Frederick C. Beiser
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- February 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199573011
- eISBN:
- 9780191722202
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199573011.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Aesthetics, History of Philosophy
This book is a re-examination of the rationalist tradition of aesthetics which prevailed in Germany in the late 17th and 18th century. It is partly an historical survey of the central figures and ...
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This book is a re-examination of the rationalist tradition of aesthetics which prevailed in Germany in the late 17th and 18th century. It is partly an historical survey of the central figures and themes of this tradition, but it is also a philosophical defence of some of its leading ideas such as: that beauty plays an integral role in life; that aesthetic pleasure is the perception of perfection; and that aesthetic rules are inevitable and valuable. It shows that the criticisms of Kant and Nietzsche of this tradition are largely unfounded. The rationalist tradition deserves re-examination because it is of great historical significance, marking the beginning of modern aesthetics, art criticism, and art history.Less
This book is a re-examination of the rationalist tradition of aesthetics which prevailed in Germany in the late 17th and 18th century. It is partly an historical survey of the central figures and themes of this tradition, but it is also a philosophical defence of some of its leading ideas such as: that beauty plays an integral role in life; that aesthetic pleasure is the perception of perfection; and that aesthetic rules are inevitable and valuable. It shows that the criticisms of Kant and Nietzsche of this tradition are largely unfounded. The rationalist tradition deserves re-examination because it is of great historical significance, marking the beginning of modern aesthetics, art criticism, and art history.
Jerrold Levinson
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- January 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780199206179
- eISBN:
- 9780191709982
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199206179.003.0023
- Subject:
- Philosophy, 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 ...
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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
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.
Lawrence Danson
- Published in print:
- 1998
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780198186281
- eISBN:
- 9780191674488
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198186281.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
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 ...
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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
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.
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9781846316456
- eISBN:
- 9781846316708
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781846316456.003.0004
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
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 ...
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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
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.
Fernihough Anne
- Published in print:
- 1993
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198112358
- eISBN:
- 9780191670770
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198112358.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Clive Bell's Art (1914), one of the key texts of Bloomsbury art-criticism, is at best an incoherent work and, at worst, a disturbingly elitist one. Peter Fuller, in Art and Psychoanalysis, is harshly ...
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Clive Bell's Art (1914), one of the key texts of Bloomsbury art-criticism, is at best an incoherent work and, at worst, a disturbingly elitist one. Peter Fuller, in Art and Psychoanalysis, is harshly critical of it in ways that few people would wish to question, attacking Bell as ‘opinionated, arrogant, ultimately downright reactionary’, yet nonetheless finding in Bell's theory ‘kernels of truth’ that can shed light on his own arguments. In spite of its faults, Bell's Art is an important text for the student of D. H. Lawrence's art-criticism. Lawrence had many direct and indirect connections with Bloomsbury, and Bell and Roger Fry are two of the very few art-critics he takes the trouble to criticize overly. In fact, his attack on Bloomsbury aesthetics is vociferous and uncompromising. As a result, literary history has generally defined Lawrence's views on art in opposition to those of Bloomsbury, which is not the most fruitful way of approaching the art-criticism of either camp.Less
Clive Bell's Art (1914), one of the key texts of Bloomsbury art-criticism, is at best an incoherent work and, at worst, a disturbingly elitist one. Peter Fuller, in Art and Psychoanalysis, is harshly critical of it in ways that few people would wish to question, attacking Bell as ‘opinionated, arrogant, ultimately downright reactionary’, yet nonetheless finding in Bell's theory ‘kernels of truth’ that can shed light on his own arguments. In spite of its faults, Bell's Art is an important text for the student of D. H. Lawrence's art-criticism. Lawrence had many direct and indirect connections with Bloomsbury, and Bell and Roger Fry are two of the very few art-critics he takes the trouble to criticize overly. In fact, his attack on Bloomsbury aesthetics is vociferous and uncompromising. As a result, literary history has generally defined Lawrence's views on art in opposition to those of Bloomsbury, which is not the most fruitful way of approaching the art-criticism of either camp.
Mikiko Hirayama
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- November 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780824834418
- eISBN:
- 9780824871239
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Hawai'i Press
- DOI:
- 10.21313/hawaii/9780824834418.003.0011
- Subject:
- History, Asian History
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 ...
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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
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.
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9781846316456
- eISBN:
- 9781846316708
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781846316456.003.0002
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
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 ...
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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
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.
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9781846316456
- eISBN:
- 9781846316708
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781846316456.003.0003
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
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 ...
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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
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.
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9781846316456
- eISBN:
- 9781846316708
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781846316456.003.0005
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
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 ...
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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
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.
Daniel N. Robinson
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199563340
- eISBN:
- 9780191731303
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199563340.003.0008
- Subject:
- Religion, Philosophy of Religion, Religious Studies
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 ...
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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
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.
Sebastian Zeidler
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781501702082
- eISBN:
- 9781501701900
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9781501702082.001.0001
- Subject:
- Art, Art History
The German writer and art critic Carl Einstein (1885–1940) has long been acknowledged as an important figure in the history of modern art, and yet he is often sidelined as an enigma. This book ...
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The German writer and art critic Carl Einstein (1885–1940) has long been acknowledged as an important figure in the history of modern art, and yet he is often sidelined as an enigma. This book recovers Einstein's multifaceted career, offering the first comprehensive intellectual biography of Einstein in English. Einstein first emerged as a writer of experimental prose through his involvement with the anarchist journal Die Aktion. After a few limited forays into art criticism, he burst onto the art scene in 1915 with his book Negro Sculpture, at once a formalist intervention into the contemporary theory and practice of European sculpture and a manifesto for the sophistication of African art. Einstein would go on to publish seminal texts on the cubist paintings of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. His contributions to the surrealist magazine Documents (which Einstein cofounded with Georges Bataille) including writings on Picasso and Paul Klee, remain unsurpassed in their depth and complexity. In a series of close visual analyses—illustrated with major works by Braque, Picasso, and Klee—the book retrieves the theoretical resources that Einstein brought to bear on their art. It shows us that to rediscover Einstein's art criticism is to see the work of great modernist artists anew through the eyes of one of the most gifted left-wing formalists of the twentieth century.Less
The German writer and art critic Carl Einstein (1885–1940) has long been acknowledged as an important figure in the history of modern art, and yet he is often sidelined as an enigma. This book recovers Einstein's multifaceted career, offering the first comprehensive intellectual biography of Einstein in English. Einstein first emerged as a writer of experimental prose through his involvement with the anarchist journal Die Aktion. After a few limited forays into art criticism, he burst onto the art scene in 1915 with his book Negro Sculpture, at once a formalist intervention into the contemporary theory and practice of European sculpture and a manifesto for the sophistication of African art. Einstein would go on to publish seminal texts on the cubist paintings of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. His contributions to the surrealist magazine Documents (which Einstein cofounded with Georges Bataille) including writings on Picasso and Paul Klee, remain unsurpassed in their depth and complexity. In a series of close visual analyses—illustrated with major works by Braque, Picasso, and Klee—the book retrieves the theoretical resources that Einstein brought to bear on their art. It shows us that to rediscover Einstein's art criticism is to see the work of great modernist artists anew through the eyes of one of the most gifted left-wing formalists of the twentieth century.
J. A. Hiddleston
- Published in print:
- 1999
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198159322
- eISBN:
- 9780191673597
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198159322.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
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 ...
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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
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.
Anne Fernihough
- Published in print:
- 1993
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198112358
- eISBN:
- 9780191670770
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198112358.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This first extended study of D. H. Lawrence's aesthetics draws on a number of modern critical approaches to present an original and balanced analysis of his literary and art criticism, and of the ...
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This first extended study of D. H. Lawrence's aesthetics draws on a number of modern critical approaches to present an original and balanced analysis of his literary and art criticism, and of the complex cultural context from which it emerged. Emphasizing the influence on this most ‘English’ of writers of a German intellectual and cultural heritage, the author focuses on Lawrence's connections with the völkisch ideologies prevalent in Germany from 1910–1930, from which both Heideggerian philosophy and Nazism emerged. The deep-seated affinities between Lawrentian and Heideggerian aesthetics are examined for the first time, and the author highlights Lawrence's ‘green’ critique of industrialization. New light is shed on Lawrence's hostility towards Sigmund Freud, contrasting the two writers' thinking on art and the unconscious. The book's reassessment of Lawrence's relationship with Bloomsbury opposes the received view that Lawrence and the Bloomsbury art critics were poles apart. This study reveals Lawrence's art criticism as pluralistic and anti-authoritarian, a necessary antidote to his sometimes brutally authoritarian politics and to the dogma and rigidity that pervades so many other areas of Lawrence's thought.Less
This first extended study of D. H. Lawrence's aesthetics draws on a number of modern critical approaches to present an original and balanced analysis of his literary and art criticism, and of the complex cultural context from which it emerged. Emphasizing the influence on this most ‘English’ of writers of a German intellectual and cultural heritage, the author focuses on Lawrence's connections with the völkisch ideologies prevalent in Germany from 1910–1930, from which both Heideggerian philosophy and Nazism emerged. The deep-seated affinities between Lawrentian and Heideggerian aesthetics are examined for the first time, and the author highlights Lawrence's ‘green’ critique of industrialization. New light is shed on Lawrence's hostility towards Sigmund Freud, contrasting the two writers' thinking on art and the unconscious. The book's reassessment of Lawrence's relationship with Bloomsbury opposes the received view that Lawrence and the Bloomsbury art critics were poles apart. This study reveals Lawrence's art criticism as pluralistic and anti-authoritarian, a necessary antidote to his sometimes brutally authoritarian politics and to the dogma and rigidity that pervades so many other areas of Lawrence's thought.
Fernihough Anne
- Published in print:
- 1993
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198112358
- eISBN:
- 9780191670770
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198112358.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
It has been argued in the last two chapters that D. H. Lawrence and the Bloomsbury art-critics had far more in common than the critical orthodoxy on modernist aesthetics would suggest. The extent to ...
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It has been argued in the last two chapters that D. H. Lawrence and the Bloomsbury art-critics had far more in common than the critical orthodoxy on modernist aesthetics would suggest. The extent to which their interests coincide is brought out by the fact that they all single out Paul Cézanne's work as a kind of paradigm or benchmark for what they think art should achieve. Clive Bell's Art, though making universal claims about art, was written very much as a defense of Cézanne's painting in particular, whilst Roger Fry devoted an entire study to Cézanne. Lawrence wrote his own longest essay in art-criticism, shortly after reading Bell's Art in January 1929. In the same month, he also read Fry's Cézanne: A Study of His Development (1927), a work to which he makes specific reference in his own essay. His comments on Fry's study are extremely dismissive, and, taking them at face value, many critics have been content to cite them as evidence of the radical Lawrence-Bloomsbury opposition.Less
It has been argued in the last two chapters that D. H. Lawrence and the Bloomsbury art-critics had far more in common than the critical orthodoxy on modernist aesthetics would suggest. The extent to which their interests coincide is brought out by the fact that they all single out Paul Cézanne's work as a kind of paradigm or benchmark for what they think art should achieve. Clive Bell's Art, though making universal claims about art, was written very much as a defense of Cézanne's painting in particular, whilst Roger Fry devoted an entire study to Cézanne. Lawrence wrote his own longest essay in art-criticism, shortly after reading Bell's Art in January 1929. In the same month, he also read Fry's Cézanne: A Study of His Development (1927), a work to which he makes specific reference in his own essay. His comments on Fry's study are extremely dismissive, and, taking them at face value, many critics have been content to cite them as evidence of the radical Lawrence-Bloomsbury opposition.
James Grant
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199661794
- eISBN:
- 9780191748318
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199661794.003.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Aesthetics, Philosophy of Language
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 ...
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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
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.
Fernihough Anne
- Published in print:
- 1993
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198112358
- eISBN:
- 9780191670770
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198112358.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Women in Love is both an intense scrutiny of the status of art and artists in modern society and a graphic and heartfelt evocation of the spread of the ‘leprosy’ of industrialism ...
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Women in Love is both an intense scrutiny of the status of art and artists in modern society and a graphic and heartfelt evocation of the spread of the ‘leprosy’ of industrialism over the land. For D. H. Lawrence, aesthetics and industrialism are vitally connected. This chapter examines the links between Lawrence's art-criticism and Victorian commentaries on industrialism, in order to go on to point to the ways in which Lawrence departed from the positions of his nineteenth-century predecessors. The inclusion of Martin Heidegger in an assessment of Lawrence's writings on art is not arbitrary, although, surprisingly, almost nothing has been published on the extensive links between these two thinkers. Like Lawrence, Heidegger was an energetic commentator on both art and the impact of capitalistic industrialism and technology on the environment.Less
Women in Love is both an intense scrutiny of the status of art and artists in modern society and a graphic and heartfelt evocation of the spread of the ‘leprosy’ of industrialism over the land. For D. H. Lawrence, aesthetics and industrialism are vitally connected. This chapter examines the links between Lawrence's art-criticism and Victorian commentaries on industrialism, in order to go on to point to the ways in which Lawrence departed from the positions of his nineteenth-century predecessors. The inclusion of Martin Heidegger in an assessment of Lawrence's writings on art is not arbitrary, although, surprisingly, almost nothing has been published on the extensive links between these two thinkers. Like Lawrence, Heidegger was an energetic commentator on both art and the impact of capitalistic industrialism and technology on the environment.
Sebastian Zeidler
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781501702082
- eISBN:
- 9781501701900
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9781501702082.003.0007
- Subject:
- Art, Art History
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 ...
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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
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.
James Grant
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199661794
- eISBN:
- 9780191748318
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199661794.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Aesthetics, Philosophy of Language
This book is about metaphor, imaginativeness, and criticism of the arts. Since the eighteenth century, many philosophers have argued that appreciating art is rewarding because it involves responding ...
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This book is about metaphor, imaginativeness, and criticism of the arts. Since the eighteenth century, many philosophers have argued that appreciating art is rewarding because it involves responding imaginatively to a work. Literary works can be interpreted in many ways; architecture can be seen as stately, meditative, or forbidding; and sensitive descriptions of art are often colourful metaphors: music can ‘shimmer’, prose can be ‘perfumed’, and a painter’s colouring can be ‘effervescent’. Engaging with art, like creating it, seems to offer great scope for imagination. Hume, Kant, Oscar Wilde, Roger Scruton, and others have defended variations on this attractive idea. This book critically examines it. The first half explains the role imaginativeness plays in criticism. To do this, it answers three questions that are of interest in their own right. First, what are the aims of criticism? Is the point of criticizing a work to evaluate it, to explain it, to modify our response to it, or something else? Second, what is it to appreciate art? Third, what is imaginativeness? This book gives new answers to all three questions. It uses them to explain the role of imaginativeness in criticism. The book’s second half focuses on metaphor. Why are some metaphors so effective? How do we understand metaphors? Are some thoughts expressible only in metaphor? The book’s answers to these questions go against much current thinking in the philosophy of language. It uses these answers to explain why imaginative metaphors are so common in art criticism.Less
This book is about metaphor, imaginativeness, and criticism of the arts. Since the eighteenth century, many philosophers have argued that appreciating art is rewarding because it involves responding imaginatively to a work. Literary works can be interpreted in many ways; architecture can be seen as stately, meditative, or forbidding; and sensitive descriptions of art are often colourful metaphors: music can ‘shimmer’, prose can be ‘perfumed’, and a painter’s colouring can be ‘effervescent’. Engaging with art, like creating it, seems to offer great scope for imagination. Hume, Kant, Oscar Wilde, Roger Scruton, and others have defended variations on this attractive idea. This book critically examines it. The first half explains the role imaginativeness plays in criticism. To do this, it answers three questions that are of interest in their own right. First, what are the aims of criticism? Is the point of criticizing a work to evaluate it, to explain it, to modify our response to it, or something else? Second, what is it to appreciate art? Third, what is imaginativeness? This book gives new answers to all three questions. It uses them to explain the role of imaginativeness in criticism. The book’s second half focuses on metaphor. Why are some metaphors so effective? How do we understand metaphors? Are some thoughts expressible only in metaphor? The book’s answers to these questions go against much current thinking in the philosophy of language. It uses these answers to explain why imaginative metaphors are so common in art criticism.
J. A. Hiddleston
- Published in print:
- 1999
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198159322
- eISBN:
- 9780191673597
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198159322.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
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 ...
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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
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.
Gabriel Riera
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- March 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780823226719
- eISBN:
- 9780823235315
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fso/9780823226719.003.0006
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Philosophy of Language
This chapter discusses Emmanuel Levinas' criticism on the inhumanity of art in his essay “Reality and Its Shadow”. It explains that the il y a plays a central role in Levinas' ...
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This chapter discusses Emmanuel Levinas' criticism on the inhumanity of art in his essay “Reality and Its Shadow”. It explains that the il y a plays a central role in Levinas' thinking and in his determination of the nonethical nature of the work of art. Levinas places transitional layers between the anonymous rumbling of the il y a and the order of the world or totality, and considers the exposure of consciousness to the il y a as a horror that throws subjectivity into an impersonal vigilance.Less
This chapter discusses Emmanuel Levinas' criticism on the inhumanity of art in his essay “Reality and Its Shadow”. It explains that the il y a plays a central role in Levinas' thinking and in his determination of the nonethical nature of the work of art. Levinas places transitional layers between the anonymous rumbling of the il y a and the order of the world or totality, and considers the exposure of consciousness to the il y a as a horror that throws subjectivity into an impersonal vigilance.
