Aesthetic Investigations (E-Journal, Dutch Association of Aesthetics)
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Persistent Autonomy and Romanticism
Full text linkAutonomy in the arts is generally considered an outdated concept, an atavism that is only relevant to outsiders and to people who have a mere traditional, if not completely obsolete understanding of the artistic and aesthetic field. Autonomy in this view has little to do with contemporary discussions about art and artistic practices. The very first sentence of a recent study about autonomy in literature, Andrew Goldstone’s Fictions of Autonomy (2013) for example reads: ‘In literary studies, we regard aesthetic autonomy as an idea whose time has passed.’
Instead of repeating the historicity and irrelevance of the autonomy concept it may be interesting to ask why it has been criticised so often while continuing to reappear again and again. If we keep in mind Peter Bürger’s analysis in his classic Theory of the Avant-Garde (1984), that the Avant-Garde failed to abolish autonomy in the arts and that this appeared to be impossible in what he calls ‘late capitalist society’, it may still be worthwhile to ask ourselves, how to understand the tenacious belief in autonomy, a belief that has so often been abolished yet and is still present everywhere. In doing so we’d better go back to the emergence of the belief in autonomy in the art history of the last few centuries rather than adding still another explanation about the irrelevancy of the concept
Blindness and Visual Impairment at an Art Academy
Full text linkThe article describes the theoretical and practical questions that rise by including blind and partial sighted students at an art academy. Several examples are presented, like the painter Jonathan Huxley, who studied at the Royal Academy in London or the scluptor Flavio Titolo, who did his art program at the University of the West of England in Bristol. The main theoretical questions go beyond an interpretion of the arts as visual or merely conceptual, and the practical approach includes haptic techniques and sensibilities which might otherwise be none discovered
The Realistic Angel: Realism as Hypothetical Verity
No full textMy main objective in this paper is to formulate a view of pictorial realism I call ‘hypothetical verity’. It owes much to John Kulvicki but diverges from his view in an important respect: rather than thinking that realistic pictures are true to our conceptions of things, I hold that they are true to what things would be like if they existed. In addition, I agree with Dominic Lopes that different realisms reflect different aspects of reality, but restate the case without recourse to symbol systems. Together, the twin principles of hypothetical verity and aspectival absolutism constitute a theory of realism able to account for realistic fictional entities, the problem of revelatory realism and images that teach new information