Art And Aesthetics At Work

Over the last decade or so, aesthetic and art theory has played an increasingly significant role in the way work and its organization has come to be understood. Bringing together the work of an international spectrum of academics, this collection contributes, in an overall more critical vein, to such emerging debates. Combining both empirical and theoretical material, each chapter re-evaluates the emerging relationship between art, aesthetics and work, exploring its potential as both a medium of critical analysis, and as a site of conflict and resistance.

Over the last decade or so, aesthetic and art theory has played an increasingly significant role in the way work and its organization has come to be understood. Bringing together the work of an international spectrum of academics, this collection contributes, in an overall more critical vein, to such emerging debates. Combining both empirical and theoretical material, each chapter re-evaluates the emerging relationship between art, aesthetics and work, exploring its potential as both a medium of critical analysis, and as a site of conflict and resistance.

Working Aesthetics is about the relationship between art and work under contemporary capitalism. Whilst labour used to be regarded as an unattractive subject for art, the proximity of work to everyday life has subsequently narrowed the gap between work and art. The artist is no longer considered apart from the economic, but is heralded as an example of how to work in neoliberal management textbooks. As work and life become obscured within the contemporary period, this book asks how artistic practice is affected, including those who labour for artists. Through a series of case studies, Working Aesthetics critically examines the moments in which labour and art intersect under capitalism. When did labour disappear from art production, or accounts of art history? Can we consider the dematerialization of art in the 1960s in relation to the deskilling of work? And how has neoliberal management theory adopting the artist as model worker affected artistic practices in the 21st century? With the narrowing of work and art visible in galleries and art discourse today, Working Aesthetics takes a step back to ask why labour has become a valid subject for contemporary art, and explores what this means for aesthetic culture today.

What is art? What counts as an aesthetic experience? Does art have to beautiful? Can one reasonably dispute about taste? What is the relation between aesthetic and moral evaluations? How to interpret a work of art? Can we learn anything from literature, film or opera? What is sentimentality? What is irony? How to think philosophically about architecture, dance, or sculpture? What makes something a great portrait? Is music representational or abstract? Why do we feel terrified when we watch a horror movie even though we know it to be fictional? In Conversations on Art and Aesthetics, Hans Maes discusses these and other key questions in aesthetics with ten world-leading philosophers of art: Noël Carroll, Gregory Currie, Arthur Danto, Cynthia Freeland, Paul Guyer, Carolyn Korsmeyer, Jerrold Levinson, Jenefer Robinson, Roger Scruton, and Kendall Walton. The exchanges are direct, open, and sharp, and give a clear account of these thinkers' core ideas and intellectual development. They also offer new insights into, and a deeper understanding of, contemporary issues in the philosophy of art.

Life as Art brings the resources of contemporary aesthetics since Nietzsche to bear on the problems of how one integrates the aesthetic emphases of meaning, liberation, and creativity into one’s daily life. By linking together the aesthetic and ethical accounts of critical theorists, phenomenologists, and existentialists into a coherent view on the artful life, Life as Art shows the ways in which much of contemporary Continental theory has been concerned with alternative ways of constructing one’s own life. Seen as a unified phenomenon, life as art signifies an active attempt to create a life which bears the resistance, openness, and creativity found in artworks.

How can we understand art and its impact? Gary Iseminger argues that the function of the practice of art and the informal institution of the artworld is to promote aesthetic communication. He concludes that the fundamental criteria for evaluating a work of art as a work of art are aesthetic. After considering other practices and institutions that have aesthetic dimensions and other things that the practice of art does, Iseminger suggests that art is better at promoting aesthetic communication than other practices are and that art is better at promoting aesthetic communication than it is at anything else. Iseminger bases his work on a distinction often blurred in contemporary aesthetics, between art as a set of products"works of art"and art as an informal institution and social practice—the artworld. Focusing initially on the function of the artworld rather than the function of works of art, he blends elements from two of the most currently influential philosophical approaches to art, George Dickie's institutional theory and Monroe Beardsley's aesthetic theory, and provides a new foundation for a traditional account of what makes good art.

Instead of asking questions about the symbolic meaning or underlying "truth" of a work of art, renée c. hoogland is concerned with the actual "work" that it does in the world (whether intentionally or not). Why do we find ourselves in tears in front of an abstract painting? Why do some cartoons of the prophet Muhammad generate worldwide political outrage? What, in other words, is the compelling force of visual images, even—or especially—if they are nonfigurative, repulsive, or downright "ugly"? Rather than describing, analyzing, and interpreting artworks, hoogland approaches art as an event that obtains on the level of actualization, presenting "retellings" of specific artistic events in the light of recent interventions in aesthetic theory, and proposing to conceive of the aesthetic encounter as a potentially disruptive, if not violent, force field with material, political, and practical consequences.