Aesthetic Investigations (E-Journal, Dutch Association of Aesthetics)
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On the category of \u27the aesthetic\u27
No full textThose contrasting our appreciation of art (as artistic appreciation) with our appreciation of the other occasions when grace, line, elegance, and so on — or their opposites — (as aesthetic appreciation) typically give much fuller accounts of art-based cases, even though it is recognized that many artworks, although not all, could be perceived — that is, mis-perceived — as objects of aesthetic appreciation. Moreover, here, ascriptions of ‘the aesthetic’ typically reflect the claim to positive aesthetic value, rather than the ‘even-handed’ version described in philosophy, giving weight to ugliness. Such a positive conception is well-exemplified in the philosophy of sport, when the attempt to describe a purist conception of sports spectatorship — one devoted to the sport, but without allegiance to any team — presents that purist as “… enjoying sport for its purely positive and aesthetic aspects” (Mumford, 2012 p. 18): that is, the conception of such spectatorship is as directed to the aesthetic. In part, the argument there seems to assume, mistakenly, that what is not appreciated purposively (for sport, in terms of winning and losing) is thereby appreciated aesthetically.
But here, following a hint from Austin (1979 p. 180), it is urged that the term “aesthetic” is used in such contexts ‘to rule out the suggestion of some or all of its recognized antitheses’: here, in particular, aesthetic interest is contrasted with, and feeds of, purposive interest. In recognizing this is a typical feature of uses of the term “aesthetic” one has an explanation of previous failures to provide an account of aesthetic appreciation at the same level of comprehensiveness as that offered for artistic appreciation: references to the aesthetic are contextualized to the particular antithetical notion being rejected on that occasion. And that was a feature implicitly recognized in the argument identified above, even if then falsely generalized. Yet there is really not just one contrast here: different antithetical terms may be invoked on different occasions. In this sense, aesthetic judgement is context-dependent or occasion-sensitive (see Travis, 2008 esp. pp. 150-160). And that is what grounds the general difficulty for dealing broadly (and briefly) with the category of the aesthetic
The uncanny garden. Jardin-forêt at Bibliothèque nationale de France
Get PDFThe paper is an analysis of the garden at the National Library in Paris. The garden (Jardin-foret) is desribed as uncanny for it belongs to a long tradition of gardening but at the same time it turns out to be its opposite. The uncanny effect seems to stem from the tension between artificiality and naturalness which is at least partly responsable for the lack of enthusiasm towards the garden as it is proved by a quotation from W.G. Sebald\u27s novel \u27Austerlitz\u27
Beauty – A Brief Conceptual Journey
Get PDFThe first part of the essay deals with four dimensions of aesthetic attraction in an attempt to provide a notion of beauty that is rich and robust enough to apply to different sorts and objects of aesthetic praise, including the productions of modern and contemporary arts. The second part confronts this apology of beauty with a number of test cases such as the ugly, the horrible and the sublime, including a discussion of putative couterexamples such as the films of Michael Haneke and the novels of Imre Kertész
‘Vengeance is Mine.’ Heroes from the Movie-Powerhouse of Emotions
Get PDFIn this text I am guided by an interest in cinema as a well-understood machine of emotions which creates a common sense. From this perspective I approach the subject matter of heroism, using the emotions linked to vengeance as a connection between heroism and the cinematic production of common sense. In so doing, I put forward several theses for discussion: that film – like art in general – is a medium which founds community; that such a founding of community essentially occurs via the dimensions of emotion, in our case the dimension of a specific aesthetic emotion; that the hero is a figure emerging from the founding of community; and, finally, that feelings of vengeance – like figures of heroism – are made present in cinema in a representative way
The Atrocity of Representing Atrocity - Watching Kevin Carter\u27s \u27Struggling Girl\u27
No full textTaking Kevin Carter\u27s famous photograph of a Sudanese \u27Struggling Girl\u27 as an example, this article shows by criticizing the work of photography scholar Ariella Azoulay who argues for an ethic, reparative spectatorship that focuses on the social encounters behind the photograph, how discussions about atrocity photography often result in moral debates: discussions that center around the social relations behind photography and blame the photographer, but do not take into account and criticize the photographic representation of the atrocity. By giving an overview of the afterlife of Carter\u27s photograph, the articles shows how such a \u27social\u27 focus on photography, easily reaffirms the social inequalities that lies within the practices of atrocity photography
Form and History: Hegel’s Philosophy of Art Today
Get PDFIn this article, I discuss the philosophical position that marks the end of the Age of Aesthetics: Hegel\u27s philosophy of art. I demonstrate how it has passed the test of time, and will further defend its systematic outlines. I reconstruct Hegel\u27s philosophy of art in a way that relies less on Hegel’s own conceptual terminology, but, rather, attempts to shed light on the insights it can afford with regard to some more recent discussions: on the one hand, discussions about how to read Hegel of contemporary debates in postanalytical and continental philosophy, and on the other hand, in light of the post-Hegelian philosophy of art.
I reconstruct Hegel’s philosophy of art in the light of two key concepts: form and unity. Overall, my article has two parts. The first one deals with Hegel’s concept of form, the second deals with his concept of unity. In the background of my argument stands Hegel’s thought that art is a particular form of the development of the concept.
Hegel’s theory allows for an immanent reconstruction of art and thus a thinking of the autonomy of art. We should describe art as a particular form of experience for which a specific unityis characteristic – a kind of unity that entails that the form of experience cannot be understood in a formalist way, but must rather be understood as something that develops in and through history
Aesthetics is the Philosophy of Our Wordless World
Get PDFFor too long, philosophers have tried to force our world to comport to the ‘linguistic turn,’ made famous by Richard Rorty’s 1967 anthology of the same name. And as time marches on, we seem to have even fewer tools at our disposal to carve out alternative views, even though philosophers as varied as Gilbert Ryle and Maurice Merleau-Ponty once discerned our world quite differently. Aesthetics remains the philosophical field where language need not occupy center court. For this reason, Aesthetics matters more than those Realists, who are prone to dismiss non-evidential views, might admit. 
The Materiality of Water
Get PDFRecordings of water have been an important focus for composers and sound and video artists. Works by Wendy Carlos (Sonic Seasonings), Jane Grant (Fathom), Annea Lockwood (World Rhythms, A Sound Map of the Danube), Hildegard Westerkamp (Talking Rain), Frances White (Walk Through Resonant Landscape), Jana Winderen (Surface Runoff, Evaporation, Aquaculture), and video works by Véréna Paravel (Leviathan), Pipilotti Rist (Pickelporno, Supersubjektiv, Rain Woman) feature the sounds of water as prominent sonic components. Whether similar qualitatively, water sounds have also preoccupied male composers from John Cage to Chris Watson. It’s likely that there are acoustic features developed in these compositions that constitute a kind of listening that is different from what is experienced through other compositional approaches. This retrieval of frequently unmanipulated natural sounds accommodates what is offered up by one’s environment and implies an ecology of matter distinct from other experimental sound practices. Luce Irigaray’s concept of liquidity as a condition of movement and equivocation in ‘The Mechanics of Fluids’ has been cited to articulate a feminist dimension to Rist’s videos, yet what other kinds of materialities are delineated by artists having recourse to an acoustics of fluids? If characterizing these as gendered soundscapes over-essentialises the work and restricts women’s participation in sound production, what draws these respective composers to the properties of water’s materiality as these are accessed by its sound? 
Using Philosophy of Perception in Aesthetics
Get PDFAesthetics is about ways of experiencing the world. But then if we apply the remarkably elaborate and sophisticated conceptual apparatus of philosophy of perception to questions in aesthetics, we can make real progress
In Defense of Genreblending
Get PDFReaders often only care about one distinction when it comes to things they read—is it fiction or nonfiction? Did it happen or didn’t it? Presumably, we make sense of events we believe happened in a different way than we make sense of the ones that we don’t believe. Deconstructionists often warn us about the hazards that occur with the strict binary thinking we tend to orient ourselves with. When this binary is blurred, which it often is in many contemporary works of literature, readers become unsettled. It is our position that genre, and even the more broad categories of fiction and nonfiction, should not be found exclusively as properties internal to the text itself, but rather, the way we make sense of genre is an active process of narrative comprehension. We will question how the particular binary concerning fiction and nonfiction has sold us short concerning the ways in which we make sense of literary texts, and how much more fluid our notions of genre really could and should be. We also want to argue that the reduction of the binary of genre merely into fiction and nonfiction is a gross oversimplification of the ways in which we understand both genres themselves, as well as the ways in which we understand both truth and reference