siegel takes up writers from the time of the French Revolution to today who have reacted to the depredations of revolutionary iconoclasm, imperial looting, and industrial capitalism, and proposes that in these authors we may find resources with which to navigate our contemporary situation. Deftly bringing the methods of literary studies to bear on important debates in the study of heritage, archaeology, and visual culture, Overlooking Damage reflects on the ways in which concepts of beauty intersect with periods of epochal violence in an attempt to resist the separation of broken things from the worlds in which they have come to be embedded.

We encounter in our lives things and situations that elicit from us special forms of attention. They affect and inform us in various ways, drawing us in and holding us in their grasp or turning us away. Works of art of all sorts, and nature in its myriad manifestations, exemplify these luring and repelling qualities and potencies. Dimensions of Aesthetic Encounters explores central perceptual, interpretative, and semiotic dimensions of these encounters, combining a wide range of examples and intellectual resources from pragmatist, hermeneutical, and semiotic frameworks. Practicing a kind of'method of rotation'Robert E. Innis breaks down barriers in aesthetic theory and shows their complementary powers. Recurring themes link each chapter, throwing a powerful light on aesthetic encounters by foregrounding such pivotal notions as play, fundedness and the role of memory, the defining quality of an artwork, energies of objects, potencies, rhythm, form, presentational abstraction, medium, symbolization, intuition, role of the body, and the non-argumentative nature of art.

El arte contemporáneo goza de actualidad. Apenas hay ciudad que no tenga un centro dedicado a él. Existen multitud de cátedras y proyectos de investigación destinados a estudiarlo. Pero ¿qué significa exactamente el concepto de arte contemporáneo y a qué contemporaneidad hace referencia? Con este libro, Juliane Rebentisch se propone introducir, desde una teoría del arte entendida como proyecto crítico, un debate aún en curso sobre cuestiones que son fundamentales tanto a nivel teórico-artístico como estético. Sirviéndose de herramientas teóricas que provienen de la filosofía, de las disciplinas particulares de la ciencia del arte, de la crítica, de los curadores y de los artistas, su objetivo es contribuir al desarrollo de un concepto normativo del arte contemporáneo.

This book provides a critical, systematic-analytical, and detailed analysis of creativity in art with special emphasis on the activity of artistic creation and the process of aesthetic perception. Consciously dismissed from the realm of aesthetic discourse during the past century, the book argues that the study of creativity is a primary task of aesthetic theory; understanding its dynamics, source, and the conditions under which it happens is a necessary condition for an adequate analysis of the essential nature of the artistic and the aesthetic.

In'Concerning the Spiritual in Art,'Wassily Kandinsky articulates a profound exploration of the intersection between artistic expression and the spiritual dimension of human experience. Written in 1911, this seminal work presents a compelling argument for the transcendental power of art, advocating for an abstraction that goes beyond representational forms. Kandinsky employs a lyrical and philosophical style, weaving together personal anecdotes, theoretical insights, and historical references, reflecting the broader avant-garde movement of the early 20th century that sought to redefine the purpose and impact of art amidst the tumult of modernity. Kandinsky, a pioneer of abstract art, was deeply influenced by his background in music and philosophy, which provided him with unique perspectives on the sensory experiences of color and form. His quest for spiritual enlightenment through art stemmed from his own encounters with the metaphysical, prompting him to break away from traditional artistic conventions. This framework not only illustrates his artistic evolution but also situates him within the larger discourse on the role of artists in society—a response to the rapid changes of his time.'Concerning the Spiritual in Art'is essential reading for art students, scholars, and enthusiasts seeking a deeper understanding of the philosophical foundations of modern art. Kandinsky's insights provide a transformative lens through which to appreciate abstract artistic practices, encouraging readers to contemplate how art can embody profound spiritual truths beyond mere aesthetics.

This book explores how speculative thinking is shaping how we relate to our entangled social, mental, and environmental ecologies. It examines how speculative philosophies and concepts are changing geographical research methods and techniques, whilst also developing how speculative thinking transforms the way human, non-human, and more-than-human things are conceptualised in research practices across the social sciences, arts, and humanities. Offering the first dedicated compendium of geographical engagements with speculation and speculative thinking, the chapters in this edited collection advance debates about how affective, imperceptible, and infra-sensible qualities of environments might be written about through alternative registers and ontologies of experience. Organised around the themes of Ethics, Technologies, and Aesthetics, the book will appeal to those engaging with architecture, Black political theory, fiction, cinema, children's geographies, biotechnologies, philosophy, rural studies, arts practice, and nuclear waste studies as speculative research practices appropriate for addressing contemporary ecological problems.Chapters 1, 3 and 4 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

William Desmond argues that philosophy, religion, and art begin in wonder. Desmond is widely recognized for his original metaphysics and his provocative philosophy of religion. Desmond's extensive writings on aesthetics, art, and literature, however, have received much less attention. Wonder Strikes is the first book-length examination of these dimensions of Desmond's thought. It offers nuanced commentary on his treatment of beauty and the sublime; his accounts of tragedy and comedy; and his argument that, having asked'too much'of art in modernity, we now ask'too little.'Desmond claims that art, philosophy, and religion must recover their ancient kinship and their shared roots in wonder if they are to counter the destructive instrumentalism of our time.

From the 1990s until just before his death, the legendary art critic and philosopher Arthur C. Danto carried out extended conversations about contemporary art with the prominent Italian critic Demetrio Paparoni. Their discussions ranged widely over a vast range of topics, from American pop art and minimalism to abstraction and appropriationism. Yet they continually returned to the concepts at the core of Danto's thinking—posthistory and the end of aesthetics—provocative notions that to this day shape questions about the meaning and future of contemporary art.Art and Posthistory presents these rich dialogues and correspondence, testifying to the ongoing importance of Danto's ideas. It offers readers the opportunity to experience the intellectual excitement of Danto in person, speculating in a freewheeling yet erudite style. Danto and Paparoni discuss figures such as Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp, Franz Kline, Sean Scully, Clement Greenberg, Cindy Sherman, and Wang Guangyi, offering both insightful comments on individual works and sweeping observations about wider issues. On occasion, the artist Mimmo Paladino and the philosopher Mario Perniola join the conversation, enlivening the discussion and adding their own perspectives.The book also features an introductory essay by Paparoni that provides lucid analysis of Danto's thinking, emphasizing where the two disagree as well as what they learned from each other.

This open access book is about exploring interesting borderline cases of art. It discusses the cases of gustatory and olfactory artworks (focusing on food), proprioceptive artworks (dance, martial arts, and rock climbing qua proprioceptive experiences), intellectual artworks (philosophical and scientific theories), as well as the vague limits between painting and photography. The book focuses on the author's research about what counts as art and what does not, as well as on the nature of these limits. Overall, the author defends a very inclusive view,'extending'the limits of art, and he argues for its virtues. Some of the limits discussed concern our senses (our different perceptual modalities), some concern vagueness and fuzzy boundaries between different types of works of art, some concern the amount of human intention and intervention in the process of creation of an artwork, and some concern the border between art and science. In these various ways,by understanding better such borderline cases, Benovsky suggests that we get a better grip on an understanding of the nature of art.

Throughout his career, Robert B. Pippin has examined the relationship between philosophy and the arts. With his writings on film, literature, and visual modernism, he has shown that there are aesthetic objects that cannot be properly understood unless we acknowledge and reflect on the philosophical concerns that are integral to their meaning. His latest book, Philosophy by Other Means, extends this trajectory, offering a collection of essays that present profound considerations of philosophical issues in aesthetics alongside close readings of novels by Henry James, Marcel Proust, and J. M. Coetzee. The arts hold a range of values and ambitions, offering beauty, playfulness, and craftsmanship while deepening our mythologies and enriching the human experience. Some works take on philosophical ambitions, contributing to philosophy in ways that transcend the discipline's traditional analytic and discursive forms. Pippin's claim is twofold: criticism properly understood often requires a form of philosophical reflection, and philosophy is impoverished if it is not informed by critical attention to aesthetic objects. In the first part of the book, he examines how philosophers like Kant, Hegel, and Adorno have considered the relationship between art and philosophy. The second part of the book offers an exploration of how individual artworks might be considered forms of philosophical reflection. Pippin demonstrates the importance of practicing philosophical criticism and shows how the arts can provide key insights that are out of reach for philosophy, at least as traditionally understood.

Today's many popular aesthetic pleasures have a very long history. Paul Duncum considers the historical critical discourses, and socio-political issues raised by aesthetic pleasures in fifteen thematic chapters. Using illustrative examples from the past, present, and across cultures, he challenges the idea of any decline of cultural standards and argues that no grounds exist for cultural pessimism. Refusing to condemn popular culture on the basis of taste, he reserves critique for the socio-political ideologies aesthetics invariably serve.Art history, film, cultural studies, and philosophical aesthetics are each employed to show that the sensory/emotional lures of today's popular culture are mostly identical to those of premodern fine art. They include the violent, the horrific, the sentimental, the exotic, the erotic, and the humorous. Some of these pleasures derive from our evolutionary biology; they are all an important part of what it means to be human, and central to understanding contemporary society. Examples are wide-ranging, including British seaside postcards, Disney films, Nazi propaganda, burlesque, modern advertising, as well as many exemplars of fine art.The book reveals fresh insights for all those studying visual culture, art history, aesthetics, media studies, and media and art education.

This book investigates the ontological state of relations in a unique way. Starting with the notion of system, it shows that the system can be understood as a relational structure, and that relations can be assessed within themselves, with no need to transform relations in elements. “Relations” are understood in contrast to “relational property”: without a relation there is no identity, therefore no existence. What allows us to do that without hypostatizing the relation, and without immediately taking it simply as a causal relation, can be better grasped, possibly, in reference to a few entities that make best display of their systemic nature, for example images, works of art, and virtual bodies.This book shows how virtual bodies are ontological hybrids representing a type of entity that has never appeared in the world before. This entity becomes a phenomenon in interactivity and evades the dichotomy between “external” and “internal”; it is neither a cognitive product of theconsciousness, nor an image of the mind. The user is well aware of experiencing anotherreality, also in the sense of a paradoxical reduplication of perceptual synthesis. The virtual body-environment is therefore simultaneously external and internal, with virtual bodies-environments to be seen as artificial windows to an intermediary world. In this intermediary world, the space itself is the result of interactivity; the world takes place in the sense or feeling of immersion experienced by the user; and the body, perceived as “other”, takes upon itself the sense of its reality, of its effectiveness, as an imaginary and pathic incision, as a production of desire and emotion, to the point that the feeling of reality conveyed by a virtual environment will rely significantly on how this environment produces emotions in the users.

This book offers a philosophical exploration of lines in art and culture, and traces their history from Antiquity onwards. Lines can be physical phenomena, cognitive responses to observed processes, or both at the same time. Based on this assumption, the book describes the “philosophy of lines” in art, architecture, and science. The book compares Western and Eastern traditions. It examines lines in the works of Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and Henri Michaux, as well as in Chinese and Japanese art and calligraphy. Lines are not merely a matter of aesthetics but also reflect the psychological states of entire cultures. In the nineteenth century, non-Euclidean geometry sparked the phenomenon of the “self-negating line,” which influenced modern art; it also prepared the ground for virtual reality. Straight lines, distorted lines, blurred lines, hot and cold lines, dynamic lines, lines of force, virtual lines, and on and on, lines narrate the development of human civilization.

The contributors to Nervous Systems reassess contemporary artists'and critics'engagement with social, political, biological, and other systems as a set of complex and relational parts: an approach commonly known as systems thinking. Demonstrating the continuing relevance of systems aesthetics within contemporary art, the contributors highlight the ways that artists adopt systems thinking to address political, social, and ecological anxieties. They cover a wide range of artists and topics, from the performances of the Argentinian collective the Rosario Group and the grid drawings of Charles Gaines to the video art of Singaporean artist Charles Lim and the mapping of global logistics infrastructures by contemporary artists like Hito Steyerl and Christoph Büchel. Together, the essays offer an expanded understanding of systems aesthetics in ways that affirm its importance beyond technological applications detached from cultural contexts.Contributors. Cristina Albu, Amanda Boetzkes, Brianne Cohen, Kris Cohen, Jaimey Hamilton Faris, Christine Filippone, Johanna Gosse, Francis Halsall, Judith Rodenbeck, Dawna Schuld, Luke Skrebowski, Timothy Stott, John Tyson

The main themes and aims of this book are understanding aesthetics, contemporary art and the end of the avant-garde not from the traditional viewpoint of the metaphysics of the beautiful and the sublime but rather thru close connection to the techno-genesis of virtual worlds. This book tackles problems in contemporary art theory such as the body in space and time of digital technologies, along with other issues in visual studies and image science. Further intentions exhibit the fundamental reasons for the disappearance of the picture in the era of virtual reality starting from the notion of contemporary art as realized iconoclasm; art has no world for its'image'. The author argues that the iconoclasm of contemporary art has severe consequences. This text appeals to philosophers of art and those interested in contemporary art theory.

Die wechselseitige Bedingtheit von Klang und Notation in der Musik stellt für die US-amerikanische und europäische Nachkriegsavantgarde ein Problem dar: Wie sollen die neuen, sich herkömmlichen Systemen entziehenden Klänge visuell fixiert werden? Zahlreiche Komponisten antworten auf diese Frage mit der Entwicklung eigener Notationsästhetiken, die sich auch bildlicher Elemente bedienen. Die wahrnehmungstheoretischen und performativen Implikationen dieses Paradigmenwechsels werden in Earle Browns Zyklus'Folio'(1952–53) reflektiert. Eine Untersuchung seiner Partituren anhand von zeitgenössischen Schrift- und Bildtheorien zeigt, dass diese Kunstpraxis zwar Aspekte beider Medien berührt, sich durch deren Ansätze jedoch nicht ganz ergründen lässt. Der zwischen Dekodierung und Kontemplation oszillierende Blick auf die Partitur wird aufgefordert, aus dem visuellen Fundus Klangereignisse herauszudestillieren. Diese ästhetische Operation setzt eine zeitweilige Überbrückung des ihr zugrunde liegenden medialen Hiatus voraus. Der theoretische Entwurf einer'Auralen Latenz'versucht der rätselhaften Natur dieses Vorgehens auf den Grund zu gehen.

A new field of counterinvestigation across in human rights, art and lawToday, artists are engaged in investigation. They probe corruption, human rights violations, environmental crimes and technological domination. At the same time, areas not usually thought of as artistic make powerful use of aesthetics. Journalists and legal professionals pore over opensource videos and satellite imagery to undertake visual investigations. This combination of diverse fields is what the authors call “investigative aesthetics”: the mobilisation of sensibilities associated with art, architecture and other such practices in order to speak truth to power. Investigative Aesthetics draws on theories of knowledge, ecology and technology; evaluates the methods of citizen counter-forensics, micro-history and art; and examines radical practices such as those of WikiLeaks, Bellingcat, and Forensic Architecture. These new practices take place in the studio and the laboratory, the courtroom and the gallery, online and in the streets, as they strive towards the construction of a new common sense. Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman have here provided an inspiring introduction to a new field that will change how we understand and confront power today.To Nour Abuzaid for your brilliance, perseverance, and unshaken belief in the liberation of Palestine.

Awarded an Honorable Mention for the 2022 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award Imagining Dewey features productive (re)interpretations of 21st century experience using the lens of John Dewey's Art as Experience, through the doubled task of putting an array of international philosophers, educators, and artists-researchers in transactional dialogue and on equal footing in an academic text. This book is a pragmatic attempt to encourage application of aesthetic learning and living, ekphrasic interpretation, critical art, and agonist pluralism. There are two foci: (a) Deweyan philosophy and educational themes with (b) analysis and examples of how educators, artists, and researchers envision and enact artful meaning making. This structure meets the needs of university and high school audiences, who are accustomed to learning about challenging ideas through multimedia and aesthetic experience. Contributors are: James M. Albrecht, Adam I. Attwood, John Baldacchino, Carolyn L. Berenato, M. Cristina Di Gregori, Holly Fairbank, Jim Garrison, Amanda Gulla, Bethany Henning, Jessica Heybach, David L. Hildebrand, Ellyn Lyle, Livio Mattarollo, Christy McConnell Moroye, María-Isabel Moreno-Montoro, María Martínez Morales, Stephen M. Noonan, Louise G. Phillips, Scott L. Pratt, Joaquin Roldan, Leopoldo Rueda, Tadd Ruetenik, Leísa Sasso, Bruce Uhrmacher, David Vessey, Ricardo Marín Viadel, Sean Wiebe, Li Xu and Martha Patricia Espíritu Zavalza.

Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben takes a close look at why the sense of taste has not historically been appreciated as a means to know and experience pleasure or why it has always been considered inferior to actual theoretical knowledge. Taste, Agamben argues, is a category that has much to reveal to the contemporary world. Taking a step into the history of philosophy and reaching to the very origins of aesthetics, Agamben critically recovers the roots of one of Western culture's cardinal concepts. Agamben is the rare writer whose ideas and works have a broad appeal across many fields, and with Taste he turns his critical eye to the realm of Western art and aesthetic practice. This volume will not only engage the author's devoted fans in philosophy, sociology, and literary criticism but also his growing audience among art theorists and historians.

An illustrated survey of artist hoaxes, including impersonations, fabula, cryptoscience, and forgeries, researched and written by an expert “fictive-art” practitioner. In her groundbreaking book, internationally recognized multimedia artist and writer Antoinette LaFarge reflects on the most urgent question of today: where does truth lie, and how is it verified? Encouraging readers to critically question the role art plays in shaping reality, Sting in the Tale: Art, Hoax, and Provocation defines a new genre of art that fabricates evidence to support a central fiction. Interweaving contemporary'fictive art'practice with a lineage of hoaxes and impostures dating from the 17th century, LaFarge offers the first comprehensive survey of this practice. The shift from the early information age to our'infocalypse'era of rampant misinformation has made fictive art an especially radical form as it straddles the lines between fact, fiction, and wild imagination. Artists deploy a wide range of practices to substantiate their fictions, manufacturing artefacts, altering photographs, and posing as experts from many different fields. A fictive-art practitioner herself, LaFarge explores and underscores the myriad ways art can ground or destabilize one's lived reality, forcing us to question our subjective experience and our understanding of what counts as evidence. Many examples of these curious and sometimes notorious fabrications are included - from nonexistent artists and peculiar museums to cryptoscientific objects like fake skeletons and staged archaeological evidence. From the intriguing Cottingley fairy photographs'captured'in 1917 by teenage sisters, to the Museum of Jurassic Technology; from the work of artists like Iris Häussler, Joan Fontcuberta, and Eva and Franco Mattes to the enigmatic encyclopedia known as the Codex Seraphinianus, fictive art continues to reframe assumptions made by its contemporaneous culture. With all the attendant consequences of mistrust, outrage, and rejection, fictive art practitioners both past and present play upon the fragile trust that establishes societies, underlining the crucial roles played by perception and doubt.

'The four essays in this volume constitute Derrida's most explicit and sustained reflection on the art work as pictorial artifact, a reflection partly by way of philosophical aesthetics (Kant, Heidegger), partly by way of a commentary on art works and art scholarship (Van Gogh, Adami, Titus-Carmel). The illustrations are excellent, and the translators, who clearly see their work as both a rendering and a transformation, add yet another dimension to this richly layered composition. Indispensable to collections emphasizing art criticism and aesthetics.'—Alexander Gelley, Library Journal

The Space that Separates: A Realist Theory of Art radically challenges our assumptions about what art is, what art does, who is doing it, and why it matters. Rejecting the modernist and market-driven misconception that art is only what artists do, Wilson instead presents a realist case for living artfully. Art is defined as the skilled practice of giving shareable form to our experiences of being-in-relation with the real; that is to say, the causally generative domain of the world that extends beyond our direct observation, comprising relations, structures, mechanisms, possibilities, powers, processes, systems, forces, values, ways of being. In communicating such aesthetic experience we behold life's betweenness –'the space that separates', so coming to know ourselves as connected.Providing the first dedicated and comprehensive account of art and aesthetics from a critical realist perspective – Aesthetic Critical Realism (ACR), Wilson argues for a profound paradigm shift in how we understand and care for culture in terms of our system(s) of value recognition. Fortunately, we have just the right tool to help us achieve this transformation – and it's called art. Offering novel explanatory accounts of art, aesthetic experience, value, play, culture, creativity, artistic truth and beauty, this book will appeal to a wide audience of students and scholars of art, aesthetics, human development, philosophy and critical realism, as well as cultural practitioners and policy-makers.

Adolf Hölzel war nicht nur ein Kunstpädagoge von ungeheurer Bedeutung, sondern auch ein Pionier in der theoretischen Bestimmung der ungegenständlichen Kunst: »Absolute Malerei« ist der Begriff, den Adolf Hölzel prägte.In zahlreichen Aufsätzen und auf 4000 überlieferten Schriftblättern aus dem sogenannten »kunsttheoretischen Nachlass« entwickelt Adolf Hölzel seine Theorie, die allein an den Mitteln orientiert ist, die ein Bild konstituieren – unabhängig davon, ob etwas Gegenständliches dargestellt wird oder nicht. Denn jedes Bild ist, so Adolf Hölzel, allein ein abstraktes Gebilde von Linien, Formen und Farben. Seine kunsttheoretischen Schriften sind nun in chronologischer Reihenfolge zugänglich, inklusive seiner zentralen Aufsätze und Schriften, bisher unpublizierter Manuskripte und ausgewählter Briefe des vielleicht wichtigsten Kunstpädagogen des 20. Jahrhunderts

'El presente ensayo procede de una preocupación de orden estético que, si bien atañe al arte y tiene en el tiempo un lejano inicio, carece aún hoy de un descargo cumplidor. Radicada en el trato que tiene la capacidad sensorial con el uso intelectivo, en El pensamiento visible la inquietud apunta preferentemente a la pintura y se enuncia a caballo de dos conceptos de larga trayectoria pero desatento empleo; su nombre, estilo y expresión. Tantas veces confundidos hasta incurrir en sinonimia, no es siempre fácil ver en el segundo, referido a la moderna expresión artística en particular, el desahogo, cuando no la dispersión, de un cuerpo que deviene signatario en su obrar y que deja un vestigio con las formas que produce, llámense huella personal o impronta anunciadora. Y no resulta más sencillo detectar lo que hay en el estilo: la derivada de una diferencia individuadora que, con su tarea de afirmación, desea garantizarse. De estas dos dificultades nace El pensamiento visible en su recorrido por una heterogénea selección de aportaciones a la plástica. Las formas del arte no son una carga intelectual que hemos de captar –no se trata de comprender las obras–; lo que hay en ellas es una fuerza redoblada que, al modo de los sueños, estimula al receptor llevándole a discurrir acerca de lo que allí parece tener un prudente amparo. Trenzado así con el aparato teórico, el camino argumental emprende su marcha en este libro con la obra del artista chino Zhu Jinshi, de una expresión terminante en la ejecución y negligente con el estilo, hasta ir a desembocar en Decorpeliada, un creador ocasional que, anhelante de un estilo individuador que sin embargo le rehúye, aislado al fin en su extravío, sólo con la muerte acierta con la azarosa afirmación de sí.'

Let Them Haunt Us analyzes contemporary aesthetics engaged in trauma and critically challenges its canonical status as »unrepresentable«. Focusing on case studies in the aesthetic practices of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Omer Fast, Forensic Architecture, and Paul McCarthy this book proposes to redefine trauma as a productive framework to exploring individual, collective, and cultural conflicts addressed in current artistic and curatorial practices. Anna-Lena Werner considers the aesthetic realm as a potential forum that provides methods of understanding the humanitarian consequences of violence and warfare, and to reveal the effects of trauma on visual culture, collective memory, and politics.

Oscar Wilde's famous quip'All art is quite useless'might not be as outrageous or demonstrably false as is often supposed. No-one denies that much art begins life with practical aims in mind: religious, moral, political, propagandistic, or the aggrandising of its subjects. But those works that survive the test of time will move into contexts where for new audiences any initial instrumental values recede and the works come to be valued for their own sake. The book explores this idea and its ramifications. The glorious Palaeolithic paintings on the walls of the Chauvet Cave present a stark example. In spite of total ignorance of their original purposes, we irresistibly describe the paintings as works of art and value them as such. Here we are at the very limits of what is meant by art and aesthetic appreciation. Are we misusing these terms in such an application? The question goes to the heart of the scope and ambition of aesthetics. Must aesthetics in its pursuit of art and beauty inevitably be culture-bound? Or can it transcend cultural differences and speak meaningfully of universal values: timelessly human not merely historically relative? The case of literature or film puts further pressure on the idea of art valued for its own sake. Characters in works of literature and film or finely-honed emotions in poetry often give pleasure precisely because they resonate with our own lives and seem (in the great works) to say something profound about human existence. Is not this kind of insight why we value such works? Yet the conclusion is not quite as clear-cut as it might seem and the idea of valuing something for its own sake never quite goes away.

Ästhetik reflektiert Kunst, kaum aber deren konkrete Verwendungsformen. Um zu verstehen, was Kunst ist, muss sie jedoch als spezifische Situationen konstituierende besondere Praxis untersucht werden. Kunst ist kein Erkennen oder Erfahren, sondern strategisches Tun: Als (feierliches) ästhetisches Sorgen kultiviert sie in öffentlichen wie privaten Kontexten eine Praxis existenziellen kultischen Sorgens. Christian Zürner hinterfragt ästhetische Topoi wie Autonomie und (Zweck-)Freiheit angesichts solch immanenter Notwendigkeit ebenso wie normative philosophische Zuschreibungen. Kunst bedeutet keinen souveränen Überschuss, sondern lebt vom Drang, menschliche Existenz in einer unheimlichen Welt überhaupt erst einzurichten.

Heavy makeup, gaudy jewelry, dramatic hairstyles, and clothes that are considered cheap, fake, too short, too tight, or too masculine: working-class Black and Latina girls and women are often framed as embodying'excessive'styles that are presumed to indicate sexual deviance. In Aesthetics of Excess Jillian Hernandez examines how middle-class discourses of aesthetic value racialize the bodies of women and girls of color. At the same time, their style can be a source of cultural capital when appropriated by the contemporary art scene. Drawing on her community arts work with Black and Latina girls in Miami, Hernandez analyzes the art and self-image of these girls alongside works produced by contemporary artists and pop musicians such as Wangechi Mutu, Kara Walker, and Nicki Minaj. Through these relational readings, Hernandez shows how notions of high and low culture are complicated when women and girls of color engage in cultural production and how they challenge the policing of their bodies and sexualities through artistic authorship.