A R T | C A N O N | art genres, groups, movements, and styles; art critics, historians, philosophers, and theorists

HAL FOSTER

Dates: 1955-

Nationality: American

Hal Foster, who is the Townsend Martin, Class of 1917, Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University, is an internationally renowned author of books on post-modernism in art. Born 1955 in Seattle, the son of a partner in the distinguished law firm of Foster Pepper and Shefelman, Foster was educated at a private academy, Lakeside School, where one of his classmates was Microsoft founder Bill Gates.

Hal Foster’s intellectual formation was constituted, initially as a critic, then as a critical art historian, in the fraught cultural context of late-1970s New York. Following his undergraduate education at Princeton, he first began to write art criticism for Artforum in 1978. This criticism was marked by a precocious ability to theorize postmodernism through critical theory. The strength of his early writing quickly propelled Foster into a major presence in the New York art scene: from 1981-1987 he was an associate, then senior editor at Art in America; in 1983 he edited a seminal collection of essays on postmodernism, The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture; and in 1985 he published his first collection of essays, Recodings: Art Spectacle, Cultural Politics.

Shortly after the appearance of Recodings, Foster’s semi-independent position as an art critic began to shift towards a more academically affiliated position as an art historian. Leaving Art in America in 1987, he became the director of critical and curatorial studies at the Whitney Independent Study Program until 1991 (though his involvement continues into the present). Foster received his Ph. D. from the Graduate Center at the City University of New York in 1990, writing a dissertation on Surrealism under the direction of Rosalind Krauss (later revised to become his first book, Compulsive Beauty). In 1991 he assumed a position in the Department of Art History at Cornell University, the same year that joined the editorial board of the journal October, a position he continues to hold. Foster left Cornell in 1997 to assume his current chaired professorship in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. In addition to Recodings and several edited collections, Foster’s books include Compulsive Beauty (1993), The Return of the Real (1996), Design and Crime (and Other Diatribes) (2002), and Prosthetic Gods (2004). He is also the author, with Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, of the recent textbook Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (2004).

Along with other members of the October editorial board, and an older generation of critic-historians whom he cites as intellectual models (most notably Michael Fried, Rosalind Krauss, and T. J. Clark) Foster has consistently worked to straddle the double role of critic and historian. In large part the double imperative of history and criticism (an imperative central to all his writing) is a direct result of being intellectually constituted at the juncture of late modernism and emergent postmodernism. For Foster, as with other like-minded critics of his generation, postmodernism offered the productive potential of a historical rupture, while maintaining a ground in the antecedent practices of the historical- and neo-avant-garde. As he argues in The Return of the Real, this often vexed relation between historical discontinuity and continuity was a central problem of the avant-garde. The continued avant-garde negotiation between social-political critique and historical engagement is, for Foster, the core challenge of art history and production in the wake of modernism. Foster argues for a variety of ways in which avant-garde postmodernism extends the critical advances of late-modernism. First, postmodernism moves beyond a tendency to level critique within and at the institutions of art (the gallery/museum), opening instead onto more extended public sphere (bus shelters, baseball stadiums, taxi cabs, etc.). Second, in moving beyond the institutional framework of art, there is a concurrent shift away from a modernist “deconstructive” engagement with conventional art forms such as painting (Daniel Buren’s banners, for example) and sculpture (Michael Asher’s displacements). Third, while Minimalism and post-Minimalism activated the body of the viewer, postmodernism no longer assumes this body to be gender, race, or class neutral. And finally, critical postmodernism, attempts to circumvent the danger that late-modernist institutional critique will fold back into the mainstream of institutional practice, becoming it own professionally sanctioned form of expertise.

By the mid-1990s, the future viability of a postmodern avant-garde—conceived as a dialectical negotiation of the “temporal, diachronic, or vertical axis” of history with the “spatial, synchronic, or horizontal axis” of the social—had, for Foster, entered a state of crisis. This breakdown in the historical-critical axes of the avant-grade was born, he claims, not of the failure of the avant-garde, but of its very success. Indeed, for Foster, the imbalance and eventual nullification of the dialectical terms “history” and “criticism” can be traced to the very efforts of the avant-garde to shift a historically grounded criterion of quality, to a socially or politically determined criterion of interest. This is a crucial move for Foster, as it allows for an acknowledgment of avant-garde crisis, while resisting the despondency of various positions that proclaim the initial failure of historical avant-garde, and worse, the farcical reputation of this failure within the neo-avant-garde (as argued Peter Bürger’s influential Theory of the Avant-Garde).

If Foster advocates a recuperative dialectic for the neo-avant-garde through to the first generation of avant-garde postmodernism, by the mid-1990s the dialectical engine of history and critique, as he sees it, is no longer working. Foster thus advances an alternate historical-critical model conceived on the Freudian notion of deferred action (nachträglichkeit). According to Foster’s model of deferred action, the historical and epistemological significance of the avant-garde is never fully apprehended in the first instance. Nor can it ever be, as, for Foster, the avant-garde is registered as a form of trauma—as a hole in the symbolic order of history. Thus, while the historical avant-garde grappled to work through the traumas of modernity, the neo-avant-garde responds to, and attempts to work through, the deferred trauma of this initial working through. No longer an evolutionary avant-garde of historical progress, Foster replaces dialectical sublation with nachträglichkeit, and the past and future tenses of continuity and rupture with the future-anterior of the will-have-been.

As a recent recipient of Guggenheim and CASVA fellowships, he continues to write regularly for the London Review of Books, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, October (where he is also a co-editor), and the New Left Review.

Wikipedia contributors, ‘Hal Foster (art critic)’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 12 November 2010, 22:02 UTC, <en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hal_Foster_(art_critic)&oldid=396395539>

2012: 02/25
CATEGORY: All Writers
Critic
F
Historian
Leave a comment

JAMES ELKINS

Dates: 1955-

Nationality: American

James Elkins is an art historian and art critic. He is also E.C. Chadbourne Chair of art history, theory, and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is on the faculty of the Stone Summer Theory Institute, a short term school on contemporary art history held in Chicago.

Wikipedia contributors, ‘James Elkins (art critic)’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 15 August 2010, 08:52 UTC, <en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=James_Elkins_(art_critic)&oldid=379015902>

James Elkins grew up in Ithaca, New York, separated from Cornell University by a quarter-mile of woods once owned by the naturalist Laurence Palmer. He stayed on in Ithaca long enough to get the BA degree (in English and Art History), with summer hitchhiking trips to Alaska, Mexico, Guatemala, the Caribbean, and Columbia. For the last twenty-five years he has lived in Chicago; he got a graduate degree in painting, and then switched to Art History, got another graduate degree, and went on to do the PhD in Art History, which he finished in 1989. (All from the University of Chicago.) Since then he has been teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is currently E.C. Chadbourne Chair in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism.

His writing focuses on the history and theory of images in art, science, and nature. Some of his books are exclusively on fine art (What Painting Is, Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles?). Others include scientific and non-art images, writing systems, and archaeology (The Domain of Images, On Pictures and the Words That Fail Them), and some are about natural history (How to Use Your Eyes). Current projects include a series called the Stone Summer Theory Institutes, a book called The Project of Painting: 1900-2000, a series called Theories of Modernism and Postmodernism in the Visual Art, and a book written against Camera Lucida.

<www.jameselkins.com/#page2>

2012: 02/25
CATEGORY: All Writers
Critic
E
Historian
Leave a comment

YVE-ALAIN BOIS

Dates: 1952-

Nationality: French

Yve-Alain Bois is an historian and critic of modern art. Yve-Alain Bois was born on April 16, 1952 in Constantine, Algeria. In a formative early experience, he rejected Michel Seuphor’s mis-characterization of Piet Mondrian as a kind of neo-Platonic monk, upon receiving this book as a confirmation present from his grandfather. He received an M.A. from the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris for work on El Lissitzky’s typography, and a Ph.D. from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales for work on Lissitzky’s and Malevich’s conceptions of space. His advisor was Roland Barthes.

He is a Professor in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, in the chair inaugurated by Erwin Panofsky and formerly held by Millard Meiss, Irving Lavin, and Kirk Varnedoe. Previously, he served on the faculty at Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.

He has written books or major articles on canonical artists of European modernism including Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian, El Lissitzky, Kazimir Malevich, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and of American postwar art including Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Cy Twombly, Ellsworth Kelly, Richard Serra, and Robert Ryman. He is also an influential interpreter of comparatively more obscure artists including Wladyslaw Strzeminski, Katarzyna Kobro, and Sophie Calle. He is an editor of the journal October.

Wikipedia contributors, ‘Yve-Alain Bois’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 16 October 2010, 09:12 UTC, <en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Yve-Alain_Bois&oldid=391028321>

2012: 02/25
CATEGORY: All Writers
B
Critic
Historian
Leave a comment

GRISELDA POLLOCK

Dates: 1949-

Nationality: British

Griselda Pollock is a prominent art historian and cultural analyst, and a world-renowned scholar of international, post-colonial feminist studies in the visual arts. She is best known for her theoretical and methodological innovation, combined with deeply engaged readings of historical and contemporary art, film and cultural theory. Since 1977, Pollock has been one of the most influential scholars of modern, avant-garde art, postmodern art, and contemporary art. She is also a major influence in feminist theory, feminist art history and gender studies.

Born in South Africa, Griselda Pollock grew up in both French and English Canada. Moving to Britain during her teens, Pollock studied Modern History at Oxford (1967-1970) and History of European Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art (1970-72). She received her doctorate in 1980 for a study of Vincent Van Gogh and Dutch Art: A reading of his notions of the modern. After teaching at Reading and Manchester universities, Pollock went to Leeds in 1977 as Lecturer in History of Art and Film and was appointed to a Personal Chair in Social and Critical Histories of Art in 1990. In 2001 she became Director of Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History at the University of Leeds, where she is Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art.

Griselda Pollock continually challenges the dominant museum models of art and history that have been so excluding of women’s artistic contributions, and articulates the complex relations between femininity, modernity, psychoanalysis and representation. Pollock is engaged in French feminism and psychoanalysis. She is best known for her work on the artists Jean-François Millet, Vincent van Gogh, Mary Cassatt, Bracha L. Ettinger, Eva Hesse and Charlotte Salomon.

Wikipedia contributors, ‘Griselda Pollock’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 27 November 2010, 10:23 UTC, <en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Griselda_Pollock&oldid=399114300>

2012: 02/25
CATEGORY: All Writers
Historian
P
Leave a comment

NOËL CARROLL

Dates: 1947-

Nationality: American

Noël Carroll is an American philosopher considered an authority for his aesthetic analysis of films. He works in general on philosophy of art, theory of media and also philosophy of history. He is at present a distinguished professor of philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center. As a journalist, he has also published a number of articles in the Chicago Reader, ARTforum, In These Times, Dance Magazine, Soho Weekly News and The Village Voice.

Wikipedia contributors, ‘Noël Carroll’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 4 October 2010, 18:42 UTC, <en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=No%C3%ABl_Carroll&oldid=388734489>

Philosophical aesthetics in the twentieth century has shown a striking inability to come to terms with mass art. In the main, the phenomenon is generally ignored in philosophical treatises on art. Instead the examples upon which twentieth century philosophers of art construct their theories are primarily drawn from the realm of what is often called high art. Moreover, when philosophers or philosophically minded art theorists have focused on the topic of mass art, their finding are frequently dismissive and openly hostile. Often their energies are spent in the attempt to show that mass art is not genuine art, but something else, something called kitsch or pseudo-art. (Carroll 15)

Carroll, Noël. The Philosophy of Mass Art. Oxford University Press, Inc., New York, 1998.

2012: 02/25
CATEGORY: All Writers
C
Philosopher
Leave a comment

THIERRY DE DUVE

Dates: 1944-

Nationality: Belgian

Thierry de Duve is a Belgian professor of modern art theory and contemporary art theory, and both actively teaches and publishes books in the field. He also curates exhibitions. He has been a visiting professor at: the University of Lille III (France), the Sorbonne (France), MIT, and Johns Hopkins University, and was the Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Distinguished Visiting Professor in Contemporary Art in Penn’s History of Art Department. He was a fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Wikipedia contributors, ‘Thierry de Duve’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 22 October 2010, 06:55 UTC, <en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thierry_de_Duve&oldid=392172287>

Thierry de Duve is professor at Université Lille 3, département des arts plastiques in Villeneuve d’Ascq, France. He writes and teaches on modern and contemporary art. Committed to a reinterpretation of modernism, his work has long revolved around Marcel Duchamp’s readymade and its implications for aesthetics. His publications include: Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp’s Passage from Painting to the Readymade, with D. Polan (Minneapolis,1991); Clement Greenberg between the Lines, translated by Brian Holmes (Paris, 1996); Kant After Duchamp (Cambridge, 1998); and The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp (Cambridge, 1993).

<www.clarkart.org/research/fellows-view.cfm?ID=717&Fellow=3>

2012: 02/21
CATEGORY: All Writers
D
Theorist
Leave a comment

T.J. CLARK

Dates: 1943-

Nationality: British

Timothy James Clark (often “T.J. Clark”) was born in 1943 in Bristol, England. He first acquired fame as a Marxist art historian. He holds the George C. and Helen N. Pardee Chair as Professor of Modern Art at the University of California, Berkeley. Clark is currently concerned with examining a particular type of pictorial thought, involving notions of human uprightness and the ground plane, which runs throughout the history of painting and which he has termed “ground level painting.” The artists Nicolas Poussin, Pieter Bruegel, and Paolo Veronese figure prominently in his work on the subject.

Clark was educated at Bristol Grammar School, before entering St. John’s College, Cambridge University, where he graduated with first class distinction in 1964. He received his Ph.D. in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London in 1973. He lectured at the University of Essex 1967-1969 and then at Camberwell College of Arts as a senior lecturer, 1970-1974. During this time he was also a member of the British Section of the Situationist International, from which he was expelled along with the other members of the English section. He was also involved in the group King Mob.

In 1973 he published two books based on his Ph.D. dissertation which launched his international career as an art historian. The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848-1851 and Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the Second French Republic, 1848-1851 were received as manifestos of the new art history in the English language. In 1974, his visiting professor position at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) turned into an associate professor rank. Clark returned to Britain and Leeds University to be chair of the Fine Art Department in 1976. In 1980 Clark joined the Department of Fine Arts at Harvard University, setting off a furor among many traditional and connoisseurship-based faculty. Chief among his Harvard detractors was the Renaissance art historian Sydney Freedberg, with whom he had a public feud. In 1991 Clark was awarded the College Art Association’s Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award. Notable students include Holly Clayson, Thomas E. Crow, Whitney Davis, Serge Guilbaut, Michael Leja, and Jonathan Weinberg. In 1988 he joined the faculty at UC-Berkeley.

In the early 1980s, he wrote an essay, “Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art,” critical of prevailing Modernist theory, which prompted a notable and pointed exchange with Michael Fried. This exchange defined the debate between Modernist theory and the social history of art. Since that time, a mutually respectful and productive exchange of ideas between Clark and Fried has developed. Clark’s works have provided a new form of art history that take a new direction from traditional preoccupations with style and iconography. His books regard modern paintings as striving to articulate the social and political conditions of modern life.

Clark received an honorary degree from the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2006. He is a member of Retort, a Bay Area-based collective of radical intellectuals, with whom he authored the book Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War, published by Verso Books.In 2006, Jontathan Nitzan, a professor of political economy at Canada’s York University and Shimshon Bicher an Israeli professor of economy in several Israeli colleges and universities alleged that Much of Retort’s explanation—including both theory and fact—contained in their book was plagiarized, “cut and pasted, almost as is,” from their several essays and books including “The Weapondollar-Petrodollar Coalition,” a 71-page chapter in their book, The Global Political Economy of Israel (Pluto 2002), as well as “It’s All About Oil” (2003), “Clash of Civilization, or Capital Accumulation?” (2004), “Beyond Neoliberalism” (2004) and “Dominant Capital and the New Wars” (2004). In a long essay titled Scientists and the Church they argued that the reason for Clark and his Retort colleagues theft of their intellectual content was rooted in the ancient clash of science and church. Retort’s plagiarism, they contended was “part of the constant attempt of every organized faith—whether religious or academic, liberal or Leninist, fundamentalist or postist—to disable, block and, if necessary, appropriate creativity and novelty. Creativity and novelty are dangerous. They defy dogma and undermine the conventional creed; they question the dominant ideology and threaten those in power; their very possibility challenges the church’s exclusive hold over truth. And that challenge is a cause for panic—for without this exclusivity, organized religion becomes irrelevant.” Verso, the publisher of Afflicted Powers, never responded to Nitzan and Bichler’s complaint.

Wikipedia contributors, ‘T. J. Clark (historian)’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 14 November 2010, 20:44 UTC, <en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=T._J._Clark_(historian)&oldid=396770773>

2010: 02/21
CATEGORY: All Writers
C
Historian
Leave a comment

ROSALIND KRAUSS

Dates: 1941-

Nationality: American

Rosalind Krauss is an American art critic, professor, and theorist who is based at Columbia University. Like many, Krauss had been drawn to the criticism of Clement Greenberg, as a counterweight to the highly subjective, poetic approach of Harold Rosenberg. The poet-critic model proved long-lasting in the New York scene, with products from Frank O’Hara to Kynaston McShine to Peter Schjeldahl, but for Krauss and others, its basis in subjective expression was fatally unable to account for how a particular artwork’s objective structure gives rise to its associated subjective effects.

Greenberg’s gifted way of assessing how an art object works, or how it is put together, became for Krauss a fruitful resource; even if she and fellow ‘Greenberger’ Fried would break first with the older critic, and then with each other, at particular moments of judgment, the commitment to formal analysis as the necessary if not sufficient ground of serious criticism would still remain for both of them. Decades after her first engagement with Greenberg, Krauss still used his ideas about an artwork’s ‘medium’ as a jumping-off point for her strongest effort to come to terms with post-1980 art in the person of William Kentridge. Krauss would formulate this formalist commitment in strong terms, against attempts to account for powerful artworks in terms of residual ideas about an artist’s individual genius, for instance in the essays “The Originality of the Avant-Garde: A Postmodernist Repetition” and “Photography’s Discursive Spaces.” For Krauss and for the school of critics who developed under her influence, the Greenbergian legacy offers at its best a way of accounting for works of art using public and hence verifiable criteria (unsurprisingly, Wittgenstein could also be found in Krauss’s arsenal); at its worst, in a repetition of the late Greenberg, an apodictic monologue in pseudoscientific jargon cloaks essentially unverifiable judgments of taste in a mantle of spurious authority.

Whether about art from earlier moments of modernism (Cubist collage, Surrealist photography, early Giacometti sculpture, Rodin, Brancusi, Pollock) or about art contemporaneous to her own writing (Robert Morris, Sol LeWitt, Richard Serra, Cindy Sherman), Krauss has a gift for translating the ephemeralities of visual and bodily experience into precise, vivid English, which has solidified her prestige as a critic. Her usual practice is to make this experience intelligible by using categories translated from the work of a thinker outside the study of art, such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Ferdinand de Saussure, Jacques Lacan, Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Georges Bataille, or Roland Barthes. Her work has helped establish the position of these writers within the study of art, even at the cost of provoking anxiety about threats to the discipline’s autonomy.

In many cases, Krauss is credited as a leader in bringing these concepts to bear on the study of modern art. For instance, her Passages in Modern Sculpture (1977) makes important use of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology (as she had come to understand it in thinking about minimal art) for viewing modern sculpture in general. In her study of Surrealist photography, she rejected William Rubin’s efforts at formal categorization as insufficient, instead advocating the psychoanalytic categories of “dream” and “automatism,” as well as Jacques Derrida’s “grammatological” idea of “spacing.” See “The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism” (October, winter 1981).

Concerning Cubist art, she took Picasso’s collage breakthrough to be explicable in terms of Saussure’s ideas about the differential relations and non-referentiality of language, rejecting efforts by other scholars to tie the pasted newspaper clippings to social history. Similarly, she held Picasso’s stylistic developments in Cubist portraiture to be products of theoretical problems internal to art, rather than outcomes of the artist’s love life. Later, she explained Picasso’s participation in the rappel à l’ordre or return to order of the 1920s in similar structuralist terms. See “In the Name of Picasso” (October, spring 1981), “The Motivation of the Sign” (in Lynn Zelevansky, ed., Picasso and Braque: A Symposium, 1992), and The Picasso Papers (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998).

From the 1980s, she became increasingly concerned with using a psychoanalytic understanding of drives and the unconscious, owing less to the Freudianism of an André Breton or a Salvador Dalí, and much more to the structuralist Lacan and the “dissident surrealist” Bataille. See “No More Play”, her 1984 essay on Giacometti, as well as “Corpus Delicti”, written for the 1985 exhibition L’Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism, Cindy Sherman: 1975–1993 and The Optical Unconscious (both 1993) and Formless: A User’s Guide with Yve-Alain Bois, catalog to the exhibition L’Informe: Mode d’emploi (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 1996).

Years after her time at Artforum in the 1960s, Krauss also returned to the drip painting of Jackson Pollock as both a culmination of modernist work within the format of the “easel picture”, and a breakthrough that opened the way for several important developments in later art, from Allan Kaprow’s happenings to Richard Serra’s lead-flinging process art to Andy Warhol’s oxidation (i.e. urination) paintings. For reference, see the Pollock chapter in The Optical Unconscious, several entries in the Formless catalog, and “Beyond the Easel Picture”, her contribution to the MoMA symposium accompanying the 1998 Pollock retrospective (Jackson Pollock: New Approaches). This direction provided intellectual validation for the explosive Pollock markets; but it exacerbated already tense relations between herself and more radical currents in visual/cultural studies, the latter growing steadily impatient with the traditional western art-historical canon.

In addition to writing focused studies about individual artists, Krauss also produced broader, synthetic studies that helped gather together and define the limits of particular fields of practice. Examples of this include “Sense and Sensibility: Reflections on Post ’60s Sculpture” (Artforum, Nov. 1973), “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism” (October, spring 1976), “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America”, in two parts, October spring and fall 1977), “Grids, You Say,” In Grids: Format and Image in 20th Century Art (exh. cat.: Pace Gallery, 1978), and “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” (October, spring 1979). Some of these essays are collected in her book The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths.

Wikipedia contributors, ‘Rosalind E. Krauss’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 20 October 2010, 01:21 UTC, <en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rosalind_E._Krauss&oldid=391754222>

2010: 02/21
CATEGORY: All Writers
Critic
K
Theorist
Leave a comment

JACQUES RANCIÈRE

Dates: 1940-

Nationality: French

Jacques Rancière is a French philosopher and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris (St. Denis) who came to prominence when he co-authored Reading Capital (1968), with the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. In 2006, it was reported that Rancière’s aesthetic theory had become a point of reference in the visual arts, and Rancière has lectured at such art world events as the Frieze Art Fair.

Wikipedia contributors, ‘Jacques Rancière’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 29 October 2010, 22:53 UTC, <en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jacques_Ranci%C3%A8re&oldid=393692405>

RANCIÈRE, FOR DUMMIES by Ben Davis

The 66-year-old French philosopher Jacques Rancière is clearly the new go-to guy for hip art theorists. Artforum magazine’s ever-sagacious online “Diary” has referred to Rancière as the art world’s “darling du jour,” and in its recent issue, the magazine itself has described digital video artist Paul Chan as “Rancièrian” — as an aside, without further explanation, no less! For anyone looking for a primer, Rancière’s slim The Politics of Aesthetics has just been published in paperback.

Rancière has the undeniable virtue, for the esoterica-obsessed art world at least, of being something of an odd duck. A one-time fellow traveler of Marxist mandarin Louis Althusser, Rancière split with him after the May ’68 worker-student rebellion against the de Gaulle government, feeling that Althusser, a partisan of the Stalinized French Communist Party, left too little space in his theoretical edifice for spontaneous popular revolt. Against this background of disenchantment, Rancière set out to explore the relationships between philosophy and the worker, rethink ideas of history and try to construct a progressive theory of art.

The Politics of Aesthetics is a quick and dirty tour of a number of these themes. It features five short meditations on various conjunctions of art and politics, plus a lengthy interview with Rancière by his translator Gabriel Rockhill titled “The Janus-Face of Politicized Art,” an introduction by Rockhill and a concluding essay by the art world’s other favorite quirky philosopher, Slavoj Zizek. It is a short but serious book and, in keeping with French intellectual practice, sensuously impenetrable, coming equipped with a glossary of terms for the uninitiated.

Davis, Ben. “Ranciere, for Dummies.” Artnet.com.<www.artnet.com/magazineus/books/davis/davis8-17-06.asp>

2010: 02/21
CATEGORY: All Writers
Philosopher
R
Leave a comment

RICHARD KOSTELANETZ

Dates: 1940-

Nationality: American

Richard (Cory) Kostelanetz is an American artist, author and critic. He was born to Boris Kostelanetz and Ethel Cory and is the nephew of the composer Andre Kostelanetz. After a lifetime in Manhattan and thirty-five years in its SoHo district, he has moved his studio christened Wordship to Ridgewood-SoHo, as he calls it, in Far-East Artists’ Bushwick. He never remarried. He is a passionate defender of the avant-garde. He has a B.A. from Brown University and an M.A. in American History from Columbia University under Woodrow Wilson, NYS Regents, and International Fellowships; he also studied at King’s College London as a Fulbright Scholar.

Grants have come to him from the Guggenheim Foundation (1967), Pulitzer Foundation (1965), DAAD Berliner Kunstlerprogramm (1981-1983), Vogelstein Foundation (1980), Fund for Investigative Journalism (1981), Pollock-Krasner Foundation (2001), CCLM (1981), ASCAP (1983 annually to the present), American Public Radio Program Fund (1984), and the National Endowment for the Arts with ten individual awards (1976, 1978, 1979, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1985, 1986, 1990, 1991). He also assumed production residencies at the Electronic Music Studio of Stockholm, Experimental TV Center (Owego, NY), Mishkenot Sha’ananim (Jerusalem), and the MIT Media Lab, among other entities.

He came onto the literary scene with essays in quarterlies like “Partisan Review’ and The Hudson Review, then profiles of older artists, musicians and writers for The New York Times Magazine; these profiles were collected in Master Minds” (1969)’. Not one to shy away from controversy, he turned on his literary elders with The End of Intelligent Writing: Literary Politics in Ameroca (1974). SoHo: The Rise and Fall of an Artists’ Colony (2003) evinces not the Latest but the Last. Books of his radically alternative fiction include “In the Beginning” (1971) (the alphabet arranged in single and double letter combinations), “Short Fictions’ (1974), “More Short Fictions” (1980, and Furtherest Fictions (2007)); of his mostly visual poetry, “Visual Language” (1970), “I Articulations” (1974), “Wordworks” (1993), and “More Wordworks” (2006). Among the anthologies he has edited are “On Contemporary Literature” (1964, 1969), “Beyond Left & Rght” (1968), “John Cage” (1970, 1991), “Moholy-Nagy” (1970), Scenarios (1980), and The Literature of SoHo (1981). A political anarchist-libertarian, he authored “Political Essays” (1999) and “Toward Secession: More Political Essays” (2008) and has since 1987 been a contributing editor for Liberty Magazine.

Wikipedia contributors, ‘Richard Kostelanetz’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 19 October 2010, 12:13 UTC, <en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Richard_Kostelanetz&oldid=391630231>

2010: 02/21
CATEGORY: All Writers
Critic
K
Leave a comment

DAVE HICKEY

Dates: 1939-

Nationality: American

Dave Hickey is one of the best known American art and cultural critics practicing today. He has written for many major American publications including Rolling Stone, Art News, Art in America, Artforum, Harper’s Magazine, and Vanity Fair. He is currently Professor of English at the University of Nevada Las Vegas.

Known for his arguments against academicism and in favor of the effects of rough-and-tumble free markets on art, his critical essays have been published in two volumes: The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty and Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy (1997). In 2009, Hickey published a revised and updated version of The Invisible Dragon, adding an introduction that addressed changes in the art world since the book’s original publication, as well as a new concluding essay. Through his writing and lecturing, Dave Hickey has gained a substantial international reputation. He has been the subject of profiles in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, U.S. News and World Report, Texas Monthly, and elsewhere. He was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called “genius grant.”

Hickey has had a varied career. He graduated from Texas Christian University in 1961 and received his PhD from the University of Texas only two years later. In 1989, SMU Press published Prior Convictions, a volume of his short fiction. He was owner-director of A Clean Well-Lighted Place, an art gallery in Austin, Texas and director of Reese Palley Gallery in New York. He has served as Executive Editor for Art in America magazine, as contributing editor to The Village Voice, as Staff Songwriter for Glaser Publications in Nashville and as Arts Editor for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. In 2003, he was inducted into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame, sponsored by the Friends of the University of Nevada, Reno Libraries. He is married to art historian Libby Lumpkin.

Wikipedia contributors, ‘Dave Hickey’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 23 October 2010, 15:20 UTC, <en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dave_Hickey&oldid=392416621>

2010: 02/21
CATEGORY: All Writers
Critic
H
Leave a comment

MICHAEL FRIED

Dates: 1939-

Nationality: American

Michael Fried (born 1939, New York City) is an Modernist art critic and art historian. He studied at Princeton University and Harvard University and was a Rhodes Scholar at Merton College, Oxford University. He is currently the J.R. Herbert Boone Professor of Humanities and Art History at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, United States. Fried’s preeminent contribution to art historical discourse involved the debate over the origins and development of modernism. Along with Fried, this debate’s interlocutors include other theorists and critics such as Clement Greenberg, Kenworth Moffett, T. J. Clark, and Rosalind Krauss. Since the early 1960s, he has also been close to philosopher Stanley Cavell.

Fried describes his early career in the introduction to Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (1998), an anthology of his art criticism in the 60s and 70s. Although he majored in English at Princeton it was there that he became interested in writing art criticism. While at Princeton he met the artist, Frank Stella, and through him Walter Darby Bannard. In 1958 he wrote a letter to Clement Greenberg expressing his admiration for his writing, and first met him in the Spring of that year. In September 1958 he moved to Oxford, and then to London in 1961-2, where he studied philosophy part-time at University College, London under Stuart Hampshire and Richard Wollheim. In 1961 Hilton Kramer offered him the post of London correspondent for the journal, Arts. In the fall of 1961 Fried began his friendship with the sculptor, Anthony Caro, Caro inviting him to write the introduction to his Whitechapel Art Gallery exhibition in 1963.

In the late summer of 1962, Fried returned to the U.S, where he combined studying for a Ph.D in art history at Harvard with writing art criticism, initially for Art International, and curating the exhibition Three American painters: Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella at the Fogg Art Museum. In his essay, Art and Objecthood, published in 1967, he suggested that Minimalism had betrayed Modernism’s exploration of the medium by becoming emphatic about its own materiality as to deny the viewer a proper aesthetic experience. Minimalism (or “literalism” as Fried called it) offered an experience of “theatricality” rather than “presentness”; it left the viewer in his or her ordinary, non-transcendent world. The essay inadvertently opened the door to establishing a theoretical basis for Minimalism as a movement based in phenomenological experience. In Art and Objecthood Fried criticised the “theatricality” of Minimalist art. He introduced the opposing term “absorption” in his 1980 book, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot.Drawing on Diderot’s aesthetics, Fried argues that whenever a consciousness of viewing exists absorption is sacrificed and theatricality results.As well as applying the distinction to Eighteenth Century painting, he also uses it to assess post-1945 American painting and sculpture, which he values to the extent to which they are liberated from theatricality. Fried is dismissive of critics who wish to conflate his art-critical and art-historical writing.

Stephen Melville accepts that Fried is right to draw attention to the fear since the time of Diderot that art is threatened by the forces of theatricality, entertainment, kitsch and mass-culture; but that his analysis is limited by accepting on its own terms the response of art to this threat. Melville maintains that theatricality is a necessary condition of art and that absorption is itself theatrical.Martin Puchner holds that Fried’s distinction rests on a Modernist resistance to interference from the public sphere and a defence of the artist’s control over the external circumstances of reception. In a somewhat surprising turn Fried revisits these concerns via a study on recent photography; his oddly titled ‘Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before’ (London and New Haven 2008). In a selective reading of works by prominent ‘Art’ photographers of the last twenty years (Bernd and Hilla Becher, Jeff Wall, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Demand amongst others) Fried asserts that concerns of anti-theatricality and absorption are central to the turn by recent photographers towards large scale “for the wall” works. It remains to be seen whether this represents a slightly opportunistic attempt to reinvest his previous concerns with currency, or a genuinely productive approach to this high profile body of work.

Wikipedia contributors, ‘Michael Fried’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 18 October 2010, 21:44 UTC, <en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Michael_Fried&oldid=391522076>

2010: 02/21
CATEGORY: All Writers
Critic
F
Historian
Leave a comment

BARBARA ROSE

Dates: 1938-

Nationality: American

Barbara Rose is an American art historian and art critic. She was educated at Smith College, Barnard College and Columbia University. She was married to artist Frank Stella between 1961 and 1969. In 1965 she published ABC Art in which she described the characteristics of minimal art.

In her essay, ABC Art, Rose considers the diverse roots of minimalism in the work of Malevich and Duchamp as well as the choreography of Merce Cunningham, the art criticism of Greenberg, the philosophy of Wittgenstein and the novels of Robbe-Grillet. In examining the historical roots of minimal art in 1960s America, Rose draws a distinction between Kasimir Malevich’s “search for the transcendental, universal, absolute” and Marcel Duchamp’s “blanket denial of the existence of absolute values.”

Rose grouped some 1960’s artists as closer to Malevich, some as closer to Duchamp, and some as between the two. Closer to Malevich are Walter Darby Bannard, Larry Zox, Robert Huot, Lyman Kipp, Richard Tuttle, Jan Evans, Ronald Bladen, Anne Truitt. Closer to Duchamp are Richard Artschwager and Andy Warhol. Between Malevich and Duchamp she places Robert Morris, Donald Judd, Carl Andre, and Dan Flavin. Her conclusion is that minimal art is both transcendental and negative:

“The art I have been talking about is obviously a negative art of denial and renunciation. Such protracted asceticism is normally the activity of contemplatives or mystics…Like the mystic, in their work these artists deny the ego and the individual personality, seeking to evoke, it would seem, the semihypnotic state of blank unconsciousness.”

She also contrasts minimal art with Pop Art:

“…if Pop Art is the reflection of our environment, perhaps the art I have been describing is its antidote, even if it is a hard one to swallow.”

Wikipedia contributors, ‘Barbara Rose’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 18 October 2010, 15:18 UTC, <en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Barbara_Rose&oldid=391456786>

2010: 02/21
CATEGORY: All Writers
Critic
Historian
R
Leave a comment

ROBERT HUGHES

Dates: 1938-

Nationality: Australian

Robert Studley Forrest Hughes, AO, is an Australian-born art critic, writer and television documentary maker who has resided in New York since 1970. Hughes left Australia for Europe in 1964, living for a time in Italy before settling in London, England (1965) where he wrote for The Spectator, The Daily Telegraph, The Times and The Observer, among others, and contributed to the London version of Oz. In 1970 he obtained the position of art critic for TIME magazine and he moved to New York. He quickly established himself in the United States as an influential art critic.

In 1975 he and Don Brady provided the narration for the film Protected, a documentary showing what life was like for Indigenous Australians on Palm Island. Hughes and Harold Hayes were recruited in 1978 to anchor the new ABC News (US) newsmagazine 20/20. His only broadcast, on June 6, 1978, proved so disastrous that, less than a week later, ABC News president Roone Arledge dumped Hughes and Hayes, replacing them with veteran TV host Hugh Downs. In 1980, the BBC broadcast The Shock Of The New, Hughes’s television series on the development of modern art since the Impressionists. It was accompanied by a book of the same name; its combination of insight, wit and accessibility are still widely praised. In 1987, The Fatal Shore, Hughes’s study of the British penal colonies and early European settlement of Australia, became an international best-seller.

During the 1990s, Hughes was a prominent supporter of the Australian Republican Movement. Hughes provided commentary and highlights on the work of artist Robert Crumb throughout the 1994 film “Crumb”, calling Crumb “the American Breughel.” His 1997 television series American Visions reviewed the history of American art since the Revolution. He was again dismissive of much recent art; this time, sculptor Jeff Koons was subjected to scathing criticism. Australia: Beyond the Fatal Shore (2000) was a series musing on modern Australia and Hughes’s relationship with it. Hughes’s 2002 documentary on the painter Francisco Goya – Goya: Crazy Like a Genius—was broadcast on the first night of the BBC’s domestic digital service. Hughes created a one hour update to The Shock of the New. Titled The New Shock of the New, the program aired first in 2004. Hughes published the first volume of his memoirs, Things I Didn’t Know, in 2006.

Wikipedia contributors, ‘Robert Hughes (critic)’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 18 October 2010, 10:55 UTC, <en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Robert_Hughes_(critic)&oldid=391418244>

2010: 02/21
CATEGORY: All Writers
Critic
H
Leave a comment

LUCY LIPPARD

Dates: 1937-

Nationality: American

Lucy Lippard is an internationally known writer, activist and curator from the United States. Lippard was among the first writers to recognize the de-materialization at work in conceptual art and was an early champion of feminist art. She is the author of eighteen books on contemporary art, and the recipient of a 1968 Guggenheim Fellowship, the Frank Mather Award for Criticism from the College Art Association, and two National Endowment for the Arts grants in criticism. She has written art criticism for Art in America, The Village Voice, In These Times, and Z Magazine.

Lucy Lippard was born in New York City and lived in New Orleans and Charlottesville, Virginia, before enrolling at Abbot Academy in 1952. After earning a B.A. degree from Smith College, she worked with the American Friends Service Committee in a Mexican village —- her first experience of a foreign nation. Later, she earned an M.A. degree in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. In 1968, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship. Since 1966, Lippard has published 20 books on feminism, art, politics and place and has received numerous awards and accolades from literary critics and art associations. Co-founder of Printed Matter, the Heresies Collective, Political Art Documentation/Distribution, Artists Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America, and other artists’ organizations, she has also curated over 50 exhibitions, done performances, comics, guerrilla theater, and edited several independent publications the latest of which is the decidedly local La Puente de Galisteo in her home community in Galisteo, New Mexico. She has infused aesthetics with politics, and disdained disinterestedness for ethical activism. In 2007 Lippard was awarded an honorary degree from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD University), Doctor of Fine Arts, honoris causa.

Wikipedia contributors, ‘Lucy R. Lippard’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 18 October 2010, 01:06 UTC, <en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lucy_R._Lippard&oldid=391343626>

2010: 02/21
CATEGORY: All Writers
Critic
L
Leave a comment

DONALD KUSPIT

Dates: 1935-

Nationality: American

Donald Kuspit (b. March 26, 1935) is an American art critic, poet, and Distinguished Professor of art history and philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and professor of art history at the School of Visual Arts. Kuspit is one of America’s most distinguished art critics. He was formerly the A. D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University (1991-1997). He received the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art Criticism in 1983 (given by the College Art Association). His essay “Reconsidering the Spiritual in Art” appears in Blackbird: an online journal of literature and the arts.

Wikipedia contributors, ‘Donald Kuspit’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 17 October 2010, 03:01 UTC, <en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Donald_Kuspit&oldid=391169870>

A photographic detail from the Hirst installation Home, Sweet Home – consisting of a clutter of fag ends, beer bottles, coke cans, coffee cups and sweet wrappings on a table – graces the cover of The End of Art. Valued at around $7000, Home, Sweet Home was famously binned by humble cleaner Emmanuel Asare, who afterwards explained, to the amusement of the Press, that he did so because he “didn’t think for a second that it was a work of art.” Neither does Donald Kuspit.

Indeed, Home, Sweet Home is so far beyond what can properly considered art, Kuspit believes, that he uses the term “postart” to describe it. And, like Asare, Kuspit engages in a spot of enlightened cleaning in an attempt to remove the postmodern clutter that threatens to swamp our artistic landscape. Kuspit traces the genealogy of the postart aesthetic from Marcel Duchamp’s announcement of an “entropic split” between intellectual expression and animal expression (which led to the reification of concept over form, and from there to a nihilistic pessimism) through Warhol’s commercialism (which blurred the line between art and business) to Hirst’s installations (which reflect postmodernism’s preoccupation with the banal objects and situations of our everyday lives).

Whereas modern art consisted of revolutionary experiments motivated by a desire to express aspects of the newly-discovered “unconscious mind,” Kuspit argues, postart is shallow, unreflective banality motivated by the desire to become institutionalized; that is, part of the mainstream (along with the commercial reward that such co-opted acceptability brings). In this regard, the messianic zeal with which Van Gogh approached his work represents an ideal because it demonstrates the kind of authentic and individualistic commitment to artistic expression that today’s commercialized postartists lack. The crucifixion has become a cabaret.

Kuspit points out that it was to a very different kind of institution – the psychiatric ward – that modern artists were drawn. In an attempt to understand how the unconscious and madness can affect the creative process, modern artists turned their attention to the artworks of psychiatric patients. Modern art went on to find its greatest glories in the dark and mysterious world of the human unconscious. This is the anti-Allegory of the Cave, an emergence into night.

Acknowledging that modern art’s engagement with madness produced imperfect (but important) art, Kuspit’s new book attacks the postartists for substituting modern art’s authentic engagement with madness for the cozy passivity of the television documentary. Fearful of the dark and unpredictable world of the unconscious (largely because they are ignorant of it), postartists engage in mimicry of madness. The failure of creativity that characterizes postart, Kuspit notes, is highlighted in the way that postartists fail to imagine that there is a flicker of madness inside us all.

Typical post-art values include: a tendency to mock posterity, a tendency to elevate the banal to the status of the enigmatic and the scatological to the status of the sacred, and a preference for concept-driven art. Postart is art at the service of the mind and the product of joyless, “clever, clever” theorizing. Entertainment value and commercial panache are valued more highly than artistic ability or aesthetic worth and painting is perilously close to becoming a sub-genre of performance art. Kuspit blends psychoanalytic criticism, philosophy, and non-technical art history to make a powerful and compelling case for dismissal of the postart aesthetic. The End of Art will appeal to anyone who has ever felt cheated by the produce of the postmodern establishment.

If there’s a criticism to be made, it’s that Kuspit’s description of the New Old Masters is largely confined to a postscript. This group, which includes Lucien Freud and Jenny Saville, might be our artistic saviours, Kuspit claims, inasmuch as they represent values that simultaneously evoke the spirituality and humanism of the Old Masters and the innovation and criticality of the New Masters, enabling them to transcend the suicidal intellectualism and socio-political fixations of postart.

Cole, Emmett. “Emmett Cole Interviews Donald Kuspit.” themodernword.com. <www.themodernword.com/reviews/kuspit.html>

2010: 02/21
CATEGORY: All Writers
Critic
Historian
K
Leave a comment

EDWARD LUCIE-SMITH

Dates: 1933-

Nationality: British

Edward Lucie-Smith was born in 1933 at Kingston, Jamaica. He moved to Britain in 1946, and was educated at King’s School, Canterbury and Merton College, Oxford, where he read History. Subsequently he was an Education Officer in the R.A.F., then worked in advertising for ten years before becoming a freelance author. He is now an internationally known art critic and historian, who is also a published poet (member of the Académie Européenne de Poésie, winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize), an anthologist and a practising photographer.

He has published more than a hundred books in all, including a biography of Joan of Arc (recently republished by Penguin in paperback as a ‘classic biography’), a historical novel, and more than sixty books about art, chiefly but not exclusively about contemporary work. He is generally regarded as the most prolific and the most widely published writer on art, with sales for some titles totalling over 250,000 copies. A number of his art books, among them Movements in Art since 1945 , Visual Arts of the 20th Century, A Dictionary of Art Terms and Art Today are used as standard texts throughout the world. Movements in Art since 1945, first published in 1969, has been continuously in print since that date, and has been completely updated five times since first publication. A new edition was published in March 2001. Other well-known texts include Sexuality in Western Art and 20th Century Latin American Art. The latter is regarded as the best concise account of a notoriously complex subject. It has been translated into Spanish and is widely used in Latin America itself. In addition to writing on art he has written extensively on craft and on industrial design, where his books include The Story of Craft, A History of Industrial Design and A Concise History of Furniture. Other texts include American Realism (1994) and Ars Erotica (1997). He is also the author of Judy Chicago: An American Vision (1999, Watson- Guptill), the first full career survey of the work of the leading American feminist artist. His books have been translated into many languages, among them French, Italian, Spanish (where he has six titles in the Mundo del Arte series published by El Destino in Barcelona), German, Dutch, Portuguese, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Serbo-Croatian, Arabic, Korean and Chinese. Movements in Art appeared in October 2001 in Farsi. The translator is the director of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art.

A book of his Collected and Selected Poems titled Changing Shape was published by the Carcanet Press in February 2002. He has lectured in numerous countries including the United States, France, Spain, Belgium, Luxembourg, Sweden, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Australia, Turkey, Iran, Korea, Hong Kong. Yugoslavia, Australia and New Zealand. In Britain he was for many years a well-known broadcaster, appearing regularly on the BBC arts discussion programme The Critics and its successor Critics’ Forum. His appearances on these programmes spanned a period of twenty years.

He has written for many leading British newspapers and periodicals, among them The Times of London (where at one time he had a regular column), the London Evening Standard (whose critic he was for two years), the New Statesman, the Spectator, the London Magazine and Encounter. He currently writes regularly for Art Review, and also for Index on Censorship. He also writes for La Vanguardia in Barcelona. His work as a photographer is included in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery, London; the Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid; the New Orleans Museum of Art; the Butler Institute of Art, Youngstown, Ohio; the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, and the Frissiras Museum, Athens.

<www.edwardlucie-smith.co.uk/Biography.htm>

2010: 02/20
CATEGORY: All Writers
Critic
Historian
L
Leave a comment

BRIAN SEWELL

Dates: 1931-

Nationality: British

Brian Sewell is a British art critic, motoring expert and media personality. He writes for the London Evening Standard and is noted for artistic conservatism and his acerbic view of the Turner Prize and conceptual art. A noted wit, Sewell has been described as “Britain’s most famous and controversial art critic.”

In 1984 he became art critic of the Evening Standard (replacing avant-garde critic Richard Cork). He won press awards including Critic of the Year in 1988, Arts Journalist of the Year in 1994, the Hawthornden Prize for Art Criticism in 1995 and the Foreign Press Award (Arts) in 2000. In April 2003 he was awarded “The George Orwell” prize for his political/current affairs column in the Evening Standard. In criticisms of the Tate Gallery’s art, he coined the phrase, the “Serota Tendency”, after its director Nicholas Serota. It was not until the late 1990s that he became a household figure through television, though he was on BBC Radio 4 before then.

Sewell is noted for formal, old-fashioned diction and anti-populist sentiments. He offended people in Gateshead by claiming an exhibition was too important to be held only at the town’s Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art and should be shown to “more sophisticated” audiences in London; he has also disparaged Liverpool as a cultural city.Sewell’s attitude to female artists has been controversial. In July 2008 he was quoted in The Independent as saying:

“The art market is not sexist. The likes of Bridget Riley and Louise Bourgeois are of the second and third rank. There has never been a first-rank woman artist. Only men are capable of aesthetic greatness. Women make up 50 per cent or more of classes at art school. Yet they fade away in their late 20s or 30s. Maybe it’s something to do with bearing children.”

Sewell’s extensive vocabulary and verbose reviews are parodied in the ‘Brian Sewell Does Pop Culture!’ feature in The Tart webzine. Each week Sewell reviews a popular culture artefact, from television, film or pop music. Sewell does not hold his tongue regarding his opinions, and has frequently insulted the general public for their views on art.Consequently, he is more known for controversy than art criticism among many. He has issued quotes such as the following regarding public praise for the work of Banksy in Bristol:

“The public doesn’t know good from bad. For this city to be guided by the opinion of people who don’t know anything about art is lunacy. It doesn’t matter if they [the public] like it.”

He went on to assert that Banksy himself “should have been put down at birth.” Clive Anderson has described him as “a man intent on keeping his Christmas card list nice and short.”

Wikipedia contributors, ‘Brian Sewell’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 19 November 2010, 12:49 UTC, <en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Brian_Sewell&oldid=397668857>

2010: 02/20
CATEGORY: All Writers
Critic
S
Leave a comment

LINDA NOCHLIN

Dates: 1931-

Nationality: American

Linda Nochlin is a Professor and art historian. She is considered to be a leader in feminist art history studies. In 1971, the magazine ArtNews published an essay whose title posed a question that would spearhead an entirely new branch of art history. The essay, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?,” explores possible reasons why “greatness” in artistic accomplishment has been reserved for male “geniuses” such as Michelangelo. Nochlin argues that general social expectations against women seriously pursuing art, restrictions on educating women at art academies, and “the entire romantic, elitist, individual-glorifying, and monograph-producing substructure upon which the profession of art history is based”have systematically precluded the emergence of great women artists.

Nochlin has also been involved in publishing other essays and books including Women, Art, and Power: And Other Essays (1988), The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society (1989), Women in the 19th Century: Categories and Contradictions (1997), and Representing Women (1999). The thirty-year anniversary of Nochlin’s query motivated a conference at Princeton University in 2001. The book associated with the conference, “Women artists at the Millennium”, that hosts Nochlin’s new essay “”Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” Thirty Years After”, and in which art historians discuss the innovative work of such figures as Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Francesca Woodman, Carrie Mae Weems and Mona Hatoum in the light of the legacies of thirty years of feminist art history, appeared in 2006. Nochlin was the co-curator of a number of landmark exhibitions exploring the history and achievements of female artists. “Women Artists: 1550-1950” (with Anne Sutherland Harris) opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1976. “Global Feminisms” (with Maura Reilly) opened at the Brooklyn Museum in 2007.

Nochlin received her BA from Vassar College, an MA in English from Columbia University, and her PhD in the history of art from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University in 1963. Besides feminist art history, she is best known for her work on Realism, specifically on Courbet. After working in the art history departments at Yale University, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (with Rosalind Krauss), and Vassar College, Nochlin took a position at the Institute of Fine Arts, where she continues to teach.In 2000, Self and History: A Tribute to Linda Nochlin was published, an anthology of essays developing themes that Nochlin has worked on throughout her career. Nochlin has also been the Norton professor at Harvard University.

Wikipedia contributors, ‘Linda Nochlin’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 15 October 2010, 09:54 UTC, <en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Linda_Nochlin&oldid=390851214>

2010: 02/19
CATEGORY: All Writers
Historian
N
Leave a comment

JACQUES DERRIDA

Dates: 1930-2004

Nationality: French

Jacques Derrida (July 15, 1930 – October 8, 2004) was a French philosopher born in Algeria, who is known as the founder of deconstruction. His voluminous work had a profound impact upon literary theory and continental philosophy. Derrida’s best known work is Of Grammatology.

Wikipedia contributors, ‘Jacques Derrida’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 13 December 2010, 00:02 UTC, <en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jacques_Derrida&oldid=402046992>

According to Jacques Derrida, structure — the structure of language, for example — occupies an impossible and ideal position: it at once posits an absolute center that holds everything together and a meta-perspective that also holds everything together. For Derrida, then, structure is defined by a double law in which it is at once bound and unbound — such is the very possibility (or impossibility) of a structure’s existence. Which is to say, a structure can exist only in as much as it undoes itself. For Derrida, this double function is always already at work — and so Poststructuralism is born. This double logic, which Derrida calls “differance,” (a word which in French blurs the line between speech and writing) operates like an electric current; it is the alternating force which drives language, philosophy, and texts in general. This force stems from the relentless play between a positive and negative node, between the positing and undoing of a thing. Hence, just as an electric current only exists as movement, texts come to exist only from their “differance .” Therefore, there is no absolute and stable dictionary that fixes meaning in place. At the origin of meaning, Derrida tells us, is play. Hence, when Derrida reads, he seeks the play within a text, the particular ways that a text posits itself and is thereby already outside itself, playing elsewhere in unexpected fields, with unexpected texts. This is what he means by Deconstruction.

<www.artandculture.com/users/73-jacques-derrida>

2010: 02/19
CATEGORY: All Writers
D
Philosopher
Leave a comment

JEAN BAUDRILLARD

Dates: 1929-2007

Nationality: French

Jean Baudrillard (July 27, 1929 – March 6, 2007) was a French sociologist, philosopher, cultural theorist, political commentator, and photographer. His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and post-structuralism. As he developed his work throughout the 1980s, he moved from economically-based theory to the consideration of mediation and mass communications. Although retaining his interest in Saussurean semiotics and the logic of symbolic exchange (as influenced by anthropologist Marcel Mauss) Baudrillard turned his attention to Marshall McLuhan, developing ideas about how the nature of social relations is determined by the forms of communication that a society employs. In so doing, Baudrillard progressed beyond both Saussure’s and Roland Barthes’ formal semiology to consider the implications of a historically-understood (and thus formless) version of structural semiology. The concept of Simulacra also involves a negation of the concept of reality as we usually understand it. Baudrillard argues that today there is no such thing as reality.

Wikipedia contributors, ‘Jean Baudrillard’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 19 November 2010, 22:22 UTC, <en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jean_Baudrillard&oldid=397755649>

French theorist and contemporary critic of society and culture who has had a central role in French postmodern theory. As a prolific author who has written more than twenty books, Baudrillard’s reflections on art and aesthetics are an important, if not central, aspect of his work. Although his writings exhibit many twists, turns, and surprising developments as he moved from synthesizing Marxism and semiotics to a prototypical postmodern theory, interest in art remains a constant of his theoretical investigations and literary experiments.

<www.mywire.com/a/Enc-Aesthetics/Baudrillard-Jean/9450003/>

2010: 02/19
CATEGORY: All Writers
B
Philosopher
Theorist
Leave a comment

HILTON KRAMER

Dates: 1928-2012

Nationality: American

Hilton Kramer (born 1928, Gloucester, Massachusetts) was a U.S. art critic and cultural commentator.

Kramer was educated at Syracuse University, Columbia University, Harvard University, Indiana University and the New School for Social Research. He worked as the editor of Arts Magazine, art critic for The Nation, and from 1965 to 1982, as an art critic for The New York Times. He has also published in the Art and Antiques Magazine and The New York Observer.

Over the course of his career, Kramer came to disagree with left-wing political views and what he perceived as the aesthetic nihilism characterizing a large majority of 20th century working artists and art critics. This change of position led to his resignation from The New York Times in 1982 to found The New Criterion, now a prominent conservative magazine for which Kramer is, with Roger Kimball, co-editor and publisher. Kramer took a strongly anti-Stalinist stance in his 2003 review of Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A History. In his 1999 The Twilight of the Intellectuals, he defended the anti-Stalinist views of art critic Clement Greenberg.

Wikipedia contributors, ‘Hilton Kramer’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 13 October 2010, 23:08 UTC, <en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hilton_Kramer&oldid=390594085>

2010: 02/19
CATEGORY: All Writers
Critic
K
Leave a comment

MICHEL FOUCAULT

Dates: 1926-1984

Nationality: French

Michel Foucault, born Paul-Michel Foucault (October 15, 1926 – June 25, 1984), was a French philosopher, sociologist, and historian. He held a chair at the Collège de France with the title “History of Systems of Thought,” and also taught at the University at Buffalo and the University of California, Berkeley.

Foucault is best known for his critical studies of social institutions, most notably psychiatry, medicine, the human sciences, and the prison system, as well as for his work on the history of human sexuality. His work on power, and the relationships among power, knowledge, and discourse has been widely discussed. In the 1960s Foucault was associated with Structuralism, a movement from which he distanced himself. Foucault also rejected the post-structuralist and postmodernist labels to which he was often later attributed, preferring to classify his thought as a critical history of modernity rooted in Kant. Foucault is particularly influenced by the work of Nietzsche; his “genealogy of knowledge” is a direct allusion to Nietzsche’s genealogy of morals. In a late interview he definitively stated: “I am a Nietzschean.”

Wikipedia contributors, ‘Michel Foucault’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 24 November 2010, 23:04 UTC, <en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Michel_Foucault&oldid=398710932>

Foucault’s aesthetic writings are preponderately situated in a rather narrow period of time – basically what he later called “those strange years, the ’60s.” It was the moment before ’68, when the loose group of historians, anthropologists, psychoanalysts, and philosophers that Americans now classify as “poststructuralist” or “postmodernist” was emerging. Not only do most of Foucault’s aesthetic writings date from this period, but they form a coherent group with a distinct relation to his archival research. In his “methodology” and in his “aesthetics” from this period there is much talk of impersonality, anonymity, faceless authorship. It was, after all, a time of Minimalism, Beckett, Robbe-Grillet, and Warhol, and Foucault tried to associate with such work the existence of a kind of “neutral space” – an “absence of oeuvre” that “affirms nothing.” He tried to show that the turn to this space was “archaeologically” significant, forming a sort of counterpoint to the importance given to language of the “linguistic model.” For it exposed something in language that was prior to linguistics or analytic logic and the ways in which words and images, saying and seeing are thought to be related to one another. The aim of Foucault’s own analysis of discourse was then at once to specify and attain this prior zone.

Foucault’s well-known reading of Magritte exemplifies this attempt. The logic of abstraction in Kandinsky and Klee, he said, is in fact not one of reduction and self-reference. Rather, Kandinsky undoes the relation between resemblance and affirming a subject, while Klee undoes the hierarchical relations of images to words in an “uncertain, reversible, floating space.” In taking up the problem posed by the two Bauhaus painters, Magritte may then be seen to point to a free zone before words and images, forms and contents, signifiers and signifieds are determined, a zone where at last painting might “affirm nothing.” Abstraction, in other words, leads to this free space before saying and seeing become “archivally” determined within some particular “discourse”; and Ceci n’est pas une pipe would then be Magritte’s paradoxical procedure to diagnose the existence of this space. Conversely an “archive” is what at a particular time and place so relates seeing and saying as to make something like “representation” or “affirmation” or the distinction between form and content possible. The aim of Foucault’s aesthetics was then in each case to attain what he described as the “anonymous murmur” of discourse, where what can be said and who can speak is up for grabs. As a kind of new archivist (as Deleuze called Foucault), he would thus join with the artist in trying to diagnose who or what, outside the prevailing “archive,” we might yet become. A strange asceticism and madness permeates this attempt. For, much as with the “neutral space” in the artwork, to attain the free anonymity of discourse was to undo one’s own discursive position in an act of depersonalization that Foucault took precisely to be characteristic of madness in his time, a matter of course of great concern and ongoing research for him. But it is at this point that the problems begin. Is it that the “absence of oeuvre” just is this zone “outside” a given archive in thought, and with it, “aesthetics”? Or is this zone rather something future historians will assign to us or our archive, the reason for our having been drawn to it a mystery? Foucault in fact entertains both hypotheses; and when after ’68 there was no further talk of such questions, one may infer that he silently adopted the second option.

Rajchman, John. “Out of the Ordinary.” ArtForum, December, 1998. <findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_4_37/ai_53479685/>

2010: 02/19
CATEGORY: All Writers
F
Philosopher
Leave a comment

GEORGE DICKIE

Dates: 1926-

Nationality: American

Since the early 1960s Dickie has made numerous important contributions to the philosophy of art. Among the most influential of his contributions are his attacks on key aspects of widely held aesthetic theories and his creation and critical development of the institutional theory of art. His critique of aesthetic theory addresses a number of theses about what is involved in people’s experiencing something’s aesthetic qualities (and associated theses about aesthetic objects), whereas his Institutional Theory provides an account of the concept of art that locates art’s essence within a special category of social practices attributed to a social group Dickie calls the artworld.

A widely held view among aesthetic theorists is that someone must in some way invoke a special mode of perception in himself or herself in order to experience something’s aesthetic qualities (or in order to experience something as an aesthetic object). Invoking this special mode of perception is commonly equated with adopting a special attitude toward what is being experienced, a disinterested attitude, for example. Speaking generally, Dickie shows that experiencing aesthetic qualities cannot require adopting a special attitude by providing counterexamples to the various attempts philosophers have made to show that there is a distinct kind of experience (properly classified as aesthetic experience) that people must have in order to experience something’s aesthetic qualities, and that having this kind of experience requires adopting a special attitude.

Early on in his attack on aesthetic attitude theorists, Dickie argued against the view that experiencing something’s aesthetic qualities required attending to it disinterestedly. He did this by providing examples to show that the difference between people who are experiencing something’s aesthetic qualities and people who are experiencing the same object without being aware of its aesthetic qualities merely is a function of which characteristics of the thing each person is paying attention to, regardless of the interests motivating his or her attention. Since the difference in what is experienced is explained by what is being attended to, not the mode of attention, it is not necessary to introduce notions like disinterested attention or other special modes of perception (identified in terms of the perceiver’s interests, purposes, or motives) in order to understand the experience of something’s aesthetic qualities.

Bailey, George W. S.. “Dickie, George.” Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. Ed. Michael Kelly. Oxford Art Online. 13 Mar. 2010 <www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/opr/t234/e0168>

2010: 02/19
CATEGORY: All Writers
D
Philosopher
Theorist
Leave a comment

IRVING SANDLER

Dates: 1925-

Nationality: American

Irving Sandler, Senior Fellow, received a BA at Temple University and an MA at the University of Pennsylvania in 1950 for American history and his PhD in Art History at New York University in 1976. Throughout the 1950s, Irving Sandler was involved in several different artist organizations; he was the director of the artist-run Tanager Gallery, the Program Chairman for the Artists’ Club and worked as a reviewer for Art News and Art International. During the 1950s, he also independently interviewed artists and worked as an art critic. In the 1960s he taught at New York University and and SUNY-Purchase. Mr. Sandler has been published several times for his books on interviews with artists, reviews and surveys of contemporary art. Some of his work includes The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism (1970), The New York School: The Painters and Sculptors of the Fifties (1978), American Art of the 1960s (1988), Art of the Postmodern Era: From the Late 1960s to the Early 1990s (1996) and A Sweeper-Up After Artists: A Memoir (1993). Throughout his career, Irving Sandler has also held several influential positions at various curatorial organizations as well as larger foundations such as the National Endowment for the Arts and the Sharpe Art Foundation.

<www.cueartfoundation.org/irving-sandler.html>

2010: 02/19
CATEGORY: All Writers
Critic
S
Leave a comment

GILLES DELEUZE

Dates: 1925-1995

Nationality: French

Gilles Deleuze (January 18, 1925 – November 4, 1995) was a French philosopher of the late 20th century. From the early 1960s until his death, Deleuze wrote many influential works on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular books were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), both co-written with Félix Guattari. His books Difference and Repetition (1968) and The Logic of Sense (1969) led Michel Foucault to declare that “one day, perhaps, this century will be called Deleuzian.” (Deleuze, for his part, said Foucault’s comment was “a joke meant to make people who like us laugh, and make everyone else livid.”)

Wikipedia contributors, ‘Gilles Deleuze’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 25 November 2010, 19:13 UTC, <en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gilles_Deleuze&oldid=398847187>

Kant had dissociated aesthetics into two halves: the theory of sensibility as the form of possible experience (the “Transcendental Aesthetic” of the Critique of Pure Reason), and the theory of art as a reflection on real experience (the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” in the Critique of Judgment). In Deleuze’s work, these two halves of aesthetics are reunited: if the most general aim of art is to “produce a sensation,” then the genetic principles of sensation are at the same time the principles of composition for works of art; conversely, it is works of art that are best capable of revealing these conditions of sensibility. Deleuze therefore writes on the arts not as a critic but as a philosopher, and his books and essays on the various arts—including the cinema (Cinema I and II), literature (Essays Critical and Clinical), and painting (Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation)—must be read as philosophical explorations of this transcendental domain of sensibility. The cinema, for instance, produces images that move, and that move in time, and it is these two aspects of film that Deleuze set out to analyze in The Movement-Image and The Time-Image: “What exactly does the cinema show us about space and time that the other arts don’t show?” Deleuze thus describes his two-volume Cinema as “a book of logic, a logic of the cinema” that sets out “to isolate certain cinematographic concepts,” concepts which are specific to the cinema, but which can only be formed philosophically. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation likewise creates a series of philosophical concepts, each of which relates to a particular aspect of Bacon’s paintings, but which also find a place in “a general logic of sensation.” In general, Deleuze will locate the conditions of sensibility in an intensive conception of space and a virtual conception of time, which are necessarily actualized in a plurality of spaces and a complex rhythm of times (for instance, in the non-extended spaces and non-linear times of modern mathematics and physics).

For Deleuze, the task of art is to produce “signs” that will push us out of our habits of perception into the conditions of creation. When we perceive via the re-cognition of the properties of substances, we see with a stale eye pre-loaded with clichés; we order the world in what Deleuze calls “representation.” In this regard, Deleuze cites Francis Bacon: we’re after an artwork that produces an effect on the nervous system, not on the brain. What he means by this figure of speech is that in an art encounter we are forced to experience the “being of the sensible.” We get something that we cannot re-cognize, something that is “imperceptible”—it doesn’t fit the hylomorphic production model of perception in which sense data, the “matter” or hyle of sensation, is ordered by submission to conceptual form. Art however cannot be re-cognized, but can only be sensed; in other words, art splits perceptual processing, forbidding the move to conceptual ordering. This is exactly what Kant in the Third Critique called reflective judgment: when the concept is not immediately given in the presentation of art. With art we reach “sensation,” or the “being of the sensible,” the sentiendum.

Deleuze talks about this effect of sensation as the “transcendent exercise” of the faculty of sensibility; here we could refer to the third chapter of Difference and Repetition, where Deleuze lays out a non-Kantian “differential theory of the faculties.” In this remarkable theory, intensity is “difference in itself,” that which carries the faculties to their limits. The faculties are linked in order; here we see what Deleuze calls the privilege of sensibility as origin of knowledge—the “truth of empiricism.” In the differential theory of the faculties, sensibility, imagination, memory, and thought all “communicate a violence” from one to the other. With sensibility, pure difference in intensity is grasped immediately in the encounter as the sentiendum; with imagination, the disparity in the phantasm is that which can only be imagined. With memory, in turn, the memorandum is the dissimilar in the pure form of time, or the immemorial of transcendent memory. With thought, a fractured self is constrained to think “difference in itself” in Ideas. Thus the “free form of difference” moves each faculty and communicates its violence to the next. You have to be forced to think, starting with an art encounter in which intensity is transmitted in signs or sensation. Rather than a “common sense” in which all the faculties agree in recognizing the “same” object, we find in this communicated violence a “discordant harmony” (compare the Kantian sublime) that tears apart the subject (the notion of “cruelty” Deleuze picks up from Artaud).

Smith, Daniel and Protevi, John, “Gilles Deleuze”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/deleuze/>

2010: 02/19
CATEGORY: All Writers
D
Philosopher
Leave a comment

JOSEPH MARGOLIS

Dates: 1924-

Nationality: American

Joseph Zalman Margolis (born on May 16, 1924 in Newark, New Jersey) is an American philosopher. A radical historicist, he has published many books critical of the central assumptions of Western philosophy, and has elaborated a robust form of relativism. His own investigations into “ourselves” have proceeded with a focus on a consideration of the arts as an expression of human being. In What, After All, Is a Work of Art? (1999) and Selves and Other Texts (2001), he elaborated upon his earlier work on the ontological similarity between human persons and artworks. The latter – defined as “physically embodied, culturally emergent entities” – he treats as examples of “human utterance.” Margolis argues that the cultural world is a semantically and semiotically dense domain, filled with self-interpreting texts, acts and artifacts.

Wikipedia contributors, ‘Joseph Margolis’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 12 October 2010, 06:55 UTC, <en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Joseph_Margolis&oldid=390223863>

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 (also history, action, and language) 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.

<www.psupress.org/books/titles/0-271-01865-8.html>

2010: 02/19
CATEGORY: All Writers
M
Philosopher
Leave a comment

JEAN-FRANÇOIS LYOTARD

Dates: 1924-1998

Nationality: French

Jean-François Lyotard (August 10, 1924 – April 21, 1998) was a French philosopher and literary theorist. He is well-known for his articulation of postmodernism after the late 1970s and the analysis of the impact of post-modernity on the human condition.

Lyotard was a frequent writer on aesthetic matters. He was, despite his reputation as a postmodernist, a great promoter of modernist art. Lyotard saw ‘postmodernism’ as a latent tendency within thought throughout time and not a narrowly-limited historical period. He favored the startling and perplexing works of the high modernist avant-garde. In them he found a demonstration of the limits of our conceptuality, a valuable lesson for anyone too imbued with Enlightenment confidence. Lyotard has written extensively also on few contemporary artists of his choice: Valerio Adami, Daniel Buren, Marcel Duchamp, Bracha Ettinger and Barnett Newman, as well as on Paul Cézanne and Wassily Kandinsky.

He developed these themes in particular by discussing the sublime. The “sublime” is a term in aesthetics whose fortunes revived under postmodernism after a century or more of neglect. It refers to the experience of pleasurable anxiety that we experience when confronting wild and threatening sights like, for example, a massive craggy mountain, black against the sky, looming terrifyingly in our vision.

Lyotard found particularly interesting the explanation of the sublime offered by Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Judgment (sometimes Critique of the Power of Judgment). In this book Kant explains this mixture of anxiety and pleasure in the following terms: there are two kinds of ‘sublime’ experience. In the ‘mathematically’ sublime, an object strikes the mind in such a way that we find ourselves unable to take it in as a whole. More precisely, we experience a clash between our reason (which tells us that all objects are finite) and the imagination (the aspect of the mind that organizes what we see, and which sees an object incalculably larger than ourselves, and feels infinite). In the ‘dynamically’ sublime, the mind recoils at an object so immeasurably more powerful than we, whose weight, force, scale could crush us without the remotest hope of our being able to resist it. (Kant stresses that if we are in actual danger, our feeling of anxiety is very different from that of a sublime feeling. The sublime is an aesthetic experience, not a practical feeling of personal danger.) This explains the feeling of anxiety.

The feeling of pleasure comes when human reason asserts itself. What is deeply unsettling about the mathematically sublime is that the mental faculties that present visual perceptions to the mind are inadequate to the concept corresponding to it; in other words, what we are able to make ourselves see cannot fully match up to what we know is there. We know it’s a mountain but we cannot take the whole thing into our perception. What this does, ironically, is to compel our awareness of the supremacy of the human reason. Our sensibility is incapable of coping with such sights, but our reason can assert the finitude of the presentation. With the dynamically sublime, our sense of physical danger should prompt an awareness that we are not just physical material beings, but moral and (in Kant’s terms) noumenal beings as well. The body may be dwarfed by its power but our reason need not be. This explains, in both cases, why the sublime is an experience of pleasure as well as pain.

Lyotard is fascinated by this admission, from one of the philosophical architects of the Enlightenment, that the mind cannot always organise the world rationally. Some objects are simply incapable of being brought neatly under concepts. For Lyotard, in Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, but drawing on his argument in The Differend, this is a good thing. Such generalities as ‘concepts’ fail to pay proper attention to the particularity of things. What happens in the sublime is a crisis where we realize the inadequacy of the imagination and reason to each other. What we are witnessing, says Lyotard, is actually the differend; the straining of the mind at the edges of itself and at the edges of its conceptuality.

Wikipedia contributors, ‘Jean-François Lyotard’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 7 November 2010, 19:03 UTC, <en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jean-Fran%C3%A7ois_Lyotard&oldid=395395852>

2010: 02/19
CATEGORY: All Writers
L
Philosopher
Theorist
Leave a comment

ARTHUR DANTO

Dates: 1924-

Nationality: American

Arthur Coleman Danto is an American art critic, and professor of philosophy. He is best known as the influential, long-time art critic for the Nation and for his work in philosophical aesthetics and philosophy of history, though he has contributed significantly to a number of fields. His interests span thought, feeling, philosophy of art, theories of representation, philosophical psychology, Hegel’s aesthetics, and the philosophers Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Arthur Schopenhauer.

Danto laid the groundwork for an institutional definition of art that sought to answer the questions raised by the emerging phenomenon of twentieth century art. The definition of the term “art” is a subject of constant contention and many books and journal articles have been published arguing over the answer to the question, What is Art? Definitions can be categorized into conventional and non-conventional definitions. Non-conventional definitions take a concept like the aesthetic as an intrinsic characteristic in order to account for the phenomena of art. Conventional definitions reject this connection to aesthetic, formal, or expressive properties as essential to defining art but rather, in either an institutional or historical sense, say that “art” is basically a sociological category. (Classificatory disputes about art|see Definitions of art) Danto takes a conventional approach and develops an “institutional definition of art” in that whatever art schools and museums, and artists get away with is considered art regardless of formal definitions. Danto has written on this subject in several of his recent works and a detailed treatment is to be found in Transfiguration of the Commonplace.

The essay “The Artworld” in which Danto coined the term “artworld”, by which he meant cultural context or “an atmosphere of art theory,”first appeared in the Journal of Philosophy (1964) and has since been widely reprinted. It has had considerable influence on aesthetic philosophy and, according to professor of philosophy Stephen David Ross, “especially upon George Dickie’s institutional theory of art. Dickie defines work as an artifact ‘which has had conferred upon it the status of candidate for appreciation by some person or persons acting in behalf of a certain social institution (the artworld) “(p. 43.).

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Danto’s definition has been glossed as follows: something is a work of art if and only if (i) it has a subject (ii) about which it projects some attitude or point of view (has a style) (iii) by means of rhetorical ellipsis (usually metaphorical) which ellipsis engages audience participation in filling in what is missing, and (iv) where the work in question and the interpretations thereof require an art historical context. (Danto, Carroll) Clause (iv) is what makes the definition institutionalist. The view has been criticized for entailing that art criticism written in a highly rhetorical style is art, lacking but requiring an independent account of what makes a context art historical, and for not applying to music.”

The basic meaning of the term “art” has changed several times over the centuries, and has continued to evolve during the 20th century as well. Danto describes the history of Art in his own contemporary version of Hegel’s dialectical history of art. “Danto is not claiming that no-one is making art anymore; nor is he claiming that no good art is being made any more. But he thinks that a certain history of western art has come to an end, in about the way that Hegel suggested it would.” The “end of art” refers to the beginning of our modern era of art in which art no longer adheres to the constraints of imitation theory but serves a new purpose. Art began with an “era of imitation, followed by an era of ideology, followed by our post-historical era in which, with qualification, anything goes… In our narrative, at first only mimesis [imitation] was art, then several things were art but each tried to extinguish its competitors, and then, finally, it became apparent that there were no stylistic or philosophical constraints. There is no special way works of art have to be. And that is the present and, I should say, the final moment in the master narrative. It is the end of the story.”

Wikipedia contributors, ‘Arthur Danto’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 4 November 2010, 17:12 UTC, <en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Arthur_Danto&oldid=394817202>

2010: 02/19
CATEGORY: All Writers
Critic
D
Leave a comment

RICHARD WOLLHEIM

Dates: 1923-2003

Nationality: British

Richard Arthur Wollheim (May 5, 1923 – November 4, 2003) was a British philosopher noted for original work on mind and emotions, especially as related to the visual arts, specifically, painting. Wollheim served as the president of the British Society of Aesthetics from 1992 onwards until his death in 2003.

Son of an actress and a theater impresario, Richard Wollheim attended Westminster School, London, and Balliol College, Oxford (1941-2, 1945-8), interrupted by active military service in World War II.In 1949 he obtained a first in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, and began teaching at University College London, where he became Grote Professor of Mind and Logic and Department Head from 1963 to 1982. He was visiting professor at Harvard University, Columbia University, the University of Minnesota, Graduate Center, CUNY, the University of California-Berkeley, UC Davis and elsewhere. He chaired the Department at UC Berkeley, 1998-2002. On retirement from Berkeley, he served briefly as a guest lecturer at Balliol College. Wollheim gave several distinguished lecture series, most notably the Andrew M. Mellon lectures in Fine Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (1984), published as Painting as an Art.

Besides his philosophical research and teaching on art, Wollheim was well-known for his philosophical treatments of depth psychology,notably Sigmund Freud. Art and its Objects was one of the twentieth century’s most influential texts on philosophical aesthetics. In a 1965 essay, ‘Minimal Art’, he seems to have coined the meme term ‘minimal’, although the meaning of the word drifted from his. In his well-received, posthumously-published autobiography of youth, Germs: A Memoir of Childhood, complemented by a few essays, Wollheim provides much information about his family background and his life, into early manhood, and understanding of the roots of his interests and sensibility.

Wikipedia contributors, ‘Richard Wollheim’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 4 November 2010, 16:57 UTC, <en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Richard_Wollheim&oldid=394814700>

2010: 02/19
CATEGORY: All Writers
Philosopher
W
Leave a comment

LEO STEINBERG

Dates: 1920-2011

Nationality: American

Leo Steinberg (born July 9, 1920, Moscow) was an American art critic and art historian and a naturalized citizen of the U.S. Steinberg has won literary awards as well as awards for his criticism. He was professor of the History of Art at Hunter College, and a Benjamin Franklin and University Professor of the History of Art, Emeritus, at the University of Pennsylvania. Steinberg is known for his work in several areas of Art History, notably Renaissance art and Modernism.

The whole of the Summer, 1983, issue of October was dedicated to Steinberg’s essay The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, later published as a book by Random House. In that essay, Steinberg examined a previously ignored pattern in Renaissance art: the prominent display of the genitals of the infant Christ, and the attention drawn again to that area in images of Christ near the end of his life.

In Tom Wolfe’s 1975 book, The Painted Word, Steinberg was labeled one of the “kings of Cultureburg” for the enormous degree of influence that his criticism, along with that of other “kings,” Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, exerted over the world of modern art at the time. However, Steinberg, who originally trained as an artist but earned a PhD in Art History, moved away from art criticism, concentrating on academic art-historical studies of such artists and architects as Borromini, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci.

Wikipedia contributors, ‘Leo Steinberg’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 6 November 2010, 23:47 UTC, <en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Leo_Steinberg&oldid=395257749>

2010: 02/19
CATEGORY: All Writers
Critic
Historian
S
Leave a comment

MONROE BEARDSLEY

Dates: 1915-1985

Nationality: American

Monroe Curtis Beardsley (December 10, 1915 – September 18, 1985) was an American philosopher of art. He was born and raised in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and educated at Yale University (B.A. 1936, Ph.D. 1939). He taught at a number of colleges and universities, including Mt. Holyoke College and Yale University, but most of his career was spent at Swarthmore College (22 years) and Temple University (16 years).

His work in aesthetics is best known for its championing of the instrumentalist theory of art and the concept of aesthetic experience. Beardsley was elected president of the American Society for Aesthetics in 1956. He also wrote an introductory text on aesthetics and edited a well-regarded survey anthology of philosophy. Amongst literary critics, Beardsley is known for two essays written with W.K. Wimsatt, “The Intentional Fallacy” and “The Affective Fallacy,” both key texts of New Criticism. His works also include: Practical Logic (1950), Aesthetics (1958), and Aesthetics: A Short History (1966).

Wikipedia contributors, ‘Monroe Beardsley’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 26 October 2010, 01:51 UTC, <en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Monroe_Beardsley&oldid=392908679>

Beardsley is best known for his work in aesthetics—and this article will deal exclusively with his work in that area—but he was an extremely intellectually curious man, and published articles in a number of areas, including the philosophy of history, action theory, and the history of modern philosophy.

Three books and a number of articles form the core of Beardsley’s work in aesthetics. Of the books, the first, Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism (1958; reissued with a postscript, 1981), is by far the most substantial, comprehensive, and influential. More than that, it’s also the first systematic, well-argued, and critically informed philosophy of art in the analytic tradition. Given the wide range of topics covered in Aesthetics, the intelligent and philosophically informed treatment accorded them, the historically unprecedented nature of the work, and its effect on subsequent developments in the field, a number of philosophers, including some of Beardsley’s critics, have argued that Aesthetics is the most impressive and important book of 20^th century analytic aesthetics.

The Possibility of Criticism, the second of the three books, is more modest in scope and less groundbreaking. Exclusively concerned with literary criticism, it limits itself to four problems: the ‘self-sufficiency’ of a literary text, the nature of literary interpretation, judging literary texts, and bad poetry.

The last of the books, The Aesthetic Point of View, is a collection of papers, most old, some new. Fourteen papers, largely on the nature of the aesthetic and art criticism, are reprinted, and six new pieces are added. The new pieces are of special interest, because they constitute Beardsley’s final word on the topics covered, and the topics are themselves central ones: aesthetic experience, the definition of art, judgments of value, reasons in art criticism, artists’ intentions and interpretation, and art and culture.

Wreen, Michael, “Beardsley’s Aesthetics”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2010/entries/beardsley-aesthetics/>

2010: 02/19
CATEGORY: All Writers
B
Philosopher
Leave a comment

ROLAND BARTHES

Dates: 1915-1980

Nationality: French

Roland Barthes (November 12, 1915 – March 25, 1980) was a French literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. Barthes’s work extended over many fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, social theory, Marxism and post-structuralism.

Throughout his career, Barthes had an interest in photography and its potential to communicate actual events. Many of his monthly myth articles in the 50s had attempted to show how a photographic image could represent implied meanings and thus be used by bourgeois culture to infer ‘naturalistic truths’. But he still considered the photograph to have a unique potential for presenting a completely real representation of the world. When his mother, Henriette Barthes, died in 1977 he began writing Camera Lucida as an attempt to explain the unique significance a picture of her as a child carried for him. Reflecting on the relationship between the obvious symbolic meaning of a photograph (which he called the studium) and that which is purely personal and dependent on the individual, that which ‘pierces the viewer’ (which he called the punctum), Barthes was troubled by the fact that such distinctions collapse when personal significance is communicated to others and can have its symbolic logic rationalized. Barthes found the solution to this fine line of personal meaning in the form of his mother’s picture.

Barthes explained that a picture creates a falseness in the illusion of ‘what is’, where ‘what was’ would be a more accurate description. As had been made physical through Henriette Barthes’s death, her childhood photograph is evidence of ‘what has ceased to be’. Instead of making reality solid, it reminds us of the world’s ever changing nature. Because of this there is something uniquely personal contained in the photograph of Barthes’ mother that cannot be removed from his subjective state: the recurrent feeling of loss experienced whenever he looks at it. As one of his final works before his death, Camera Lucida was both an ongoing reflection on the complicated relations between subjectivity, meaning and cultural society as well as a touching dedication to his mother and description of the depth of his grief.

Wikipedia contributors, ‘Roland Barthes’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 28 November 2010, 17:05 UTC, <en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Roland_Barthes&oldid=399347051>

2010: 02/19
CATEGORY: All Writers
B
Critic
Philosopher
Leave a comment

CLEMENT GREENBERG

Dates: 1909-1994

Nationality: American

Clement Greenberg (January 16, 1909 – May 7, 1994) was an influential American art critic closely associated with Modern art in the United States. In particular, he promoted the abstract expressionist movement and was among the first critics to praise the work of painter Jackson Pollock.

Greenberg was a graduate of Syracuse University who first made his name as an art critic with his essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” first published in the journal Partisan Review in 1939. In this article Greenberg claimed that avant-garde and Modernist art was a means to resist the leveling of culture produced by capitalist propaganda. Greenberg appropriated the German word ‘kitsch’ to describe this consumerism, though its connotations have since changed to a more affirmative notion of left-over materials of capitalist culture. Modern art, like philosophy, explored the conditions under which we experience and understand the world. It does not simply provide information about it in the manner of an illustratively accurate depiction of the world. “Avant Garde and Kitsch” was also a politically motivated essay in part a response to the destruction and repression of Modernist Art in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union and its replacement with state ordained styles of “Aryan” art and “Socialist realism.”

In December 1950, he joined the CIA-fronted American Committee for Cultural Freedom. Greenberg believed Modernism provided a critical commentary on experience. It was constantly changing to adapt to kitsch pseudo-culture, which was itself always developing. In the years after World War II, Greenberg pushed the position that the best avant-garde artists were emerging in America rather than Europe. Particularly, he championed Jackson Pollock as the greatest painter of his generation, commemorating the artist’s “all-over” gestural canvases. In the 1955 essay “American-Type Painting” Greenberg promoted the work of Abstract Expressionists, among them Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Hans Hofmann, Barnett Newman, and Clyfford Still, as the next stage in Modernist art, arguing that these painters were moving towards greater emphasis on the ‘flatness’ of the picture plane.

Greenberg helped to articulate a concept of medium specificity. It posited that there were inherent qualities that “mediums” could be driven to. Sometimes this is understood to mean that paintings should be “flat,” in keeping with their physical two-dimensionality. This is of course in contrast with the illusion of depth commonly found in pre-twentieth century painting.

In Greenberg’s conception abstract painting was high art. Greenberg’s view that, after the war, the United States had become the guardian of ‘advanced art’ was taken up in some quarters as a reason for using Abstract Expressionism as the basis for Cultural Propaganda exercises. He praised similar movements abroad and, after the success of the Painters Eleven exhibition in 1956 with the American Abstract Artists at New York’s Riverside Gallery, he travelled to Toronto to see the group’s work in 1957. He was particularly impressed by the potential of painters William Ronald and Jack Bush, and later developed a close friendship with Bush. Greenberg saw Bush’s post-Painters Eleven work as a clear manifestation of the shift from abstract expressionism to Color Field painting and Lyrical Abstraction, a shift he had called for in most of his critical writings of the period.

Greenberg expressed mixed feelings about pop art. On the one hand he expressed that pop art partook of a trend toward “openness and clarity as against the turgidities of second generation Abstract Expressionism.” But on the other hand Greenberg expressed that pop art did not “really challenge taste on more than a superficial level.”

Through the 1960s Greenberg remained an influential figure on a younger generation of critics including Michael Fried and Rosalind E. Krauss. Greenberg’s antagonism to ‘Postmodernist’ theories and socially engaged movements in art caused him to lose influence amongst both artists and art critics. Such was Greenberg’s influence as an art critic that Tom Wolfe in his 1975 book The Painted Word identified Greenberg as one of the “kings of cultureburg”, alongside Harold Rosenberg and Leo Steinberg. Wolfe contended that these critics influence was too great on the world of art.

Eventually, Greenberg was concerned that some Abstract Expressionism had been “reduced to a set of mannerisms” and increasingly looked to a new set of artists who abandoned such elements as subject matter, connection with the artist, and definite brush strokes. Greenberg suggested this process attained a level of ‘purity’ (a word he only used in quotes) that would reveal the truthfulness of the canvas, and the two-dimensional aspects of the space (flatness). Greenberg coined the term “Post-Painterly Abstraction” to distinguish it from Abstract Expressionism, or Painterly Abstraction, as Greenberg preferred to call it. Post-Painterly Abstraction was a term given to a myriad of abstract art that reacted against gestural abstraction of second-generation Abstract Expressionists. Among the dominant trends in the Post-Painterly Abstraction are Hard-Edged Painters such as Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella who explored relationships between tightly ruled shapes and edges, in Stella’s case, between the shapes depicted on the surface and the literal shape of the support and Color-Field Painters such as Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis, who stained first Magna then water-based acrylic paints into unprimed canvas, exploring tactile and optical aspects of large, vivid fields of pure, open color. The line between these movements is tenuous, however as artists such as Kenneth Noland utilized aspects of both movements in his art. Post-Painterly Abstraction is generally seen as continuing the Modernist dialectic of self-criticism.

Wikipedia contributors, ‘Clement Greenberg’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 6 October 2010, 22:57 UTC, <en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Clement_Greenberg&oldid=389191348>

2010: 02/19
CATEGORY: All Writers
Critic
G
Leave a comment

MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY

Dates: 1908-1961

Nationality: French

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (March 14, 1908 – May 3, 1961) was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger in addition to being closely associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. At the core of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy is a sustained argument for the foundational role that perception plays in understanding the world as well as engaging with the world. Like the other major phenomenologists Merleau-Ponty expressed his philosophical insights in writings on art, literature, linguistics, and politics; however Merleau-Ponty was the only major phenomenologist of the first half of the Twentieth Century to engage extensively with the sciences, and especially with descriptive psychology. Because of this engagement, his writings have become influential with the recent project of naturalizing phenomenology in which phenomenologists utilize the results of psychology and cognitive science.

It is important to clarify, and indeed emphasize, that the attention Merleau-Ponty pays to diverse forms of art (visual, plastic, literary, poetic, etc) should not be attributed to a concern with beauty per se. Nor is his work an attempt to elaborate normative criteria for “art.” Thus, one does not find in his work a theoretical attempt to discern what constitutes a major work or a work of art, or even handicraft.

Still, it is useful to note that, while he does not establish any normative criteria for art as such, there is nonetheless in his work a prevalent distinction between primary and secondary modes of expression. This distinction appears in Phenomenology of Perception (p 207, 2nd note {Fr. ed.}) and is sometimes repeated in terms of spoken and speaking language (le langage parlé et le langage parlant) (The Prose of the World, p. 10). Spoken language (le langage parlé), or secondary expression, returns to our linguistic baggage, to the cultural heritage that we have acquired, as well as the brute mass of relationships between signs and significations. Speaking language (le langage parlant), or primary expression, such as it is, is language in the production of a sense, language at the advent of a thought, at the moment where it makes itself an advent of sense.

It is speaking language, that is to say, primary expression, that interests Merleau-Ponty and which keeps his attention through his treatment of the nature of production and the reception of expressions, a subject which also overlaps with an analysis of action, of intentionality, of perception, as well as the links between freedom and external conditions.

The notion of style occupies an important place in “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence”. In spite of certain similarities with André Malraux, Merleau-Ponty distinguishes himself from Malraux in respect to three conceptions of style, the last of which is employed in Malraux’s The Voices of Silence. Merleau-Ponty remarks that in this work “style” is sometimes used by Malraux in a highly subjective sense, understood as a projection of the artist’s individuality. Sometimes it is used, on the contrary, in a very metaphysical sense (in Merleau-Ponty’s opinion, a mystical sense), in which style is connected with a conception of an “über-artist” expressing “the Spirit of Painting.” Finally, it sometimes is reduced to simply designating a categorization of an artistic school or movement.

For Merleau-Ponty, it is these uses of the notion of style that lead Malraux to postulate a cleavage between the objectivity of Italian Renaissance painting and the subjectivity of painting in his own time, a conclusion that Merleau-Ponty disputes. According to Merleau-Ponty, it is important to consider the heart of this problematic, by recognizing that style is first of all a demand owed to the primacy of perception, which also implies taking into consideration the dimensions of historicity and intersubjectivity.

Wikipedia contributors, ‘Maurice Merleau-Ponty’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 10 December 2010, 22:23 UTC, <en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Maurice_Merleau-Ponty&oldid=401683967>

2010: 02/19
CATEGORY: All Writers
M
Philosopher
Leave a comment

HAROLD ROSENBERG

Dates: 1906-1978

Nationality: American

Harold Rosenberg (February 2, 1906, New York City – July 11, 1978, New York City) was an American writer, educator, philosopher and art critic. He coined the term Action Painting in 1952 for what was later to be known as abstract expressionism. The term was first employed in Rosenberg’s essay “American Action Painters” published in the December 1952 issue of ARTnews. The essay was reprinted in Rosenberg’s book The Tradition of the New in 1959. The title is itself ambiguous as it both refers to American Action Painters and American Action Painters and reveals Rosenberg’s political agenda which consisted in crediting US as the center of international culture and action painting as the most advanced of its cultural forms. This theme was already developed in a previous article “The Fall of Paris” published in Partisan Review in 1940.

Rosenberg was born in Brooklyn, educated at City College of New York and received a law degree from St. Lawrence College in 1927. Later, he often said he was “educated on the steps of the New York Public Library.” From 1938 to 1942 he was art editor for the American Guide Series produced by the Works Progress Administration. Later he was deputy chief of domestic radio in the Office of War Information and a consult for the Treasury Department and the Advertising Council of America. Later, he was professor of social thought in the art department of the University of Chicago.

Rosenberg is best known for his art criticism. Beginning in the early 1960s he became art Critic for the New Yorker magazine. His books on art theory include The Tradition of the New (1959), The Anxious Object (1964), Art Work and Packages, Art and the Actor and The De-Definition of Art. He also wrote monographs on Willem de Kooning, Saul Steinberg, and Arshile Gorky. A Marxian cultural critic, Rosenberg’s books and essays probed the ways in which evolving trends in painting, literature, politics, and popular culture disguised hidden agendas or mere hollowness.

One of Rosenberg’s most often cited essays is “The Herd of Independent Minds,” where he analyzes the trivialization of personal experience inherent both in mass culture-making and superficial political commitment in the arts. In this work, Rosenberg exposes political posturing in both the mass media and among artistic elites (for instance, he claims the so-called socially responsible poetry of Stephen Spender was actually an avoidance of responsibility masquerading as “responsible poetry.”)Rosenberg deplored the attempts at commercialization of authentic experience through techniques of psychological manipulation available to mass media producers. He wrote mockingly of mass culture’s efforts to consolidate and control the intricacies of human needs:

The more exactly he grasps, whether by instinct or through study, the existing element of sameness in people, the more successful is the mass-culture maker. Indeed, so deeply is he committed to the concept that men are alike that he may even fancy that there exists a kind of human dead center in which everyone is identical with everyone else, and that if he can hit that psychic bull’s eye he can make all mankind twitch at once.

Rosenberg was also the subject of a painting by Elaine de Kooning. Along with Clement Greenberg and Leo Steinberg, he was identified in Tom Wolfe’s 1975 book The Painted Word as one of the three “kings of Cultureburg”, so named for the enormous degree of influence their criticism exerted over the world of modern art.

Wikipedia contributors, ‘Harold Rosenberg’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 13 November 2010, 16:40 UTC, <en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Harold_Rosenberg&oldid=396532749>

2010: 02/19
CATEGORY: All Writers
Critic
Philosopher
R
Leave a comment

NELSON GOODMAN

Dates: 1906-1998

Nationality: American

Henry Nelson Goodman (August 7, 1906– November 25, 1998) was an American philosopher, known for his work on counterfactuals, mereology, the problem of induction, irrealism and aesthetics. Goodman graduated from Harvard University in 1928. During the 1930s, he ran an art gallery in Boston, Massachusetts, while studying for a Harvard Ph.D. in philosophy, which he completed in 1941. His experience as an art dealer helps explain his later turn towards aesthetics, where he became better known than in logic and analytic philosophy.

Wikipedia contributors, ‘Nelson Goodman’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 12 December 2010, 10:06 UTC, <en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nelson_Goodman&oldid=401930322>

Most of Goodman’s aesthetics is contained in his Languages of Art (which he republished, with slight variations, in a second edition in 1976), although what is there presented is clarified, expanded, and sometimes corrected in later essays. As its subtitle, An Approach to a General Theory of Symbols, indicates, this is a book with bearings not only on art issues, but on a general understanding of symbols, linguistic and non-linguistic, in the sciences as well as in ordinary life. Indeed, Languages of Art has, amongst its merits, that of having broken, in a non-superficial and fruitful way, the divide between art and science. Goodman’s general view is that we use symbols in our perceiving, understanding, constructing the worlds of our experience: the different sciences and the different arts equally contribute to the enterprise of understanding the world. As in his works in epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of language, Goodman’s approach is often unorthodox and groundbreaking, and yet never in a way that fails to be refreshing and suggestive of future developments (some of those developments were pursued by Goodman himself in later essays and, most notably, in his last book, co-authored with Catherine Elgin, Reconceptions in Philosophy and Other Arts and Sciences [1988]).

With respect to art in particular and to symbolic activities in general, Goodman advocates a form of cognitivism: by using symbols we discover (indeed we build) the worlds we live in, and the interest we have in symbols—artworks amongst them—is distinctively cognitive. Indeed, to Goodman, aesthetics is but a branch of epistemology. Paintings, sculptures, musical sonatas, dance pieces, etc. are all entities composed of symbols, which possess different functions and bear different relations with the worlds they refer to. Hence, artworks require interpretation and interpreting them amounts to understanding what they refer to, in which way, and within which systems of rules.

Since symbolizing is for Goodman the same as referring, it must also be emphasized, first, that reference has, in his view, different modes, and, second, that something is a symbol, and is a symbol of a given kind, only within a symbol system of that kind, a system governed by the syntactical and semantic rules distinctive of symbols of that kind. Of course, natural languages are examples of symbol systems, but there are many other, non-linguistic systems: pictorial, gestural, diagrammatic, etc.

Giovannelli, Alessandro, “Goodman’s Aesthetics”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2010/entries/goodman-aesthetics/>

2010: 02/19
CATEGORY: All Writers
G
Philosopher
Leave a comment

JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

Dates: 1905-1980

Nationality: French

Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (June 21, 1905 – April 15, 1980) was a French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the leading figures in 20th century French philosophy and existentialism, and his work continues to influence further fields such as sociology and literary studies. Sartre was also noted for his long relationship with the author and social theorist, Simone de Beauvoir. He was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature but refused the honor.

Wikipedia contributors, ‘Jean-Paul Sartre’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 12 December 2010, 23:28 UTC, <en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jean-Paul_Sartre&oldid=402041483>

…But here I must at once digress to make it quite clear that we are not propounding an aesthetic morality, for our adversaries are disingenuous enough to reproach us even with that. I mention the work of art only by way of comparison. That being understood, does anyone reproach an artist, when he paints a picture, for not following rules established a priori. Does one ever ask what is the picture that he ought to paint? As everyone knows, there is no pre-defined picture for him to make; the artist applies himself to the composition of a picture, and the picture that ought to be made is precisely that which he will have made. As everyone knows, there are no aesthetic values a priori, but there are values which will appear in due course in the coherence of the picture, in the relation between the will to create and the finished work. No one can tell what the painting of tomorrow will be like; one cannot judge a painting until it is done. What has that to do with morality? We are in the same creative situation. We never speak of a work of art as irresponsible; when we are discussing a canvas by Picasso, we understand very well that the composition became what it is at the time when he was painting it, and that his works are part and parcel of his entire life.

It is the same upon the plane of morality. There is this in common between art and morality, that in both we have to do with creation and invention. We cannot decide a priori what it is that should be done. I think it was made sufficiently clear to you in the case of that student who came to see me, that to whatever ethical system he might appeal, the Kantian or any other, he could find no sort of guidance whatever; he was obliged to invent the law for himself. Certainly we cannot say that this man, in choosing to remain with his mother – that is, in taking sentiment, personal devotion and concrete charity as his moral foundations – would be making an irresponsible choice, nor could we do so if he preferred the sacrifice of going away to England. Man makes himself; he is not found ready-made; he makes himself by the choice of his morality, and he cannot but choose a morality, such is the pressure of circumstances upon him. We define man only in relation to his commitments; it is therefore absurd to reproach us for irresponsibility in our choice.

<74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:fm3XKH2CT2oJ:www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm+JEAN-PAUL+SARTrE+art&cd=4&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a>

2010: 02/19
CATEGORY: All Writers
Philosopher
S
Leave a comment

MEYER SCHAPIRO

Dates: 1904-1996

Nationality: American

Meyer Schapiro (September 23, 1904 – March 3, 1996) was an American 20th century art historian. Schapiro was born in Šiauliai, Lithuania.

In 1907 his family immigrated to the United States, where he received his bachelors’ and doctorate degrees from Columbia University. He began teaching in 1928 and became a full professor at Columbia in 1952. Schapiro was a proponent of modern art, and published books on Van Gogh and Cézanne and various essays on modern art. He was a founder of Dissent, along with Irving Howe and Michael Harrington. From 1966–1967 Schapiro was the Norton professor at Harvard University.

Schapiro’s discourse on style is often considered his greatest contribution to the study of art history. According to Schapiro, style refers to the formal qualities and visual characteristics of a piece of art. Schapiro demonstrated that style could be used not only as an identifier of a particular period but also as a diagnostic tool. Style is indicative of the artist and the culture at large. It reflects the economic and social circumstances in which an artist works and breathes and reveals underlying cultural assumptions and normative values. On the other hand our own descriptions of form and style indicate our period, our concerns, and our biases; the way art historians of a particular age talk about style is also indicative of their cultural context.

Schapiro was, at points in his career, criticized for his approach to style because of its politically radical connotations. Schapiro himself wrote scholarly articles for a variety of socialist publications and endeavored to apply a novel Marxist method to the study of art history. In his most famous essay on Medieval Spanish art, ‘From Mozarabic to Romanesque in Silos,’ Schapiro demonstrated how the concurrent existence of two historical styles in one monastery was indicative of economic upheaval and class conflict.

Wikipedia contributors, ‘Meyer Schapiro’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 6 December 2010, 11:12 UTC, <en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Meyer_Schapiro&oldid=400834909>

2010: 02/19
CATEGORY: All Writers
Historian
S
Leave a comment

KENNETH CLARK

Dates: 1903-1983

Nationality: British

Kenneth McKenzie Clark, Baron Clark, OM, CH, KCB, FBA (July 13, 1903 – May 21, 1983) was a British author, museum director, broadcaster, and one of the best-known art historians of his generation. In 1969, he achieved an international popular presence as the writer, producer, and presenter of the BBC Television series, Civilisation.

Wikipedia contributors, ‘Kenneth Clark’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 16 November 2010, 15:33 UTC, <en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kenneth_Clark&oldid=397116336>

Growing up he attended Winchester. Clarke won a scholarship to Trinity College, Oxford, gave up hopes of becoming an artist, and set his sights on art history. In 1922 he met Charles F. Bell (q.v.), keeper at the Ashmolean Museum, whom he learned the elements of connoisseurship Bell introduced Clark to Bernard Berenson (q.v.) in Florence in 1925. Clark was immediately enthralled by Berenson. Though still a student at Oxford, he assisted Berenson with the revision of Berenson’s corpus of Florentine drawings. Clark worked for Berenson for over two years, honing his skills connoisseurship skills in Italian museums and in Berenson’s library of I Tatti. He married his Oxford classmate Elizabeth Winifred “Jane” Martin (1902-1976) in 1927.

Despite concentration on Italian Renaissance painting, Clark’s first book was a suggested topic of Bell’s, The Gothic Revival, published in 1928, an expansion of Bell’s numerous notes on the topic. Clark’s work with Berenson resulted in a 1929 commission to catalog the rich holdings of Leonardo da Vinci manuscripts at Windsor castle (published 1935). Leonardo was still largely undocumented, the previous century viewing Leonardo as a dark genius of largely unfinished work. Clark co-organized the famous exhibition of Italian painting at the Royal Academy, with Lord Balniel (David Lindsay, the future Earl of Crawford and Balcarres, 1900-1975), displaying works from Italy which had never before (or since in many cases) left Italy. The show influenced many, including Thomas S. R. Boase (q.v.), later director of the Courtauld and Warburg Institutes, whose art career can be traced to this show and Clark’s friendship. Though personally dissatisfied with his contribution to the exhibition catalog, Clark found himself lecturing widely as a result of the high profile show.

In 1931 Bell retired from the Ashmolean and Clark assumed his position as keeper of the department of Fine Art. The years 1933 to 1945 were ones of great accomplishment for him. In 1933 he was appointed director of the National Gallery, London, at age 31 the youngest director ever. Clark used his position to launch a major expansion of its collection. Ruben’s Watering Place (1617), Constable’s Hadleigh Castle (1829), Rembrandt’s Saskia as Flora (1635), and Poussin’s Golden Calf (1634) were among the many major additions to the Gallery. The following year, King George V appointed him surveyor of the King’s pictures. This led to a knighthood in 1938. Unlike his predecessors, Clark took charge of the museum directly. His brash approach and direct involvement in acquisitions led to large-scale dissatisfaction among the Gallery staff, most publicly with Keeper Martin Davies (q.v.). These years before World War II Clark rightly saw as “the Great Clark Boom.” He and Jane lived in the palatial Portland Place, she the president of the Incorporated Society of London Fashion Designers and he the Director of the National Gallery, hosting parties for London society and intelligentsia.

In 1939 he published his Leonardo da Vinci: His Development as an Artist. During World War II, Clark and Davies evacuated nearly the entire collection to safe haven in a quarry cavern in Wales and instituted the Dame J. Myra Hess concerts in the empty museum. After the war, Clark resigned as director and focused on art writing. He was succeeded at the Gallery by Philip Hendy (q.v.). Clark taught as Slade Professor of fine art at Oxford, previously held by Hendy, between 1946-1950. In 1951 he published his book on Piero della Francesca. In 1953 he became the chairman of the Arts Council of Great Britain, an organization whose early incarnation, the CEMA (Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts), he helped found. That same year he delivered the Mellon Lectures in Washington, DC, which, in book form appeared in 1956 as the much-praised study, The Nude. In 1954 Clark agreed to become the first chairman of the Independent Television Authority in Britain, the commercial television competitor to the BBC. Clark and his wife bought Saltwood Castle in 1955, the home where they spent the rest of their days. When his appointment was not renewed in 1957 at ITA, Clark was hired by the rival BBC. Though 1966 saw both his New York Wrightsman lectures, and their publication as the book Rembrandt and the Italian Renaissance, it was the other event of that year that would create a new reputation for him. That year, he wrote and produced the first serious television series to tackle art history. The television series, Civilisation, was actually cancelled by the BBC and only broadcast three years later in 1969. But its affect on audiences, both in the United Kingdom and United States, was undeniable. Clark became a television star of sorts, a fame he likened to Ruskin’s in the nineteenth century.

<www.dictionaryofarthistorians.org/clarkk.htm>

2010: 02/19
CATEGORY: All Writers
C
Historian
Leave a comment

THEODOR ADORNO

Dates: 1903-1969

Nationality: German

Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund Adorno (September 11, 1903 – August 6, 1969) was a German-born international sociologist, philosopher, and musicologist. He was a member of the Frankfurt School of social theory along with Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Jürgen Habermas, and others. He was also the Music Director of the Radio Project from 1937 to 1941, in the U.S. Already as a young music critic and amateur sociologist, Adorno considered himself primarily a philosophical thinker.

Whilst Adorno’s work focuses on art, literature and music as key areas of sensual, indirect critique of the established culture and modes of thought, there is also a strand of distinctly political utopianism evident in his reflections especially on history. The argument, which is complex and dialectic, dominates his Aesthetic Theory, Philosophy of New Music and many other works.

Adorno saw the culture industry as an arena in which critical tendencies or potentialities were eliminated. He argued that the culture industry, which produced and circulated cultural commodities through the mass media, manipulated the population. Popular culture was identified as a reason why people become passive; the easy pleasures available through consumption of popular culture made people docile and content, no matter how terrible their economic circumstances. The differences among cultural goods make them appear different, but they are in fact just variations on the same theme. He wrote that “the same thing is offered to everybody by the standardised production of consumption goods” but this is concealed under “the manipulation of taste and the official culture’s pretense of individualism.” Adorno conceptualized this phenomenon as pseudo-individualization and the always-the-same. He saw this mass-produced culture as a danger to the more difficult high arts. Culture industries cultivate false needs; that is, needs created and satisfied by capitalism. True needs, in contrast, are freedom, creativity, and genuine happiness. But the subtle dialectician was also able to say that the problem with capitalism was that it blurred the line between false and true needs altogether.

The work of Adorno and Horkheimer heavily influenced intellectual discourse on popular culture and scholarly popular culture studies. At the time Adorno began writing, there was a tremendous unease among many intellectuals as to the results of mass culture and mass production on the character of individuals within a nation. By exploring the mechanisms for the creation of mass culture, Adorno presented a framework which gave specific terms to what had been a more general concern.

At the time this was considered important because of the role which the state took in cultural production; Adorno’s analysis allowed for a critique of mass culture from the left which balanced the critique of popular culture from the right. From both perspectives — left and right — the nature of cultural production was felt to be at the root of social and moral problems resulting from the consumption of culture. However, while the critique from the right emphasized moral degeneracy ascribed to sexual and racial influences within popular culture, Adorno located the problem not with the content, but with the objective realities of the production of mass culture and its effects, e.g. as a form of reverse psychology.

Wikipedia contributors, ‘Theodor W. Adorno’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 9 December 2010, 09:54 UTC, <en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Theodor_W._Adorno&oldid=401422585>

2010: 02/19
CATEGORY: A
All Writers
Philosopher
Leave a comment

JACQUES LACAN

Dates: 1901-1981

Nationality: French

Jacques-Marie-Émile Lacan (April 13, 1901 – September 9, 1981) was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who made prominent contributions to psychoanalysis, philosophy, and literary theory. He gave yearly seminars, in Paris, from 1953 to 1981, mostly influencing France’s intellectuals in the 1960s and the 1970s, especially the post-structuralist philosophers. His interdisciplinary work is Freudian, featuring the unconscious, the castration complex, the ego; identification; and language as subjective perception, and thus he figures in critical theory, literary studies, twentieth-century French philosophy, and clinical psychoanalysis.

Wikipedia contributors, ‘Jacques Lacan’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 13 December 2010, 04:59 UTC, <en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jacques_Lacan&oldid=402090618>

Jacques Lacan complicated his position on the Gaze as he developed his theories. At first, gazing was important in his theories in relation to the mirror stage, where the subject appears to achieve a sense of mastery by seeing himself as ideal ego. By viewing himself in the mirror, the subject at the mirror stage begins his entrance into culture and language by establishing his own subjectivity through the fantasy image inside the mirror, an image that the subject can aspire towards throughout his life (a stable coherent version of the self that does not correspond to the chaotic drives of our actual material bodies). Once the subject enters the symbolic order, that narcissistic ideal image is maintained in the imaginary order. As explained in the Lacan module on the structure of the psyche, that fantasy image of oneself can be filled in by others who we may want to emulate in our adult lives (role models, love objects, et cetera), anyone that we set up as a mirror for ourselves in what is, ultimately, a narcissistic relationship.

In his later essays, Lacan complicates this understanding of the narcissistic view in the mirror by distinguishing between the eye’s look and the Gaze. Gaze in Lacan’s later work refers to the uncanny sense that the object of our eye’s look or glance is somehow looking back at us of its own will. This uncanny feeling of being gazed at by the object of our look affects us in the same way as castration anxiety (reminding us of the lack at the heart of the symbolic order). We may believe that we are in control of our eye’s look; however, any feeling of scopophilic power is always undone by the fact that the the materiality of existence (the Real) always exceeds and undercuts the meaning structures of the symbolic order. Lacan’s favorite example for the Gaze is Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors. When you look at the painting, it at first gives you a sense that you are in control of your look; however, you then notice a blot at the bottom of the canvas, which you can only make out if you look at the painting from the side at an angle, from which point you begin to see that the blot is, in fact, a skull staring back at you. By having the object of our eye’s look look back at us, we are reminded of our own lack, of the fact that the symbolic order is separated only by a fragile border from the materiality of the Real. The symbols of power and desire in Holbein’s painting (wealth, art, science, ambition) are thus completely undercut. As Lacan puts it, the magical floating object “reflects our own nothingness, in the figure of the death’s head” (Lacan, Four Fundamental 92).

Lacan then argues in “Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a” that there is an intimate relationship between the objet petit a (which coordinates our desire) and the Gaze (which threatens to undo all desire through the eruption of the Real). As I stated in the previous module, “at the heart of desire is a misregognition of fullness where there is really nothing but a screen for our own narcissistic projections. It is that lack at the heart of desire that ensures we continue to desire.” However, because the objet petit a (the object of our desire) is ultimately nothing but a screen for our own narcissistic projections, to come too close to it threatens to give us the experience precisely of the Lacanian Gaze, the realization that behind our desire is nothing but our lack: the materiality of the Real staring back at us. That lack at the heart of desire at once allows desire to persist and threatens continually to run us aground upon the underlying rock of the Real.

This concept has been particularly influential on a group of feminist film theorists who explore, on the one hand, how female objects of desire in traditional Hollywood film are reduced to passive screens for the projection of male fantasies, and, on the other hand, how the male desire for the mastery of the look is, in fact, continually undercut by a certain castration at the heart of cinema: the blank space between the frames that, only in its elision, can create the illusion of cinematic “reality.” That blank space between the frames is analogous to the ever-threatening Real over which we project our narcissistic fantasy of “reality.”

<www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/engl/theory/psychoanalysis/lacangaze.html>

2010: 02/19
CATEGORY: All Writers
L
Philosopher
Theorist
Leave a comment

HANS-GEORG GADAMER

Dates: 1900-2002

Nationality: German

Hans-Georg Gadamer (February 11, 1900 – March 13, 2002) was a German philosopher of the continental tradition, best known for his 1960 magnum opus, Truth and Method (Wahrheit und Methode). Gadamer was born in Marburg, Germany, as the son of a pharmaceutical chemistry professor who later also served as the rector of the university there. He resisted his father’s urging to take up the natural sciences and became more and more interested in the humanities. He grew up and studied philosophy in Breslau under Richard Hönigswald, but soon moved back to Marburg to study with the Neo-Kantian philosophers Paul Natorp and Nicolai Hartmann. He defended his dissertation in 1922.

Shortly thereafter, Gadamer visited Freiburg and began studying with Martin Heidegger, who was then a promising young scholar who had not yet received a professorship. He and Heidegger became close, and when Heidegger received a position at Marburg, Gadamer followed him there, where he became one of a group of students such as Leo Strauss, Karl Löwith, and Hannah Arendt. It was Heidegger’s influence that gave Gadamer’s thought its distinctive cast and led him away from the earlier neo-Kantian influences of Natorp and Hartmann.

Gadamer habilitated in 1929 and spent most of the early 1930s lecturing in Marburg. Unlike Heidegger, Gadamer was anti-Nazi, although he was not politically active during the Third Reich. He did not receive a paid position during the Nazi years and never entered the Party; only towards the end of the War did he receive an appointment at Leipzig. In 1946, he was found by the American occupation forces to be untainted by Nazism and named rector of the university. Communist East Germany was no more to Gadamer’s liking than the Third Reich, and he left for West Germany, accepting first a position in Frankfurt am Main and then the succession of Karl Jaspers in Heidelberg in 1949. He remained in this position, as emeritus, until his death in 2002 at the age of 102.

Wikipedia contributors, ‘Hans-Georg Gadamer’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 14 November 2010, 08:25 UTC, <en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hans-Georg_Gadamer&oldid=396668106>

As Gadamer saw it, aesthetic theory had, largely under the influence of Kant, become alienated from the actual experience of art—the response to art had become abstracted and ‘aestheticised’—while aesthetic judgment had become purely a matter of taste, and so of subjective response. Similarly, under the influence of the ‘scientific’ historiography of such as Ranke, together with the romantic hermeneutics associated with Schleiermacher and others, the desire for objectivity had led to the separation of historical understanding from the contemporary situation that motivates it, and to a conception of historical method as based in the reconstruction of the subjective experiences of the author—a reconstruction that, as Hegel made clear, is surely impossible (see Gadamer, 1989b, 164-9).

By turning back to the direct experience of art, and to the concept of truth as prior and partial disclosure, Gadamer was able to develop an alternative to subjectivism that also connected with the ideas of dialogue and practical wisdom taken from Plato and Aristotle, and of hermeneutical situatedness taken from the early Heidegger. Just as the artwork is taken as central and determining in the experience of art, so is understanding similarly determined by the matter to be understood; as the experience of art reveals, not in spite of, but precisely because of the way it also conceals, so understanding is possible, not in spite of, but precisely because of its prior involvement. In Gadamer’s developed work, the concept of ‘play’ (Spiel) has an important role here. Gadamer takes play as the basic clue to the ontological structure of art, emphasizing the way in which play is not a form of disengaged, disinterested exercise of subjectivity, but is rather something that has its own order and structure to which one is given over. The structure of play has obvious affinities with all of the other concepts at issue here—of dialogue, phronesis, the hermeneutical situation, the truth of art. Indeed, one can take all of these ideas as providing slightly different elaborations of what is essentially the same basic conception of understanding—one that takes our finitude, that is, our prior involvement and partiality, not as a barrier to understanding, but rather as its enabling condition. It is this conception that is worked out in detail in Truth and Method.

Malpas, Jeff, “Hans-Georg Gadamer”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2009 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2009/entries/gadamer/>

2010: 02/19
CATEGORY: All Writers
G
P
Leave a comment

THOMAS MUNRO

Dates: 1897-1974

Nationality: American

Thomas Munro was a philosopher of art and professor of art history at Western Reserve University. He served as Curator of Education for the Cleveland Museum of Art for 36 years (1931-67). He was educated at Amherst College (B.A. 1916) and Columbia University (M.A. 1917), where he was influenced by philosopher and educator John Dewey. Munro served as a sergeant with the psychological services of the Army Medical Corps before returning to Columbia to get his Ph.D.

Wikipedia contributors, ‘Thomas Munro’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 2 December 2010, 02:35 UTC, <en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thomas_Munro&oldid=400047910>

Rejecting the time-honored view of art in all its forms as timeless, transcendent productions of the human spirit, Munro, then a young instructor of philosophy at Rutgers, insisted that all art works were products of a specific time and place. As such, he argued, they reflected the styles and conventions, values and biases of their eras and cultures.

“Strictly speaking,” he elaborated in a 1943 essay, “the ingredients of a work of art are not really ‘in’ the object (e.g., a painting) as a physical thing, but largely in the behavior of humans toward it. People respond to a given type of art in a more or less similar way, because of similarities in their innate equipment and cultural conditioning, and tend to project these responses onto the object which arouses them, as if they were attributes of the object itself.” (This explains why some art or music or writing can be hailed as great or important art at some time or place, and exert no appeal at all to later generations or other population groups.)

But since we also come to a work of art as individuals, “no two persons will see exactly the same thing in a picture, for each is led by his nature and habits to select slightly different aspects for special notice.”

Thus, said Munro, it is meaningless to “’describe’ a work of art as beautiful or ugly, pleasant or unpleasant, well or badly drawn.” Or, for that matter, to make rigid distinctions between “fine” art and objects made for “use,” with the implication that non-useful arts are somehow superior. Musical compositions, he pointed out, often had utilitarian purposes, as did such elements of visual art as compositional organization. Nor should one look down on so-called “decorative” art, since “all arts contain some decoration and design as well as some representation.”

Such traditional distinctions and rankings must be recognized, in other words, for what they are: subjective or learned cultural biases. By the same token, the attempt to explain art as the self-expression of the artist is, Munro argued, doomed to irrelevance since the artist’s intent, to the extent that it was conscious at all, could not be subjected to scientific scrutiny. Indeed, with the development of scientific and rational thought—and such disciplines as historiography, psychoanalysis, sociology, semantics and phenomenology—humanity is able, perhaps for the first time in history, to throw real light on what art is and, more to the point, how it impacts viewers in the ways that it does.

<www.clevelandartsprize.org/awardees/thomas_munro.html>

2010: 02/19
CATEGORY: All Writers
Historian
M
Philosopher
Leave a comment

GEORGE BATAILLE

Dates: 1897-1962

Nationality: French

Georges Bataille (September 10, 1897 – July 8, 1962) was a French writer. Although several philosophers have been significantly influenced by his thought, Bataille tended not to refer to himself as a philosopher.

In the 1920s Bataille was involved with the Surrealist movement, but he called himself the “enemy from within.” He was officially excommunicated from its inner circles by André Breton, who accused him of splintering the group. In the same decade, after a liberating period of psychoanalysis, Bataille started to write. He founded and edited many journals and was the first to publish such thinkers as Barthes, Foucault and Derrida. Between 1929 and 1931 Bataille edited the journal Documents (1929-31), which was devoted to cultural phenomena. With Pierre Klossowski, the brother of the painter Balthus, Bataille befriended in 1934; they shared a similar interest in psychoanalysis, aesthetics, and Marquis de Sade. In 1935 Bataille co-founded with André Breton the anti-Fascist group Contre-Attaque. To explore the manifestation of the sacred in society he, in 1939, co-founded with Michel Leiris and Roger Caillois the short-lived Collège de Sociologie. It was closely associated with a secret society which published the Acéphale review.

<www.kirjasto.sci.fi/bataille.htm>

2010: 02/19
CATEGORY: All Writers
B
Philosopher
Leave a comment

SUSANNE LANGER

Dates: 1895-1985

Nationality: American

Susanne Katherina Langer (née Knauth) was an American philosopher of art, a follower of Ernst Cassirer. She is best known for her 1942 book Philosophy in a New Key. She was born in Manhattan. She studied at Radcliffe College, and completed a doctorate at Harvard University in 1926. She taught at Radcliffe, Wellesley College, Smith College, and Columbia University. From 1952 to 1962, she was professor of philosophy at Connecticut College.

Wikipedia contributors, ‘Susanne Langer’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 7 December 2010, 08:02 UTC, <en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Susanne_Langer&oldid=401018641>

Philosophy in a New Key, a survey symbolism, became a best-seller. Langer’s earlier absorption into symbolic logic is seen in her attempt to create a rational basis for aesthetics. The work was much influenced by Ernst Cassirer, whose Sprache und Mythos from 1925 Langer translated into English. Feeling and Form (1953) was written on a Rockefeller Foundation grant. It developed further the ideas of Philosophy in a New Key, and expanded her system of aesthetics from music to the other fields of arts, painting, poetry, dance, etc.

Like Cassirer, Langer argued that man is essentially a symbol-using animal. Symbolic thought is deeply rooted in the human nature – it is the keynote to questions of life and consciousness, all humanistic problems. “Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling,” Langer defined. She distinguishes between the open “presentational” symbols of art and “discursive” symbols of language, which cannot reflect directly the subjective aspect of experience. Langer’s view of language is not far from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s logical theory developed in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922), but when Wittgenstein stopped on the threshold of the unsayable, Langer argued that “music articulates forms which language cannot set forth” – it shows what cannot be said.

Works of art do not directly express the artist’s experienced emotions, but rather an “idea” of emotion. Artists create virtual objects, illusions. Thus music creates an auditory apparation of time, “virtual time”, in painting “virtual space” is the primary illusion, poets create appearances of events, persons, emotional reactions, places etc, “poetic semblances”. Langer argues that musical forms bear a close logical resemblance to the forms of human feelings. Music is a “presentational symbol” of psychic process and its tonal structures bear a close logical similarity to the forms of feeling, “forms of growth and of attenuation, flowing and stowing, conflict and resolution, speed, arrest, terrific excitement, calm, or subtle activation and dreamy lapses”. The symbol and the object symbolized have a common logical form.

Langer also distinguishes art as symbol – the work of art as an indivisible whole – from symbols in art, which are elements of the work and often have a literal meaning. Langer’s unconventional use of the term “symbol” has been criticized by a number of philosophers, George Dickie included, but Monroe C. Beardley has noted in his book Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present (1966), that Langer’s general concept of art as symbol and its development “is carried through with great sensitivity and concreteness.”

<www.kirjasto.sci.fi/slanger.htm>

2010: 02/19
CATEGORY: All Writers
L
Philosopher
Leave a comment

HERBERT READ

Dates: 1893-1968

Nationality: British

Sir Herbert Edward Read, DSO, MC, was an English anarchist poet, and critic of literature and art. He was one of the earliest English writers to take notice of existentialism, and was strongly influenced by proto-existentialist thinker Max Stirner.

However, Read was (and remains) better known as an art critic. He was a champion of modern British artists such as Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. He became associated with Nash’s contemporary arts group Unit One. Read was professor of fine arts at the University of Edinburgh (1931–33) and editor of the trend-setting Burlington Magazine (1933–38). He was one of the organizers of the London International Surrealist Exhibition in 1936 and editor of the book Surrealism, published in 1936, which included contributions from André Breton, Hugh Sykes Davies, Paul Éluard, and Georges Hugnet. He also served as a trustee of the Tate Gallery and as a curator at the Victoria & Albert Museum (1922–1939), as well as co-founding the Institute of Contemporary Arts with Roland Penrose in 1947.

Wikipedia contributors, ‘Herbert Read’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 3 December 2010, 21:13 UTC, <en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Herbert_Read&oldid=400375088>

Quotes by Herbert Read:

Art is an indecent exposure of the consciousness.

Art in its widest sense is the extension of the personality: a host of artificial limbs.

Works of art must persist as objects of contemplation.

If we persist in our restless desire to know everything about the universe and ourselves, then we must not be afraid of what the artist brings back from his voyage of discovery.

Intellect begins with the observation of nature, proceeds to memorize and classify the facts thus observed, and by logical deduction builds up that edifice of knowledge properly called science… But admittedly we also know by feeling, and we can combine the two faculties, and present knowledge in the guise of art.

In general, modern art… has been inspired by a natural desire to chart the uncharted.

Art is not and never has been subordinate to moral values. Moral values are social values; aesthetic values are human values. Morality seeks to restrain the feelings; art seeks to define them by externalizing them, by giving them significant form. Morality has only one aim – the ideal good; art has quite another aim – the objective truth… art never changes.

The depths modern art has been exploring are mysterious depths, full of strange fish…

Art is pattern informed by sensibility.

The fundamental purpose of the artist is the same as that of a scientist: to state a fact.

Sensibility… is a direct and particular reaction to the separate and individual nature of things. It begins and ends with the sensuous apprehension of colour, texture and formal relations; and if we strive to organize these elements, it is not with the idea of increasing the knowledge of the mind, but rather in order to intensify the pleasure of the senses.

The peculiarity of sculpture is that it creates a three-dimensional object in space. Painting may strive to give on a two-dimensional plane, the illusion of space, but it is space itself as a perceived quantity that becomes the peculiar concern of the sculptor. We may say that for the painter space is a luxury; for the sculptor it is a necessity.

Spontaneity is not enough – or, to be more exact, spontaneity is not possible until there is an unconscious coordination of form, space and vision.

The classicist, and the naturalist who has much in common with him, refuse to see in the highest works of art anything but the exercise of judgement, sensibility, and skill. The romanticist cannot be satisfied with such a normal standard; for him art is essentially irrational – an experience beyond normality, sometimes destructive of normality, and at the very least evocative of that state of wonder which is the state of mind induced by the immediately inexplicable.

If modern art has produced symbols that are unfamiliar, that was only to be expected.

<quote.robertgenn.com/auth_search.php?authid=739>

2010: 02/19
CATEGORY: All Writers
Critic
R
Leave a comment

WALTER BENJAMIN

Dates: 1892-1940

Nationality: German

Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin (July 15, 1892 – September 27, 1940) was a German-Jewish philosopher, sociologist, literary critic, translator and essayist. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory. His turn to Marxism in the 1930s was influenced by his friend Bertolt Brecht, who had developed his own critical aesthetics, which asked for the emotional distancing of the spectator (Verfremdungseffekt). An important earlier influence and friend was Gershom Scholem, who founded the modern, academic study of the Kabbalah and of Jewish mysticism. Over the last half-century the regard for his work and its influence have risen dramatically, making Benjamin one of the most important twentieth century thinkers about literature and about modern aesthetic experience.

As a sociological and cultural critic, Benjamin combined ideas drawn from historical materialism, German idealism, and Jewish mysticism in a body of work which was a novel contribution to Western Marxism and aesthetic theory. As a literary scholar, he wrote his most famous essays on Charles Baudelaire, he translated the Tableaux Parisiens edition of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal as well as Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. His work is widely cited in academic and literary studies, in particular his essays The Task of the Translator and The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Influenced by Bachofen, Benjamin gave the name “auratic perception” to the aesthetic faculty through which civilization would recover a lost appreciation of myth.

Wikipedia contributors, ‘Walter Benjamin’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 11 December 2010, 23:04 UTC, <en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Walter_Benjamin&oldid=401853112>

In principle a work of art has always been reproducible. Man-made artifacts could always be imitated by men. Replicas were made by pupils in practice of their craft, by masters for diffusing their works, and, finally, by third parties in the pursuit of gain. Mechanical reproduction of a work of art, however, represents something new. Historically, it advanced intermittently and in leaps at long intervals, but with accelerated intensity. The Greeks knew only two procedures of technically reproducing works of art: founding and stamping. Bronzes, terra cottas, and coins were the only art works which they could produce in quantity. All others were unique and could not be mechanically reproduced. With the woodcut graphic art became mechanically reproducible for the first time, long before script became reproducible by print. The enormous changes which printing, the mechanical reproduction of writing, has brought about in literature are a familiar story. However, within the phenomenon which we are here examining from the perspective of world history, print is merely a special, though particularly important, case. During the Middle Ages engraving and etching were added to the woodcut; at the beginning of the nineteenth century lithography made its appearance. With lithography the technique of reproduction reached an essentially new stage. This much more direct process was distinguished by the tracing of the design on a stone rather than its incision on a block of wood or its etching on a copperplate and permitted graphic art for the first time to put its products on the market, not only in large numbers as hitherto, but also in daily changing forms. Lithography enabled graphic art to illustrate everyday life, and it began to keep pace with printing. But only a few decades after its invention, lithography was surpassed by photography. For the first time in the process of pictorial reproduction, photography freed the hand of the most important artistic functions which henceforth devolved only upon the eye looking into a lens. Since the eye perceives more swiftly than the hand can draw, the process of pictorial reproduction was accelerated so enormously that it could keep pace with speech. A film operator shooting a scene in the studio captures the images at the speed of an actor’s speech. Just as lithography virtually implied the illustrated newspaper, so did photography foreshadow the sound film. The technical reproduction of sound was tackled at the end of the last century. These convergent endeavors made predictable a situation which Paul Valery pointed up in this sentence:

“Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.”

Around 1900 technical reproduction had reached a standard that not only permitted it to reproduce all transmitted works of art and thus to cause the most profound change in their impact upon the public; it also had captured a place of its own among the artistic processes. For the study of this standard nothing is more revealing than the nature of the repercussions that these two different manifestations – the reproduction of works of art and the art of the film – have had on art in its traditional form.

<www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm>

2010: 02/19
CATEGORY: All Writers
B
Philosopher
Leave a comment

LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN

Dates: 1889-1951

Nationality: Austrian-British

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein (April 26, 1889 – April 29, 1951) was an Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language.

Described by Bertrand Russell as “the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense, and dominating,” Wittgenstein is considered by many to be the greatest philosopher of the 20th century.Helping to inspire two of the century’s principal philosophical movements, the Vienna Circle and Oxford ordinary language philosophy, he is considered one of the most important figures in analytic philosophy. According to an end of the century poll, professional philosophers in Canada and the U.S. rank both his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (TLP) and Philosophical Investigations among the top five most important books in twentieth-century philosophy, the latter standing out as “…the one crossover masterpiece in twentieth-century philosophy, appealing across diverse specializations and philosophical orientations.” Wittgenstein’s influence has been felt in nearly every field of the humanities and social sciences, yet there are widely diverging interpretations of his thought.

Wikipedia contributors, ‘Ludwig Wittgenstein’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 13 December 2010, 18:24 UTC, <en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ludwig_Wittgenstein&oldid=402181637>

Near the end of his lectures Wittgenstein turns to the question of the attitude we take toward the work of art. He employs the case of seeing the very slight change in the depiction of a smile within a picture of a monk looking at a vision of the Virgin Mary. Where the slight and subtle change of line yields a transformation of the smile of the monk from a kindly to an ironic one, our attitude in viewing might similarly change from one in which for some we are almost in prayer to one that would for some be blasphemous, where we are almost leering. He then gives voice to his imagined reductive interlocutor, who says, “Well there you are. It is all in the attitude” (Wittgenstein 1966, 35), where we would then focus, to the exclusion of all of the rest of the intricate, layered, and complex human dimensions of our reactions to works, solely on an analysis of the attitude of the spectator and the isolable causal elements in the work that determine it. But that, again, is only to give voice to a reductive impulse, and in the brief ensuing discussion he shows, once again, that in some cases, an attitude of this kind may emerge as particularly salient. But in other cases, not. And he shows, here intertwining a number of his themes from these lectures, that the very idea of “a description of an attitude” is itself no simple thing. Full-blooded human beings, and not stimulus-response-governed automata, have aesthetic experience, and that experience is as complex a part of our natural history as any other.

Wittgenstein ends the lectures discussing a simple heading: “the craving for simplicity” (Wittgenstein 1966, 36). To such a mind, he says, if an explanation is complicated, it is disagreeable for that very reason. A certain kind of mind will insist on seeking out the single, unitary essence of the matter, where—much like Russell’s atomistic search for the essence of the logic of language beneath what he regarded as its misleadingly and distractingly variegated surface—the reductive impulse would be given free reign. Wittgenstein’s early work in the Tractatus (1961) followed in that vein. But in these lectures, given in 1938, we see a mind well into a transition away from those simplifying templates, those conceptual pictures. Here, examples themselves do a good deal of philosophical work, and their significance is that they give, rather than merely illustrate, the philosophical point at hand. He said, earlier in the lectures, that he is trying to teach a new way of thinking about aesthetics (and indeed about philosophy itself).

Hagberg, Garry, “Wittgenstein’s Aesthetics”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/wittgenstein-aesthetics/>

2010: 02/18
CATEGORY: All Writers
Philosopher
W
Leave a comment

MARTIN HEIDEGGER

Dates: 1889-1976

Nationality: German

Martin Heidegger (September 26, 1889 – May 26, 1976) was an influential German philosopher. His best known book, Being and Time, is considered to be one of the most important philosophical works of the 20th century. Heidegger remains controversial due to his involvement with National Socialism.

The Origin of the Work of Art is the title of an article by German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Heidegger drafted the text between 1935 and 1937, reworking it for publication in 1950 and again in 1960. Heidegger based his article on a series of lectures he had previously delivered in Zurich and Frankfurt during the 1930s, first on the essence of the work of art and then on the question of the meaning of a “thing,” marking the philosopher’s first lectures on the notion of art.In his article, Heidegger explains the essence of art in terms of the concepts of being and truth. He argues that art is not only a way of expressing the element of truth in a culture, but the means of creating it and providing a springboard from which “that which is” can be revealed. Works of art are not merely representations of the way things are, but actually produce a community’s shared understanding. Each time a new artwork is added to any culture, the meaning of what it is to exist is inherently changed.

Heidegger begins his essay with the question of what the source of a work of art is. The artwork and the artist, he explains, exist in a dynamic where each appears to be a provider of the other. “Neither is without the other. Nevertheless, neither is the sole support of the other.” Art, a concept separate from both work and creator, thus exists as the source for them both. Rather than control lying with the artist, art becomes a force that uses the creator for art’s own purposes. Likewise, the resulting work must be considered in the context of the world in which it exists, not that of its artist. In discovering the essence, however, the problem of the hermeneutic circle arises. In sum, the hermeneutic circle raises the paradox that, in any work, without understanding the whole, you can’t fully comprehend the individual parts, but without understanding the parts, you cannot comprehend the whole. Applied to art and artwork, we find that without knowledge of the essence of art, we cannot grasp the essence of the artwork, but without knowledge of the artwork, we cannot find the essence of art. Heidegger concludes that to take hold of this circle you either have to define the essence of art or of the artwork, and, as the artwork is simpler, we should start there.

Artworks, Heidegger contends, are things, a definition that raises the question of the meaning of a “thing.” As this concept is so broad, he narrows down the definition to “mere things,” meaning inanimate objects. He then chooses to examine a pair of shoes painted by Vincent Van Gogh, looking to the work to establish a distinction between artwork and other “things.” This was actually typical of Heidegger as he often chose to study shoes and shoe maker shops as an example for the analysis of a culture. Heidegger explains the viewer’s responsibility to consider the variety of questions about the shoes, asking not only about form and matter—what are the shoes made of?—but bestowing the piece with life by asking of purpose—what are the shoes for?

Next, Heidegger writes of art’s ability to set up an active struggle between “Earth” and “World.” “World,” represents the essence of Being, the sum of all that is ready-to-hand for one being. So a family unit could be a world, or a career path could be a world, or even a large community or nation. “Earth”, meaning something more along the lines of objective “existence”, instead represents nature, and all that is outside the ready-to-hand, and importantly, that which the ready-to-hand cannot make intelligible. Both are necessary components for an artwork to function, each serving unique purposes. The artwork is inherently an object of “world”, as it creates a world of its own; it opens up for us other worlds and cultures, such as worlds from the past like the ancient Greek or medieval worlds, or different social worlds, like the world of the peasant, or of the aristocrat. However, the very nature of art itself appeals to “Earth”, as a function of art is to highlight the natural materials used to create it, such as the colors of the paint, the density of the language, or the texture of the stone. In this way, “World” is revealing the unintelligibility of “Earth”, and so admits its dependence on the natural “Earth”. It can be seen that here a struggle ensues, as for “Earth” to become “World”, it must be stripped of its unintelligible nature, yet “World”, and the culture it perpetuates, requires the natural materials. The existence of truth is a product of this struggle–the process of art–taking place within the artwork.

Heidegger uses the example of a Greek temple to illustrate his conception of world and earth. Such works as the temple help in capturing this essence of art as they go through a transition from artworks to art objects depending on the status of their world. Once the culture has changed, the temple no longer is able to actively engage with its surroundings and becomes passive—an art object. He holds that a working artwork is crucial to a community and so must be able to be understood. Yet, as soon as meaning is pinned down and the work no longer offers resistance to rationalization, the engagement is over and it is no longer active. While the notion appears contradictory, Heidegger is the first to admit that he was confronting a riddle—one that he did not intend to answer as much as to describe in regard to the meaning of art.

Wikipedia contributors, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 2 December 2010, 05:56 UTC, <en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Origin_of_the_Work_of_Art&oldid=400075079>

2010: 02/18
CATEGORY: All Writers
H
Philosopher
Leave a comment

art genres, groups, movements, and styles; art critics, historians, philosophers, and theorists

Recent entry

Archive

Category