Jacques Rancière: Aesthetics and Its Discontents (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, art, ethics, philosophy, politics
Only yesterday aesthetics stood accused of concealing cultural games of social distinction. Now it is considered a parasitic discourse from which artistic practices must be freed. But aesthetics is not a discourse. It is an historical regime of the identification of art. This regime is paradoxical, because it founds the autonomy of art only at the price of suppressing the boundaries separating its practices and its objects from those of everyday life and of making free aesthetic play into the promise of a new revolution. Aesthetics is not a politics by accident but in essence. But this politics operates in the unresolved tension between two opposed forms of politics: the first consists in transforming art into forms of collective life, the second in preserving from all forms of militant or commercial compromise the autonomy that makes it a promise of emancipation. This constitutive tension sheds light on the paradoxes and transformations of critical art. It also makes it possible to understand why today’s calls to free art from aesthetics are misguided and lead to a smothering of both aesthetics and politics in ethics.
Translated by Steven Corcoran
Publisher Polity, 2009
ISBN 074564631X, 9780745646312
176 pages
PDF (no OCR; some pages missing; updated on 2012-7-14)
Comment (0)Charles Harrison, Paul Wood (eds.): Art in Theory 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (1992) [English, French]
Filed under book | Tags: · 1900s, abstract art, abstraction, aesthetics, art, art history, art theory, autonomy, avant-garde, beauty, capitalism, colour, communism, conceptual art, constructivism, cubism, dada, expressionism, formalism, futurism, happening, impressionism, institutional critique, language, machine, marxism, minimal art, modernism, postmodern, poststructuralism, productivism, psychoanalysis, realism, representation, revolution, romanticism, socialism, structuralism, surrealism, symbolism
“This volume provides comprehensive representation of the theories, which underpinned developments in the visual arts during the twentieth century. As well as writings by artists, the anthology includes texts by critics, philosophers, politicians and literary figures. The content is structured into eight broadly chronological sections, starting with the legacy of symbolism and concluding with contemporary debates about the postmodern.”
Publisher Blackwell, 1992
Reprinted 1999
ISBN 0631165754, 978-0631165750
1220 pages
Review: Patricia Railing (Art Book, 2004).
Art in Theory 1900-1990 (English, 1992, 13 MB, updated on 2015-9-5)
Art en théorie 1900-1990 (French, 1997, 24 MB, added on 2016-6-26)
Nadia Michoustina (ed.): Art, Technology and Modernity in Russia and Eastern Europe (2000)
Filed under journal | Tags: · aesthetics, art, modernity, russia, technology
Contents:
* Nadia Michoustina, Introduction
* Cynthia Simmons, Fly Me to the Moon: Modernism and the Soviet Space Program in Viktor Pelevin’s Omon Ra
* Julia Vaingurt, Base Superstructures and Technical Difficulties in Maiakovskii’s America
* Andrei Khrenov, Power and Technology as the Political-Aesthetic Project: Towards the Similarity of the Russian Avant-garde of the Twenties and Stalinist Cinema
* Kimberly Elman, Garden Cities and Company Towns: Tomas Baťa and the Formation of Zlin, Czechoslovakia
Selected Papers from the Conference held at Columbia University on March 31-April 1, 2000
The Harriman Review, Vol. 12, No. 4, November 2000
35 pages
PDF (no OCR, updated on 2014-3-6)
Comment (0)