A Hunger for Aesthetics

Enacting the Demands of Art
Erscheinungsjahr 2017
ISBN: 978-0-231-15293-8
Verlag: Columbia University Press

Buch, Englisch, 272 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 139 mm x 213 mm, Gewicht: 329 g

Reihe: Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts

For decades, aesthetics has been subjected to a variety of critiques, often concerning its treatment of beauty or the autonomy of art. Collectively, these complaints have generated an anti-aesthetic stance prevalent in the contemporary art world. Yet if we examine the motivations for these critiques, Michael Kelly argues, we find theorists and artists hungering for a new kind of aesthetics, one better calibrated to contemporary art and its moral and political demands.

Following an analysis of the work of Stanley Cavell, Arthur Danto, Umberto Eco, Susan Sontag, and other philosophers of the 1960s who made aesthetics more responsive to contemporary art, Kelly considers Sontag's aesthetics in greater detail. In On Photography (1977), she argues that a photograph of a person who is suffering only aestheticizes the suffering for the viewer's pleasure, yet she insists in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) that such a photograph can have a sustainable moral-political effect precisely because of its aesthetics. Kelly considers this dramatic change to be symptomatic of a cultural shift in our understanding of aesthetics, ethics, and politics. He discusses these issues in connection with Gerhard Richter's and Doris Salcedo's art, chosen because it is often identified with the anti-aesthetic, even though it is clearly aesthetic. Focusing first on Richter's Baader-Meinhof series, Kelly concludes with Salcedo's enactments of suffering caused by social injustice. Throughout A Hunger for Aesthetics, he reveals the place of critique in contemporary art, which, if we understand aesthetics as critique, confirms that it is integral to art. Meeting the demand for aesthetics voiced by many who participate in art, Kelly advocates for a critical aesthetics that confirms the limitless power of art.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Kelly, Michael

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunst, allgemein Kunsttheorie, Kunstphilosophie
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Ästhetik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of IllustrationsPrefaceAcknowledgementsIntroduction: The Dewey Effect1. The Pop Effect2. The Sontag Effect3. The Richter Effect4. The Salcedo EffectNotesIndex

Über Autor(innen)

Michael Kelly is professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, and has served as executive director of the American Philosophical Association and as managing editor of the Journal of Philosophy. He is the author of Iconoclasm in Aesthetics and editor in chief of the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. He is also the editor of three books: Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate; Hermeneutics and Critical Theory in Ethics and Politics; and (with Daniel Herwitz) Action, Art, History: Engagements with Arthur C. Danto.