Since the 1960s, many artists have incorporated ecological concerns into their work, an endeavor that has required new strategies in art-making. To explore recent American manifestations of these interests, the David and Alfred Smart Museum commissioned new projects from artists Mark Dion, Peter Fend, and Dan Peterman, each focusing on interrelationships between particular organisms—human beings-and a specific group of sites—a museum building, a river landscape, and a university campus. The results, exhibited at the Smart (...) Museum during the summer of 2000, evoke the varied scales, from the microscopic to the global, at which human actions affect the environment. This catalog documents each of the artists' projects through an array of images and words: Smart Museum Associate Curator Stephanie Smith provides an introduction and brief overviews of the three projects, each of the artists contribute statements, and photographers Susan Anderson and Tom van Eynde document—in over 100 images—the processes and projects that comprise the exhibition. (shrink)

Bhabha, Georges Didi-Huberman, David Morgan and Lee Siegel, as well as a series of focused contributions by Yve-Alain Bois, Wendy Doniger, Kenneth Frampton, Martin E. Marty, John Hallmark Neff, Annemarie Schimmel, and Helen Tworkov consider how rapture resonate's both in a cultural context and within the experience of a single human being.

Accompanying an exhibition organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, this book is the most comprehensive catalogue on the work of this internationally recognized architectural firm.

In order to be doing something intentionally, must one know that one is doing it? Some philosophers have answered yes. Our aim is to test a version of this knowledge thesis, what we call the Knowledge/awareness Thesis, or KAT. KAT states that an agent is doing something intentionally only if he knows that he is doing it or is aware that he is doing it. Here, using vignettes featuring skilled action and vignettes featuring habitual action, we provide evidence that, in (...) various scenarios, a majority of non-specialists regard agents as intentionally doing things that the agents do not know they are doing and are not aware of doing. This puts pressure on proponents of KAT and leaves it to them to find a way these results can coexist with KAT. (shrink)

Art museums frequently remove old paintings from their original settings. In the process, the context of these works of art changes dramatically. Do museums then preserve works of art? To answer this question, I consider an imaginary painting, The Travels and Tribulations of Piero's Baptism of Christ, depicting the history of display of Piero della Francesca's Baptism of Christ. This example suggests that how Piero's painting is seen does depend upon its setting. According to the Intentionalist, such changes in context (...) have no real influence upon the meaning of Piero's painting, and consequently museums can be said to preserve works of art. According to the Skeptic, if such changes are drastic enough, we can no longer identify the picture's original meaning, and museums thus fail to pre- serve works of art. Skepticism deserves attention, for such varied influential commenta- tors as Theodore Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Maurice Blanchot, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Martin Heidegger, Hans Sedlmayr, and Paul Valery hold this pessimistic view of muse- ums. I develop the debate between the Intentionalist and the Skeptic. Ultimately skepti- cism is indefensible, I argue, because it fails to take account of the continuities in the his- tory of art's display. But Intentionalism is also deficient because it is ahistorical. In pre- senting the history of Piero's painting, The Travels and Tribulations of Piero 's Baptism of Christ shows that we can re-identify the original significance of Piero's work and the rec- ognizable continuities that obtain through its changes. It thus makes sense to claim that at least in certain circumstances art museums can preserve works of art. (shrink)

This book offers an interdisciplinary analysis of the social practice of taste in the wake of Pierre Bourdieu¿s sociology of taste. For the first time, this book unites sociologists and other social scientists with artists and curators, art theorists and art educators, and art, design and cultural historians who engage with the practice of taste as it relates to encounters with art, cultural institutions and the practices of everyday life, in national and transnational contexts. The volume is divided into four (...) sections. The first section on ¿Taste and art¿, shows how art practice was drawn into the sphere of ¿good taste¿, contrasting this with a post-conceptualist critique that offers a challenge to the social functions of good taste through an encounter with art. The next section on ¿Taste making and the museum¿ examines the challenges and changing social, political and organisational dynamics propelling museums beyond the terms of a supposedly universal institution and language of taste. The third section of the book, ¿Taste after Bourdieu in Japan¿ offers a case study of the challenges to the cross-cultural transmission and local reproduction of ¿good taste¿, exemplified by the complex cultural context of Japan. The final section on ¿Taste, the home and everyday life¿ juxtaposes the analysis of the reproduction of inequality and alienation through taste, with arguments on how the legacy of ideas of ¿good taste¿ have extended the possibilities of experience and sharpened our consciousness of identity. As the first book to bring together arts practitioners and theorists with sociologists and other social scientists to examine the legacy and continuing validity of Pierre Bourdieu¿s sociology of taste, this publication engages with the opportunities and problems involved in understanding the social value and the cultural dispositions of taste ¿after Bourdieu¿. It does so at a moment when the practice of taste is being radically changed by the global expansion of cultural choices, and the emergence of deploying impersonal algorithms as solutions to cultural and creative decision-making. (shrink)

The idea of modern art presupposes the rise of historicism and the sense of progress since the Enlightenment. Once art, however, conceives itself as progressive and hence modern, it is confronted by the paradoxes of progress: progress renders the modern obsolete at the same time as it seeks to give itself meaning by positing a goal, a destination that would be the end purpose and hence the end of progress. As a consequence, modern art is impelled to constantly transcend its (...) own achievements and limits in a utopian quest for the artwork of the future, the ultimate work of art. But what happens to art when the grand art-historical narrative of modernism collapses? I argue that the ‘modern’ mutates into the ‘contemporary’ and that art now defines itself not in relation to the future but to the present. Contemporary art understands itself as operating in the present, that is, as an art for the present. It finds its destination now in the latest institutionalization of the paradoxes of progress: the museum of contemporary art. (shrink)

Almost thirty years ago, in an attempt to undermine what he termed “the principle of alternate possibilities”.

This article proposes a sensory studies methodology for the interpretation of museum objects. The proposed method unfolds in two phases: virtual encounter via an on-line catalog and actual exposure in the context of a handling workshop. In addition to exploring the écart between image and object, the “Sensing Art and Artifacts” exercise articulates a framework for arriving at a multisensory, cross-cultural, interactive understanding of aesthetic value. The case studies presented here involve four objects from the collection of the Hunterian (...) Museum as sensed and interpreted by scholars of psychology, philosophy, sociology, and anthropology. It is proposed that aesthetic judgment in the expanded (cross-cultural) sense contemplated here involves apprehending the museum object through multiple sensory modalities in place of the conventional Western fixation on visible form. (shrink)

In this book philosophers, scholars of religion, and activists address the theme of responsibility. Barbara Darling-Smith brings together an enlightening collection of essays that analyze the ethics of responsibility, its relational nature, and its global struggle.

There can be little doubt, from the enduring contemporary popularity of art galleries and museums, that such visual arts as painting and sculpture are sources of perceptual and emotional satisfaction and pleasure to a large viewing public. Still, given the contemporary unfamiliarity of much of the subject matter of past art and the absence of any clearly comprehensible subject matter in much modern (abstract and other) art, it may be less clear what younger or older viewers might come to learn (...) from their viewing of much or any educational value. This paper first offers an overview of the complex history of development of visual art from past to present in light of the shifting standards of artistic and aesthetic evaluation that have variously guided such development. However, it is argued that, while any educated appreciation of visual art cannot be had without some understanding of such history, it also requires a clear grasp of conceptual relations between the artistic and the aesthetic and of the significant interplay of diverse criteria of evaluation in any and all serious artworks past or present. Given this, visual arts may provide a unique route to educational understanding of the broadest liberal character. (shrink)

The scope of noninvasive prenatal testing (NIPT) could expand in the future to include detailed analysis of the fetal genome. This will allow for the testing for virtually any trait with a genetic contribution, including “non-medical” traits. Here we discuss the potential use of NIPT for these traits. We outline a scenario which highlights possible inconsistencies with ethical decision-making. We then discuss the case against permitting these uses. The objections include practical problems; increasing inequities; increasing the burden of choice; negative (...) impacts on the child, family, and society; and issues with implementation. We then outline the case for permitting the use of NIPT for these traits. These include arguments for reproductive liberty and autonomy; questioning the labeling of traits as “non-medical”; and the principle of procreative beneficence. This summary of the case for and against can serve as a basis for the development of a consistent and coherent ethical framework. (shrink)

The scope of noninvasive prenatal testing (NIPT) could expand in the future to include detailed analysis of the fetal genome. This will allow for the testing for virtually any trait with a genetic contribution, including “non-medical” traits. Here we discuss the potential use of NIPT for these traits. We outline a scenario which highlights possible inconsistencies with ethical decision-making. We then discuss the case against permitting these uses. The objections include practical problems; increasing inequities; increasing the burden of choice; negative (...) impacts on the child, family, and society; and issues with implementation. We then outline the case for permitting the use of NIPT for these traits. These include arguments for reproductive liberty and autonomy; questioning the labeling of traits as “non-medical”; and the principle of procreative beneficence. This summary of the case for and against can serve as a basis for the development of a consistent and coherent ethical framework. (shrink)

We study the notion of dp-minimality, beginning by providing several essential facts about dp-minimality, establishing several equivalent definitions for dp-minimality, and comparing dp-minimality to other minimality notions. The majority of the rest of the paper is dedicated to examples. We establish via a simple proof that any weakly o-minimal theory is dp-minimal and then give an example of a weakly o-minimal group not obtained by adding traces of externally definable sets. Next we give an example of a divisible ordered Abelian (...) group which is dp-minimal and not weakly o-minimal. Finally we establish that the field of p -adic numbers is dp-minimal. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Classical Art: A Life History DAVID CAST This is a wonderful book, rich in its purposes, wide in its range and, thanks to the author’s home institution, Christ’s College, Cambridge, lavishly illustrated with images of objects, many familiar, some less so. And it is written with an elegance and clarity that belies the depths of scholarship in its history. The first letter of the subtitle suggests the (...) tenor of Vout’s account, that since every age has conjured up a different idea of the classical, what is here is yet one more such history, a modest if particular account of what was and is still there in the records made of the Greek and Roman past. The basic metaphor Vout uses to define the focus of this history is that of conversation, whether such conversing is seen to exist between the objects themselves or between the past and the present, between those objects that have outgrown their intended functions to become part of a canon that has dictated taste over the ages, as she puts it, shaping culture and culture’s questions. Thus conversation is here, plus also what Vout is not afraid, when necessary, to call the misappropriations and translocations of the Greek and Roman objects she takes note of. Yet another contribution she adds to the idea of the classical comes from what she calls, perhaps a little awkwardly, the long durée approach to its subjects, seen first when these objects were produced, then as they survived Christianity and the fall of Rome and Byzantium, the French Revolution, modernism and fascism, to live Caroline Vout, Classical Art: A Life History from Antiquity to the Present, Princeton University Press, 2018. xi + 376 pages; 80 color + 132 b/w illustrations. $39.50. ISBN 9780691177038; E-book ISBN9781400890279. arion 27.1 spring/summer 2019 on in galleries and auction rooms, making the heart soar and the blood boil, as Vout claims, even today. It is a complex story she has to tell, difficult yet valuable, and its method is nicely exemplified by the first example considered, the two statues, known as the Tyrannicides, dated to 477–476 BCE, and located now in the National Archaeological Museum in Naples, attributed on the museum caption to the sculptors Kritios and Nesiotes, and dated to 477–476 BCE. The details here are crucial for, on investigation, it is clear these are not the statues that were erected in the Athenian agora to honor the men, Harmodius and Aristogeiton, who, by tradition, had killed the tyrant’s brother Hipparchus. Yet even this second group, as she notes, had been a stand-in, since the first piece to honor these men, made by the sculptor Antenor, had been stolen by the Persians in the sack of Athens in 480–479 BCE. Nor is this group here the actual second group but rather a copy, made by an unknown copyist working under the Roman Empire. What we have here are what might be called pretenders—yet ones, despite doubts about their authenticity, that have long been taken to mark a particular moment in the formal history of Greek art, the advent of the so-called Severe style in Athens and the birth of the classical moment of sculpture. Any full account of these statues depends then on a rich history, plus a range of other events; the existence of ancient casts of the Tyrannicides during the Roman Empire, marking out such statues as art, rather than having still their first meaning; the prior history in the Renaissance of the acquisition of ancient sculpture as a sign of power; the sight of the figure of Aristogeiton, then in the Palazzo Farnese in Rome, by Johann Joachim Winckelmann; the building up of these statues from fragments of other statues; in 1859 the identification of these figures as the Tyrannicides; and finally a reading of classical texts, those of Pausanias, Pliny and Lucian, that spoke, even if in contradictory ways, of all the actors here, Antenor, Kritios and Aristogeiton. To which should be added the recent accounts of these pieces, provided by schol172 classical art: a life history ars of classical art like Brunilde Ridgway, R. T... (shrink)

In order to be doing something intentionally, must one know that one is doing it? Some philosophers have answered yes. Our aim is to test a version of this knowledge thesis, what we call the Knowledge/Awareness Thesis, or KAT. KAT states that an agent is doing something intentionally only if he knows that he is doing it or is aware that he is doing it. Here, using vignettes featuring skilled action and vignettes featuring habitual action, we provide evidence that, in (...) various scenarios, a majority of non-specialists regard agents as intentionally doing things that the agents do not know they are doing and are not aware of doing. This puts pressure on proponents of KAT and leaves it to them to find a way these results can coexist with KAT. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.3 (2003) 99-104 [Access article in PDF] New York Art, Pittsburgh Art, Art 1 David Carrier Champney Family Professor Case Western Reserve University/Cleveland Institute of Art I. New York Art A fully developed artworld requires not only artists, but also a support system — schools to teach the artists, commercial galleries to display art, and the connected artmarket; public museums and their curators (...) to make that art available to the public; and also, last and least, artwriters to interpret and evaluate the art. This has been true for a long time in America and Europe. I speak of artwriters as "last and least" just because we are important only in some artworlds. In the seventeenth century Poussin depended upon commentary of intellectuals, but his contemporaries Rembrandt and Vermeer did not. In this country, New York is such an artworld and so, perhaps, is Los Angeles. These are the places where young artists go to establish themselves, and so they are the places where the most original new art tends to be made. Artists outside of those centers then imitate the art made there.Artworld centers tend to be large business centers because they require major museums and many collectors. Each component of this system is dependent upon the others. Unless they have collectors, artists cannot support themselves without doing other jobs; unless there are museums, there is no public space in which art can be seen. Unless there are artwriters, there is no way to articulate shared experience of this art. This artworld is a product of modernist bourgeois democracy. Premodern cultures did not have public museums. Nowadays information is disseminated quickly, but the role of centers as places where new art is made, seen, and discussed remains essential. Our novel electronic technologies have not changed this situation.A collecting culture requires not just wealth, but also a special sort of sensibility. In fact, the number of serious collectors anywhere is surprisingly small, as one can see in Los Angeles, which has a great deal of wealth, but a surprisingly thin gallery system. Like collectors, artwriters too are odd sorts of creatures. I usually identify myself as a New York-based critic, because that is where I see most of the shows I review. Artforum, the Burlington Magazine, and Tema Celeste, the journals I now work for have a real interest in exhibitions at the Carnegie and the Warhol, in Pittsburgh, but no concern with shows like this one. Partly the problem is that reviewing space is very hard to come by, but also the difficulty is that it is difficult to make sense of a review discussing artists who are known only locally. Even were I to identify [End Page 99] someone local as a wonderful original talent, it would be very difficult for readers who have never seen her art to evaluate that claim.In Pittsburgh we certainly have good artists, and there are several universities with art departments. But here, as elsewhere in the cities I know, the artmarket is focused on New York; and there is, so far as I can see, only modest critical support for artists. Major collectors here, as elsewhere in America, look to New York, which has a critical mass of galleries, museums, and critics. The Carnegie too, tends to look to New York when planning its shows. The curators travel widely, but most of the art they show, whether American or from elsewhere, is displayed in New York galleries. If one adopts this way of thinking about an artworld, then art made in Pittsburgh inevitably will be judged as "provincial." There are a few major artists, and many derivative ones; and those major ones, the innovators, are in the artworld centers.This is the model Vasari adopts, it is Clement Greenberg's model, and it is the basic model driving the present day artworld. To describe Pittsburgh artists as provincial, then, is to identify the sociological structure of this, a typical local artworld. There is a lot of adventure and intelligence in Pittsburgh art, but inevitably to the critic... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.3 (2003) 99-104 [Access article in PDF] New York Art, Pittsburgh Art, Art 1 David Carrier Champney Family Professor Case Western Reserve University/Cleveland Institute of Art I. New York Art A fully developed artworld requires not only artists, but also a support system — schools to teach the artists, commercial galleries to display art, and the connected artmarket; public museums and their curators (...) to make that art available to the public; and also, last and least, artwriters to interpret and evaluate the art. This has been true for a long time in America and Europe. I speak of artwriters as "last and least" just because we are important only in some artworlds. In the seventeenth century Poussin depended upon commentary of intellectuals, but his contemporaries Rembrandt and Vermeer did not. In this country, New York is such an artworld and so, perhaps, is Los Angeles. These are the places where young artists go to establish themselves, and so they are the places where the most original new art tends to be made. Artists outside of those centers then imitate the art made there.Artworld centers tend to be large business centers because they require major museums and many collectors. Each component of this system is dependent upon the others. Unless they have collectors, artists cannot support themselves without doing other jobs; unless there are museums, there is no public space in which art can be seen. Unless there are artwriters, there is no way to articulate shared experience of this art. This artworld is a product of modernist bourgeois democracy. Premodern cultures did not have public museums. Nowadays information is disseminated quickly, but the role of centers as places where new art is made, seen, and discussed remains essential. Our novel electronic technologies have not changed this situation.A collecting culture requires not just wealth, but also a special sort of sensibility. In fact, the number of serious collectors anywhere is surprisingly small, as one can see in Los Angeles, which has a great deal of wealth, but a surprisingly thin gallery system. Like collectors, artwriters too are odd sorts of creatures. I usually identify myself as a New York-based critic, because that is where I see most of the shows I review. Artforum, the Burlington Magazine, and Tema Celeste, the journals I now work for have a real interest in exhibitions at the Carnegie and the Warhol, in Pittsburgh, but no concern with shows like this one. Partly the problem is that reviewing space is very hard to come by, but also the difficulty is that it is difficult to make sense of a review discussing artists who are known only locally. Even were I to identify [End Page 99] someone local as a wonderful original talent, it would be very difficult for readers who have never seen her art to evaluate that claim.In Pittsburgh we certainly have good artists, and there are several universities with art departments. But here, as elsewhere in the cities I know, the artmarket is focused on New York; and there is, so far as I can see, only modest critical support for artists. Major collectors here, as elsewhere in America, look to New York, which has a critical mass of galleries, museums, and critics. The Carnegie too, tends to look to New York when planning its shows. The curators travel widely, but most of the art they show, whether American or from elsewhere, is displayed in New York galleries. If one adopts this way of thinking about an artworld, then art made in Pittsburgh inevitably will be judged as "provincial." There are a few major artists, and many derivative ones; and those major ones, the innovators, are in the artworld centers.This is the model Vasari adopts, it is Clement Greenberg's model, and it is the basic model driving the present day artworld. To describe Pittsburgh artists as provincial, then, is to identify the sociological structure of this, a typical local artworld. There is a lot of adventure and intelligence in Pittsburgh art, but inevitably to the critic... (shrink)

This book is a collection of essays written by a distinguished mathematician with a very long and successful career as a researcher and educator working in many areas of pure and applied mathematics. The author writes about everything he found exciting about math, its history, and its connections with art, and about how to explain it when so many smart people (and children) are turned off by it. The three longest essays touch upon the foundations of mathematics, upon quantum (...) mechanics and Schrödinger's cat phenomena, and upon whether robots will ever have consciousness. Each of these essays includes some unpublished material. The author also touches upon his involvement with and feelings about issues in the larger world. The author's main goal when preparing the book was to convey how much he loves math and its sister fields. (shrink)

When the Bloomsbury critics, Roger Fry and Clive Bell, introduced an aesthetically-conservative English public to recent Parisian avant-garde painting, they explained its disconcerting imagery by way of a late-nineteenth-century metaphysical tradition which had long intrigued musicians and Symbolist writers on the European continent. The Post-Impressionist aesthetic they devised advocated a direct response to the formal ingenuity of the work of art without recourse to prior knowledge and it emphasized the significance of visionary genius albeit to the detriment of narrative acuity (...) and technical accomplishment, values hitherto upheld by the Edwardian art Establishment. The provocation was calculated, the author suggests, and its domestic ramifications were predictable: the reaction of an Anglo-conformist public in New York, on the other hand, was anything but. Recreating an Anglo-American dialogue inspired by Fry and Bell, and framed within a period encompassing Fry's Manet and the Post-Impressionists exhibition in 1910 and Alfred Barr Jr's Cubism and Abstract Art exhibition in 1936, the author demonstrates how key components of Bloomsbury's aesthetic bypassed a pre-existent modernist practice in New York and were taken up instead by an urban intelligentsia which adapted them to the requirements of an increasingly professionalised institutional practice during the 1920s. (shrink)

Almost thirty years ago, in an attempt to undermine what he termed "the principle of alternate possibilities" (the thesis that people are morally responsible for what they have done only if they could have done otherwise), Harry Frankfurt offered an ingenious thought-experiment that has played a major role in subsequent work on moral responsibility and free will. Several philosophers, including David Widerker and Robert Kane, argued recently that this thought-experiment and others like it are fundamentally flawed. This paper develops (...) a new Frankfurt-style example that is immune to their objections. [Reprinted in Laura Waddell Ekstrom, ed., Agency and Responsibility: Essays on the Metaphysics of Freedom (Westview Press, 2001), pp. 241-54; and in John Martin Fischer, ed., Free Will, Vol. III (Routledge, 2005), pp. 330-42.]. (shrink)

In this paper Mele and Robb defend their (1998) paper against a variety of objections and further their develop their defense of Frankfurt-style cases.

Hefty and serious—that is how this book feels when you pick it up. That was my subjective aesthetic experience anyway. Aesthetic judgment is, after all, one key to assessing our thoughts and perceptions. More on that soon, as you might expect.Hefty and serious also describes the questions with which the volume grapples: Is there, or can there be, a clear American Aesthetics, not merely aesthetics practiced by Americans? What would that look like? How would such a process affect the minds (...) and actions of Americans?The answers? It's complicated.The twenty essays in this volume trace the possibility of an American Aesthetics from foundational ideas of the past to the contemporary landscape. The goal is not only articulating an aesthetics that is distinctively American—aesthetics as a method for examining the arts and the artful—but also the possibility of aesthetics as a dynamic tool for pursuing a flourishing life within our hyper-capitalist, consumerist culture.Constant amongst the scholars gathered here is the assertion that aesthetics is not an abstract academic pursuit interesting only to the privileged and interested few but rather that aesthetics is the key element in the human pursuit of meaning and purpose in our lives. Aristotle would approve!Speaking of ancestors, the scholars here trace the work of grandparents such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Pierce, and William James, and parents such as the pragmatist John Dewey and the process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. (Whitehead is from the UK but “American” in that he died in the US after a long career at Harvard and wrote his magnum opus, Process and Reality, in the US.) From these ancestors, the scholars gathered in this volume see a path forward: Art as conscious experience, as Dewey posited, and/or art as committed immersion in the process, as Whitehead claimed.Whitehead's process approach—process aesthetics—reminds us that each moment of our experience in this at once mundane and amazing world is an occasion of beauty and a telos—each moment is in the larger process of reality quite literally our last.William James attempted to map how we might free ourselves from the everyday and from everyday-ness: “We are stuffed with abstract conceptions, and glib verbalities and verbosities and in the culture of these higher functions the peculiar sources of joy connected with our simpler functions often dry up” (109). Yet, according to James, there is hope due to the fact that we human beings seek art and do art first and foremost because we enjoy it.Enjoyment was not the angle from which John Dewey approached the subject. According to Dewey our aesthetic reactions and interactions create the experience of art (and life) that re-accesses “an underlying harmony... that we vaguely remember” (112). For pragmatists, noticing a “thing” is entering a relationship with that thing, what David Strong terms in his essay, “correlational coexistence” (371).From these building blocks the scholars assembled propose ways to change US culture from one prone to ask, “What does it do?” into one in which it is increasingly possible to ask, “What does it mean?” This would be a fundamental shift in the dominant paradigms in US culture.How to get there? Randall E. Auxier offers a concise definition of “bad”—bad is something that is “lifeless and too much indebted to the actual.” My attempts at singing fall into that category, as do many American experiences conceived in the mode of what they do, not what they mean.That works of art escape or repel descriptions of their constitutive elements has proven to be a persistent philosophical conundrum through the centuries, as has the question of whether human feelings create an object or an object creates feelings, or both/and—Dewey's interaction of “organism and environment.” From whichever philosophical direction we approach this crux, aesthetic thinking can lead us to recognize and experience the inwardness of what we view as things—objects—and this examination can realign our personal axiology—our personal valuation of reality—the “ten thousand things” of ancient Chinese philosophy.Several authors cite Suzanne Langer's theory of symbol, broadening the scope of “art” well beyond Art with a capital A into the aesthetic and the ritualistic.The scholars gathered here are optimistic that aesthetic examination can create more of those rare moments (moments art can reliably create) in which our very being adjusts to the reality of existence, and we feel exhilarated and a part of the whole process of existence. We call this “nirvana” or “enlightenment.”That is another thing that feels hefty about this volume: the persistent optimism among the scholars that psychic wholeness and human flourishing are possible for more Americans. Robert S. Corrington terms this the “selving process,” roughly what Carl Jung termed “individuation.” This collection adds up to much more than the sum of its parts, as one idea inflected in a particular way by one author sparks off the same idea approached from a different perspective in another. This collection contains scholars on the cutting edge of process theology, pragmatism, aesthetics, and religion, many of whom are adept at crossing the traditional fences between academic fields. The US needs an American Aesthetics. As American poet William Carlos Williams wrote,It is difficultto get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lackof what is found there. (shrink)

_Ranging from Homer to Picasso, and from the Iranian Revolution to _The Wizard of Oz_, this spirited and radiant book awakens us anew to the role of color in our lives_ Our lives are saturated by color. We live in a world of vivid colors, and color marks our psychological and social existence. But for all color’s inescapability, we don’t know much about it. Now authors David Scott Kastan and Stephen Farthing offer a fresh and imaginative exploration of one (...) of the most intriguing and least understood aspects of everyday experience. Kastan and Farthing, a scholar and a painter, respectively, investigate color from numerous perspectives: literary, historical, cultural, anthropological, philosophical, art historical, political, and scientific. In ten lively and wide-ranging chapters, each devoted to a different color, they examine the various ways colors have shaped and continue to shape our social and moral imaginations. Each individual color becomes the focal point for a consideration of one of the extraordinary ways in which color appears and matters in our lives. Beautifully produced in full color, this book is a remarkably smart, entertaining, and fascinating guide to this elusive topic. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Propaedeutic to Walter BenjaminDavid Socher (bio)I took the picture—the Marines took Iwo Jima.—Joe Rosenthal (1912-2006)The Emerson College Web site on Walter Benjamin's essay The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction1 nicely animates some ideas of the essay. One such idea is the following: To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. When Benjamin wrote this (...) essay and this maxim, Norman Rockwell had been illustrating magazine covers for both Boy's Life and the Saturday Evening Post for several years. Rockwell, who also made paintings for advertisements, said he didn't "want to paint for the few who can see a canvas in a museum." He wanted his "pictures to be published," exemplifying Benjamin's point.2 Wood engravings have been around for a thousand years and coins with portraits for two thousand. I don't mention these old examples to dispute Benjamin's point—certainly to an ever-greater degree the modern age designs for reproducibility. And Benjamin himself at the outset mentions the stampings, coins, and terra cottas of the Greeks as ancient cases of reproduction of a work of art. I merely intend to highlight the distinction between creating a print and painting a painting or drawing a drawing. In the latter cases the artist's goal is to produce one particular physical surface. We often imbue this surface with what Benjamin called an aura.3 Collectors of Rockwell Post covers don't have Rockwell's auras,4 and even less so those who have and hang reproductions of such covers. The making of prints has its own cachet, however. Although he is far from a typical printmaker, M. C. Escher here expresses a thought applicable to all printmakers: "The printmaker has [End Page 1] something of the minstrel spirit; he sings, and in every print … he repeats his song over and over again."5As is usual with such illustrations, Rockwell's paintings were put on magazine covers by photographic processes. Rockwell, of course, is not a photographer. His name will not be included in the history of photography. Why is it even worth stating such more-than-obvious observations? Because Benjamin seems to me to be mixed up about photography and the mix-up pervades his essay, even including his very title. Getting clear about exactly what photography is will help untangle things. Therefore, before turning to Benjamin's text, allow me a few words on photography.It is hard to overstate the importance of photography. About his own parents, whom he had never seen, Dickens's Pip says, he "never saw any likeness of either of them (for their days were long before the days of photographs)."6 Many school textbooks feature photos of children in a classroom, but often these are staged photos not actually taken in a classroom. At least one textbook publisher keeps props, including a wheelchair to take photos of "Able bodied children selected through modeling agencies [posing] in the wheelchair."7 Well, it's hard to get disabled children to serve as models, and in this way the publisher meets his disability quota. In such a case the photo is not doctored. It does picture the event in front of the camera, although unknown to the student, the picture is staged and the pictured student is neither in a classroom, nor disabled. This is a small deception; it is, however, a greater deception than is normal for, say, clothing catalogues. In such a catalogue all know that the model photographed is not actually skiing or chopping wood, although the model is so pictured. In the textbook an able-bodied child is presented as a disabled one, however, no direct falsehoods are being taught and no picture is falsely captioned. On the other hand, when a news agency doctors, falsely captions, or stages a picture, the deception is great.Newspapermen and newspaperwomen know well that photo-ops and managed news are cases where the tail wags the dog inasmuch as the event itself was only created for the sake of the picture. Somewhat similarly, staged wedding photos and other... (shrink)

Aestheticians have tended to focus their attention almost exclusively on high art, on museum painting and sculpture, classical music and literature, and architecture, leaving the popular arts to their colleagues in cultural studies. That seems a big mistake, for like it or not, popular movies and television attract enormous audiences everywhere, including very many people who take little interest in high art. This mass art creates stars, actors, and musicians who are so famous that everyone recognizes them. And celebrities (...) such as Princess Diana are also stars. Because stars straddle the boundary between politics and popular art, they deserve attention from our philosophers. Even if your favorite leisure reading.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reply to My CommentatorsDavid CarrierI am immensely thankful to Rika Burnham and Elliott Kai-Kee, Enrique Martínez Celaya, Klaus Ottmann, and Sean Ulmer for their comments on my book. And to Daniel A. Siedell for organizing this mini-symposium, which really is an author's dream. By gently pressing me to think about important issues, these sympathetic commentators have advanced dialogue.When writing Museum Skepticism I became very aware that there are (...) two kinds of literature that discuss museums. There are memoirs of curators or other museum employees, and there are the commentaries by academics, which usually look at museums from the outside. My ambition was to look at this institution in a way that would both be sympathetic to the practical concerns and embody a theoretical point of view. One otherwise sympathetic reviewer complained that I was only looking at the museum from the outside.1 That certainly is correct, but for obvious reasons people who work in museums are unusually unwilling to describe their inner workings. To have a good theory of the museum, you need to be practical. Often, for example, critics complain about the proliferation of shops and restaurants, urge that admission be free, or say that blockbuster shows are destructive and overcrowded. However one judges such moralizing, the museum director who needs to balance the budget can hardly be guided by such reasoning. One can be critical, as I am, about the power of the super-rich in museum life. But in what other way could funding be found? The history of debates about the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) points to obvious ways in which, in America at least, reliance on public funding poses problems. My goal, then, was to develop a realistic analysis.Sean Ulmer correctly notes that to understand the art in museums, we must consider its prior history. Chinese paintings, Islamic decorations, Maori sculpture, and premodern European art were not made to be displayed in public galleries. And so there are legitimate questions about how to set it alongside modernist art, whose natural home is the art museum. Allowing this much, I am not sure why he thinks it impossible to describe museums in a single book. We need to understand how artifacts with such varied origins can be coherently displayed in one building. Here, then, we get to Ulmer's second concern—museum displays. Recently museums have experimented with thematic displays. The Museum of Modern Art in New York did that before its recent reconstruction; the Tate Modern has such a system; and during summer 2006 the Whitney tried such a plan. I understand the need of museums to experiment, to find new ways to attract visitors to the permanent collection. Still, a straight chronological display has the obvious advantage of presenting that history of art in which, for example, Impressionism leads to Cubism, and then on to Abstract Expressionism. The obvious danger of thematic displays is that they bewilder the larger public. [End Page 22]When I said that museums are top-down institutions, I was thinking of the grander public museums where the function of the trustees is to raise money, either by giving themselves or by networking. These people who provide funding no doubt have their own agendas, but they, in turn, respond to larger economic and political concerns. I would be astonished if the Metropolitan Museum of Art asked Arthur Danto or Leo Steinberg to be a trustee; or, to look closer at hand, if the Carnegie Museum of Art or the Cleveland Museum of Art asked me to play that role. Since we are mere professors, what practical help could we provide? I expect that at smaller museums the situation is different. But here, again, it is important to be realistic. Cleveland's art historians have not had any influence on the rebuilding plan for the Cleveland Museum of Art. Of course I would be flattered if the new director asked for my opinion, but to be honest, I am not sure that I could tell him anything useful. When Ulmer discusses the comparative role of permanent collections and temporary exhibitions, he touches on a very important point. Like him, I... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 39.3 (2005) 115-120 [Access article in PDF] Commentary Seeing Cultural Conflicts Some years ago the great intellectual historian Isaiah Berlin made an important statement about what has become known as multiculturalism: We are urged to look upon life as affording a plurality of values, equally genuine, equally ultimate, above all equally objective; incapable, therefore, of being ordered in a timeless hierarchy, or judged in (...) terms of some one absolute standard.1He distinguishes such pluralism from relativism, which holds that different cultures (or individuals) have tastes or attitudes that are not objectively valid. Multiculturalism is, he thinks, an important position; relativism is not. Berlin describes what has now become a very familiar cliché. There are many diverse social systems. And since each has real value, we try to understand every other culture on its own terms.A great deal has been written recently about cultural conflicts. What can visual art show us about this subject, about relationships between radically opposed societies? Pre-modern civilizations were not usually tolerant of exotic cultures. Islam and Europe were often at war. "The menace of Islam was seen as something which threatened the souls as well as the bodies of Christian Europe."2 But although the Italians often fought with their Muslim neighbors, they did also import carpets to decorate the interiors of palaces and, in Venice, to adorn the facades of their homes.3 And many Venetian paintings depict these Islamic rugs. In Giovanni Mansueti's Miracles of the Bridge at San Lio (1494), now in the Accademia, Venice, or in Vittore Carpaccio's Meeting and Departure of the Betrothed (1490) showing the Episodes from the Life of St. Ursula, carpets are represented. In such pictures, the historian Paul Hills observes:... rich colours in soft textiles overlay the hardness of marble; and the eye of the Venetian painters and their public became attuned to fine degrees of hardness and softness, of fixity and pliancy, as when silken textiles move in a current of air but marbles stand fast. 4The Venetians were famous for incorporating alien artifacts, making them "their own without losing a sense of the exotic and the unfamiliar."5 And so it is unsurprising that painters freely inserted objects from another culture into works of art. The exotic decorative fabrics must surely have inspired the [End Page 115] Venetians. But because Islamic culture was foreign, Renaissance Europeans did not say much about the aesthetic qualities of these carpets.Representations of carpets are also found elsewhere in Italian art. The Siena Cathedral contains frescoes by Pinturicchio (1502-9) showing the life of Pius II, the fifteenth-century Pope. In the sixth scene, he enters Mantua to preside over the assembly called to mount an expedition against the Turks.6 (The venerable Christian capital Constantinople had just fallen to the Muslims.) On the table in the porch sheltering the Pope and his attendants, under some books, is a magnificent carpet. Even as these Christians plot, the room is decorated by art made by their enemies. Perhaps the carpet placed underfoot in this picture is treated as a trophy, like the flags of the defeated foes displayed in military museums. But often in other European paintings, Islamic rugs are depicted set on tables or hung from windows in ways that acknowledge their visual appeal.7Renaissance Italians seem to have had no concern with understanding Islamic carpets. Modern historians, by contrast, interested in the elaborate symbolism of these carpets, note that the rugs serve sacred functions.8 The Quran gives elaborate directions about how and when to pray. But it does not mention carpets. "Apart from mosque lamps the only other furnishing commonly found in mosques was some kind of floor covering," a historian explains.9 "The custom no doubt evolved from the religious requirement that all must enter the mosque unshod." Because carpets are used for prayer, both believers and Christians naturally associate them with religious observances. Non-Muslims also have long made use of these beautiful artifacts, sometimes cautiously—a fourteenth-century Spanish rabbi did say that a carpet depicting the Kaaba... (shrink)

• Aggregates of previously isolated cells of Hydra are capable, under suitable solvant conditions, of regeneration forming complete animals. In a first stage, ecto- and endodermal cells sort out, producing the bilayered hollow structure characteristic of Hydra tissue; thereafter, heads are formed (even if the original cell preparation contained no head cells), eventually leading to the separation of normal animals with head, body column and foot. Hydra appears to be the highest type of organism that allows for regeneration of the (...) entire structure from random cell aggregates. The system is particularly useful for studying cell interactions, tissue polarity, pattern formation, and cell differentiation. (shrink)

Aesthetics is not a subject usually associated with North Korea in Western scholarship, the usual tropes being autocracy, counterfeiting, drugs, human-rights abuse, famine, nuclear weapons, party-military dictatorship, Stalinism, and totalitarianism. Where the arts are concerned, they are typically seen as crude political propaganda. One British museum specialist writes that North Korean visual art is an "art under control," and one Russian historian insists that North Korean literature is devoid of the "beauty of language."1 As the short turns of phrase (...) and value judgments indicate, there has been no real attempt in English to engage the North Korean aesthetic on descriptive terms.North Korea is not a liberal .. (shrink)

This book, first published in 1989, contains a spirited debate between eminent economists, journalists, and publishers about the spread of economic ideas. Using many of the same ideas as do the rhetorical and sociological philosophical schools, the contributors to this book discuss the spread of economic ideas in readily understandable English. The examination of the flow of ideas among economists and from economists to the public is followed by a discussion of the public policy use and abuse of these concepts. (...) A final section provides insights into the funding of ideas and the incentives to make economics more relevant. The dialogue among the book's contributors provides both the lay reader and the interested professional with fascinating insights into what happens behind the scenes in academia, publishing, and journalism. (shrink)

This paper is a combination of a grandfather's musings over his grandson's drawings, combined with a reconsideration of hermeneutics as an early childhood educational theory.

Identifying the necessary and sufficient conditions for individuating and classifying diseases is a matter of great importance in the fields of law, ethics, epidemiology, and of course, medicine. In this paper, I first propose a means of achieving this goal, ensuring that no two distinct disease-types could correctly be ascribed to the same disease-token. I then posit a metaphysical ontology of diseases—that is, I give an account of what a disease is. This is essential to providing the most effective means (...) of interfering with disease processes. Following existing work in the philosophy of medicine and epidemiology (primarily Christopher Boorse; Caroline Whitbeck; Alexander Broadbent), philosophy of biology (Joseph LaPorte; D.L. Hull), conditional analyses of causation (J.L. Mackie; David Lewis), and recent literature on dispositional essentialism (Stephen Mumford and Rani Anjum; Alexander Bird), I endorse a dispositional conception of disease. Following discussion of various conceptions of disease-identity, their relations to the clinical and pathological effects of the diseases in question, and how diseases are treated, I conclude (i) that diseases should be individuated by their causes, and (ii) that diseases are causal processes best seen as simultaneously acting sequences of mutually manifesting dispositions. (shrink)