Working Aesthetics

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.

This book introduces the reader to the literary work and to an understanding of its cultural background and its specific features, presenting basic topics and ideas in their historical context and development in Western culture.

This anthology deals with the changing state of the arts and the incorporation and relevance of the aesthetic dimension in daily life in general. The articles are not restricted to the arts, but emphasis is given to aesthetics at work including art interaction, new aesthetical forms, new aesthetical activities, media and expressions including aesthetical dimensions in current economical and technological development - all the aesthetical tendencies that contribute to our world today. The book represents a decisive development in existing theories of art, taking a serious look at the expanding field of aesthetics. The contributors represent aesthetic studies, musicology, art history, literature, and media. Together they have published widely within the aesthetics field and they all take part in the development of an aesthetics program at the University of Oslo.

Postindian Aesthetics is a collection of critical, cutting-edge essays on a new generation of Indigenous writers who are creatively and powerfully contributing to a thriving Indigenous literary canon that is redefining the parameters of Indigenous literary aesthetics.

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.

Presents a collection of the author's works, including concept art and finished products.

Activating Aesthetics addresses questions of aesthetics in various fields of education, with the aim of investigating a way of revealing how aesthetics may activate an engaged, responsive and poetic pedagogy. The writers in this collection enliven different ways of thinking about aesthetics, educating through aesthetics and questioning aesthetics. They approach aesthetics through the lenses of art practice and art history, painting and literature, film and popular culture, the built environment and pedagogy, music making and reception, and feminist subjectivity and philosophy. Beyond instrumentalism, each chapter approaches questions of aesthetics by dismantling subject–object separations of analytical aesthetics and opening the potential of aesthetics to work as an activating force in education. The premise is that education, driven by means–end instrumentalism, may be activated another way via aesthetic encounters premised in difference. To build this argument, the authors engage works of Adorno, Benjamin, Bourdieu, Deleuze, Guattari, Heidegger, Hölderlin, Hokusai, Irigaray, Nietzsche, Sterne and Stiegler. The juxtaposition of these diverse theorists, philosophers, artists and writers makes for a rich tapestry of different perspectives on processes of learning, knowing and being. Aesthetics in activation discloses new ways of thinking about poetic and engaged pedagogy. Through these different perspectives, the whole collection works towards an educational philosophy of aesthetics. The chapters in this book were originally published as articles in the Educational Philosophy and Theory journal.

The first book-length study of this influential artist's work, focusing on the participatory role of the human subject rather than the art object. Michael Asher doesn't make typical installations. Instead, he extracts his art from the institutions in which it is shown, culling it from collections, histories, or museums' own walls. Since the late 1960s, Asher has been creating situations that have not only taught us about the conditions and contexts of contemporary art, but have worked to define it. In Situation Aesthetics, Kirsi Peltomäki examines Asher's practice by analyzing the social situations that the artist constructs in his work for viewers, participants, and institutional representatives (including gallery directors, curators, and other museum staff members). Drawing on art criticism, the reports of viewers and participants in Asher's projects, and the artist's own archives, Peltomäki offers a comprehensive account of Asher's work over the past four decades. Because of the intensely site-specific nature of this work, as well as the artist's refusal to reconstruct past works or mount retrospectives, many of the projects Peltomäki discusses are described here for the first time. By emphasizing the social and psychological sites of art rather than the production of autonomous art objects, Peltomäki argues, Asher constructs experientially complex situations that profoundly affect those who encounter them, bringing about both personal and institutional transformation.