Search Results

Hume's Standard of Taste: The Real Problem

Jerrold Levinson

in Contemplating Art: Essays in Aesthetics

This essay formulates a persisting problem about the authority of art criticism and situates this problem in relation to Hume's search for the standard of taste in his famous essay of that name. It ... More

This essay formulates a persisting problem about the authority of art criticism and situates this problem in relation to Hume's search for the standard of taste in his famous essay of that name. It sketches a complex solution to this problem, somewhat provocatively labelled therealproblem left us by Hume, a solution whose complexity is justified by the thorniness of the problem in question.Less

‘The Critic as Artist’

Lawrence Danson

in Wilde's Intentions: The Artist in his Criticism

This chapter analyses Oscar Wilde's essay The Critic as Artist, which suggests that the true critic of a work of art is the starting point for a new work of art. This interpretation of Wilde's essay ... More

This chapter analyses Oscar Wilde's essay The Critic as Artist, which suggests that the true critic of a work of art is the starting point for a new work of art. This interpretation of Wilde's essay also discovers a position of refine contempt for the world of fact, which non-artist critics continue to inhabit. The chapter argues that the essay owes its unshapely shape to Wilde's polemical concerns at the beginning of the last decade of the nineteenth century, and its contempt for history to an urgent need to rewrite his history before others could inscribe in on his behalf.Less

Alternatives 1971–1988

in Art and Pluralism: Lawrence Alloway's Cultural Criticism

This section focuses on Lawrence Alloway's life as an art critic in the period 1971–1988, beginning with the emergence of disorienting art as an expression of dissent in the art world, Alloway's ... More

This section focuses on Lawrence Alloway's life as an art critic in the period 1971–1988, beginning with the emergence of disorienting art as an expression of dissent in the art world, Alloway's response to the politicisation of art, his new pluralism, the uses and limits of art criticism, criticism and women's art, Alloway's writings on Photo-Realism and Earth art, the decline of the avant-garde, and crises in the art world concerning criticism, feminism and curatorship. It also looks at Alloway's last years.Less

Japanese Art Criticism: The First Fifty Years

Mikiko Hirayama

in Since Meiji: Perspectives on the Japanese Visual Arts, 1868-2000

This chapter examines the evolution of modern Japanese art criticism from the 1880s to the late 1930s, with particular emphasis on the discourse on yōga. It begins with a discussion of three ... More

This chapter examines the evolution of modern Japanese art criticism from the 1880s to the late 1930s, with particular emphasis on the discourse on yōga. It begins with a discussion of three categories of art criticism in Japan: “scientific,” “literary,” and “journalistic.” It then considers the rise of art criticism in Japanese mass media before turning to specialized art periodicals that began to emerge during the 1880s. It also explores “impressionistic criticism” by so-called dilettantes; the issue of jury selection for the Japanese exhibits at the Paris World Fair of 1900; alternative approaches to art criticism during the decade of 1910; the problems associated with “impressionistic criticism” and the call for “scientific criticism” in the 1930s; and the question of whether critics and artists should advocate the autonomy of art. The chapter concludes with an overview of art criticism under the New Order.Less

Continuum 1952–1961

in Art and Pluralism: Lawrence Alloway's Cultural Criticism

Lawrence Alloway's scope as an art critic became international in 1950, but his criticism only changed significantly the following year after a review of a Roberto Matta exhibition at the Institute ... More

Lawrence Alloway's scope as an art critic became international in 1950, but his criticism only changed significantly the following year after a review of a Roberto Matta exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA). This review marked Alloway's transition from connoisseurship and simple evaluation to a far more dense and demanding art criticism. This section focuses on Alloway's life as an art critic in the period 1952–1961. It provides an overview of ICA in the early 1950s and its Independent Group, Alloway's attitudes toward abstraction and figurative art, his cultural continuum model, his views on graphics and advertising, art autre, Alloway's first trip to the United States, and the emergence of Pop art.Less

Abundance 1961–1971

in Art and Pluralism: Lawrence Alloway's Cultural Criticism

This section focuses on Lawrence Alloway's life as an art critic in the period 1961–1971, beginning with his travel to the United States in 1961 and his dispute with Clement Greenberg with regards to ... More

This section focuses on Lawrence Alloway's life as an art critic in the period 1961–1971, beginning with his travel to the United States in 1961 and his dispute with Clement Greenberg with regards to art criticism, particularly of junk art. It also considers Alloway's writings on American Pop art, the mounting of the exhibition Six Painters and the Object and Six More in 1963, Alloway's relationship with Alexander Liberman and Paul Feeley, his views on abstraction and iconography as well as newness and avant-garde art, his reviews of a number of films and his pluralism.Less

Summary and Conclusion

in Art and Pluralism: Lawrence Alloway's Cultural Criticism

For Lawrence Alloway, the 1960s was ‘a period of exceptional high pressure, affluence, creativity, [and] confidence’, which was in stark contrast to the 1970s. This changed outlook in art was implied ... More

For Lawrence Alloway, the 1960s was ‘a period of exceptional high pressure, affluence, creativity, [and] confidence’, which was in stark contrast to the 1970s. This changed outlook in art was implied in the subtitle of Alan Sondheim's 1977 book on the contemporary avant-garde, Post-Movement Art in America. This section focuses on Lawrence Alloway's life as an art critic, beginning with his commitment to pluralism and his attitude towards Post-Modernism. It also discusses his views on art history and art criticism, his reputation as an art critic and the legacy of his pluralism.Less

Language and Rhetoric

J. A. Hiddleston

in Baudelaire and the Art of Memory

This chapter argues that there is no one text that synthesizes Baudelaire's thinking. To enter fully into Baudelaire's mental universe, it is important to read his criticism in the light of his ... More

This chapter argues that there is no one text that synthesizes Baudelaire's thinking. To enter fully into Baudelaire's mental universe, it is important to read his criticism in the light of his poetic practice and appreciate the extent to which they complement each other, ranging as they do over a great diversity of subject matter, and from the heights of ‘les beaux jours de l'esprit’ to the most poignant questioning of the validity of art and the function of the artist.Less

Aesthetics, Phantasia, and the Theistic

Daniel N. Robinson

in Turning Images in Philosophy, Science, and Religion: A New Book of Nature

Aesthetics, as with naturalism itself, reaches contemporary understanding by way of a winding path. Plato's own conflicting analyses of drama, music, and poetry would find Aristotle returning to ... More

Aesthetics, as with naturalism itself, reaches contemporary understanding by way of a winding path. Plato's own conflicting analyses of drama, music, and poetry would find Aristotle returning to basics and attempting to identify the structure and aims of aesthetic productions and offering the earliest approach to ‘art criticism’. Current attempts to absorb the aesthetic into the domain of naturalism, typically by appealing to one or another version of ‘Darwinism’, succeed only by neglecting to address the phenomenology of aesthetic experience and the continuing ambiguity surrounding notions of just what it is that qualifies events and objects as ‘natural’. The profound influence of theism on the entire history of aesthetic undertakings leaves little doubt but that merely positivistic conceptions of the ‘natural’ are likely to miss the point.Less

Caricature

J. A. Hiddleston

in Baudelaire and the Art of Memory

This chapter develops, in a ‘Baudelairean’ manner, the suggestive quality of the works he admires. Wherever relevant, it also indicates the relationship of the art criticism to his other writings, in ... More

This chapter develops, in a ‘Baudelairean’ manner, the suggestive quality of the works he admires. Wherever relevant, it also indicates the relationship of the art criticism to his other writings, in particular Les Fleurs du Mal and Le Spleen de Paris.Less

Introduction

James Grant

in The Critical Imagination

According to many, criticism of the arts, like the creation of art, involves a major role for imaginativeness. This introduction presents some of the reasons why philosophers have found this view ... More

According to many, criticism of the arts, like the creation of art, involves a major role for imaginativeness. This introduction presents some of the reasons why philosophers have found this view plausible. Literary interpretation, aesthetic experience, and the prevalence of metaphor in critics’ descriptions have all seemed to provide evidence for this claim. The introduction then explains why this view of criticism is of interest. It concludes by setting out the structure of the book and describing the content of each chapter.Less

From Landscape to the Painting of Modern Life

J. A. Hiddleston

in Baudelaire and the Art of Memory

This chapter analyses Baudelaire's admiration for Eugène Boudin, inflecting the poet towards an aesthetic of the fleeting and the evanescent, which is eventually spelled out in Le Peintre de la Vie ... More

This chapter analyses Baudelaire's admiration for Eugène Boudin, inflecting the poet towards an aesthetic of the fleeting and the evanescent, which is eventually spelled out in Le Peintre de la Vie Modern and exemplified in the works of Constantin Guys. It focuses on ‘Les Annales de la Guerre’, ‘Pompes et Solennités’, ‘Le Militaire’, and ‘Les Femmes et les Filles’.Less

Private Mythologies

Sebastian Zeidler

in Form as Revolt: Carl Einstein and the Ground of Modern Art

This chapter focuses on Paul Klee, an artist who, because of his difference from Pablo Picasso, mattered nearly as much to Carl Einstein. In the later 1920s, Klee's work prompted Einstein to write a ... More

This chapter focuses on Paul Klee, an artist who, because of his difference from Pablo Picasso, mattered nearly as much to Carl Einstein. In the later 1920s, Klee's work prompted Einstein to write a significant amount of art criticism about it, and which was powerful enough to support his argument. Klee became a focus of Einstein's most expansive intellectual project: his theory of “the real.” In Einstein's terminology, the real is not a reality that should be either inhabited or critiqued; it is rather a reality that needs to be actively produced. That production gets under way through an act of ungrounding that Einstein called metamorphotic revolt. This chapter examines how Einstein integrated cosmology into the Nietzschean formalism he had developed in his work on Picasso's surrealism under the rubric of metamorphotic revolt. It also considers the Klee version of Einstein's argument in relation to metamorphosis, myth, revolt, and realism.Less