Kategoria BISAC: Art >> Criticism & Theory

Decoys and Disruptions is the first comprehensive collection of writings by American artist and critic Martha Rosler. Best known for her videos and photography, Rosler has also been an original and influential cultural critic and theorist for over twenty-five years. The writings collected here address such key topics as documentary photography, feminist art, video, government patronage of the arts, censorship, and the future of digitally based photographic media. Taken together, these thirteen essays not only show Rosler's importance as a critic but also offer an essential resource for...

What is kitsch? What is behind its appeal? More important, what is wrong with kitsch? Though central to our modern and postmodern culture, kitsch has not been seriously and comprehensively analyzed; its aesthetic worthlessness has been generally assumed but seldom explained. Kitsch and Art seeks to give this phenomenon its due by exploring the basis of artistic evaluation and aesthetic value judgments.

Tomas Kulka examines kitsch in the visual arts, literature, music, and architecture. To distinguish kitsch from art, Kulka proposes that kitsch depicts instantly...

What is art? What is it to understand a work of art? What is the value of art? Robert Stecker seeks to answer these central questions of aesthetics by placing them within the context of an ongoing debate criticizing, but also explaining what can be learned from, alternative views. His unified philosophy of art, defined in terms of its evolving functions, is used to explain and to justify current interpretive practices and to motivate an investigation of artistic value.

Stecker defines art (roughly) as an item that is an artwork at time t if and only if it is in one of the central art...

This volume brings together essays by leading philosophers of art who consider what can be learned from the meaning of art about society, morality, and life in general. This subject inevitably leads to discussion of other issues. Is art distinct from life? Is a concern with art's messages consistent with an appropriately aesthetic appreciation of its works? Is there anything distinctive about the manner in which art communicates its messages, or about the messages it conveys? The topic of art's social and moral importance has always been a central one in aesthetics. However, whereas Plato...

Aesthetics has typically been regarded as an arena where claims about truth cannot be made as questions about art seem to involve more matters of taste than knowledge. In Real Beauty, however, Eddy Zemach maintains that beauty, ugliness, gracefulness, gaudiness, and similar aesthetic properties are real features of public things and argues that whether these features are present is a matter of fact that can be empirically investigated.

By examining the opposing nonrealistic views of Subjectivism, Noncognitivism, and Relativism, Zemach attempts to show how antirealistic...

Basic human drives--curiosity, passion, the need to provide shape and structure, the excitement of discovery--underlie all human creativity. Different minds and sensibilities necessarily focus on different aspects of human experience. However, in our educational systems and professional lives, we give undue and untrue emphasis to our differences rather than to our similarities. In Artists All Burton Raffel demonstrates that the creative force in the natural and social sciences is essentially the same as the creative energies of the arts; that the arts and aesthetic experiences...

In Picturing Space, Displacing Bodies, Lyle Massey argues that we can only learn how and why certain kinds of spatial representation prevailed over others by carefully considering how Renaissance artists and theorists interpreted perspective. Combining detailed historical studies with broad theoretical and philosophical investigations, this book challenges basic assumptions about the way early modern artists and theorists represented their relationship to the visible world and how they understood these representations. By analyzing technical feats such as anamorphosis (the...

In recent years, experience has been one of the most ambiguous, evasive, and controversial terms in myriad disciplines including epistemology, religion, literary theory, and philosophical aesthetics. Its association with the subjective consciousness has deprived it of the cognitive status of human knowledge. DEGREESIArt and Experience DEGREESR aims to grasp a firmer hold on this elusive concept, via essays written by a distinguished group of international scholars who have rediscovered the foundation of experience and restored its cognitive status in understanding our cultural activities....

Rosalind Krauss is, without visible rival, the most influential American art writer since Clement Greenberg. Together with her colleagues at DEGREESIOctober DEGREESR, the journal she co-founded, she has played a key role in the introduction of French theory into the American art world. In the 1960s, though first a follower of Greenberg, she was inspired by her readings of French structuralist and post-structuralist materials, revolted against her mentor's formalism, and developed a succession of radically original styles of art history writing. Offering a complete survey of her career and...

Denise Schmandt-Besserat opened a major new chapter in the history of literacy when she demonstrated that the cuneiform script invented in the ancient Near East in the late fourth millennium BC--the world's oldest known system of writing--derived from an archaic counting device. Her discovery, which she published in Before Writing: From Counting to Cuneiform and How Writing Came About, was widely reported in professional journals and the popular press. In 1999, American Scientist chose How Writing Came About as one of the "100 or so Books...

Every human society displays some form of behavior that can be called "art," and in most societies other than our own the arts play an integral part in social life. Those who wish to understand art in its broadest sense, as a universal human endowment, need to go beyond modern Western elitist notions that disregard other cultures and ignore the human species' four-million-year evolutionary history.

This book offers a new and unprecedentedly comprehensive theory of the evolutionary significance of art. Art, meaning not only visual art, but music, poetic language, dance, and...

"Dissanayake argues that art was central to human evolutionary adaptation and that the aesthetic faculty is a basic psychological component of every human being. In her view, art is intimately linked to the origins of religious practices and to ceremonies of birth, death, transition, and transcendence. Drawing on her years in Sri Lanka, Nigeria, and Papua New Guinea, she gives examples of painting, song, dance, and drama as behaviors that enable participants to grasp and reinforce what is important to their cognitive world."--Publishers Weekly"Homo Aestheticus offers a wealth of...

The volume offers fresh and sometimes extended discussions of single works as well as reevaluations of...

Terry Teachout, one of our most acute cultural commentators, here turns his sharp eye to every corner of the arts world--music, dance, literature, theater, film, TV, and the visual arts. This collection gathers the best of Teachout's writings from the past fifteen years. In each essay he offers lucid and balanced judgments that invariably illuminate, sometimes infuriate, and always spark a response--the mark of a critic whose thoughts, however controversial, cannot be ignored.
In a thoughtful introduction to the book, Teachout considers how American culture of the twenty-first century...