Introducing Aesthetics: A Graphic Guide

321 Pages·2010·66.6 MB·English

by  Christopher Kul-Want

Published by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39-41 North Road,
London N7 9DP
Email: [email protected]
www.introducingbooks.com

ISBN: 978-184831-167-1
Text copyright © 2012 Icon Books Ltd Illustrations copyright © 2012 Icon
Books Ltd The author and illustrator has asserted their moral rights Originating
editor: Richard Appignanesi No part of this book may be reproduced in any
form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
What is Aesthetics?
The Nature of Experience
Socrates and Plato
The Power of Poetry
Painting as Imitation
The Simulacrum
Deception is Truth, Truth Deception
Aristotle’s Poetics
Art and the Audience
Art and Reality
Catharsis
Medieval Aesthetics
The Theological Time-bomb
The Beauty of Order
Thomas Aquinas
Beauty and Cognition
Art as Religious Instruction
Art and Melancholy
The School of Night
Renaissance Aesthetics
Painting as Philosophy
The Rise of the Bourgeoisie
The Lives of the Artists
The Classical Episteme
The Subject
The Sovereign Eye
Et in Arcadia Ego
The Imperialist Subject
Capitalism and the Other
The Enlightenment
Kant’s Critical Philosophy
The Critique of Judgement
The Sublime
Universal Reason
The Unknowable
Hegel and the Universal Consciousness
Symbolic, Classical, Romantic
The Origins of Modern Aesthetics: Nietzsche, Freud and Marx
Nietzsche and the Revaluation of All Values
Apollonian and Dionysian Energy
The Intoxication of Change
Freud and Psychoanalysis
Sublimation
Marx and the Alienation of Capitalism
Art and the Bourgeoisie
Aestheticism
Modernist Aesthetics
Synaesthesia
Romanticism
Marxist Aesthetics in the 1920s and 30s
Lukács and Critical Realism
Brechtian Realism
Communist Aesthetics
Socialist Realism
Aesthetics in the Modern Era
The Aura
The Radical Power of Early Photographs
The Fragments of History
Theodor Adorno
Art After the Holocaust?
The Hollowed Subject
Nietzschean Aesthetics
The Happening of Truth
Georges Bataille
The Philosophy of Expenditure
The Pursuit of the Extreme
Psychoanalysis and Aesthetics after the Second World War
Language and the Autonomous “I”
The Gaze
The Fantasy of Control
Jouissance
Marxist Theories of the Image in the 1960s and 70s
Debord and the Society of the Spectacle
Lack
The Situationist International
Détournement
Ways of Seeing
Modernist Aesthetics: 1940-70
Winckelmann and Lessing
Minimalist Art
Aesthetics, Contemporary Experience and Postmodernism
Fredric Jameson
The Rise of the Multinationals
Modernist vs Postmodernist
Parody or Pastiche?
Schizophrenic Culture
Antonio Negri and T.J. Clark
Postmodernism and Continental Aesthetics
The Medium is the Message
The Aesthetics of Simulation
The Ironies of Postmodern Capitalism
Roland Barthes
Messages Without a Code
The Punctum
Julia Kristeva
The Chora and the Semiotic
Kristeva and Jouissance
Feminist Aesthetics and Postmodernism
Jacques Derrida
Deconstruction
Undecidable Art
Jean-François Lyotard
Newman and Duchamp
Gilles Deleuze
The Body without Organs
Conclusion
Further Reading
Author’s Acknowledgements
Index
“BEAUTY IS TRUTH, TRUTH BEAUTY”, – THAT IS ALL YE KNOW ON EARTH, AND ALL YE NEED TO KNOW.
So the Romantic poet John Keats (1795–1821) wrote in his celebrated
meditation upon mortality and immortality, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” of 1820.
But what is beauty, and what is truth? These are some of the questions which
aesthetics tries to answer …
What is Aesthetics?
Aesthetics (the plural form of aesthetic) is derived from the Greek word
aisthētikos, from aisthēta, meaning things perceptible by the senses. In the 18th
century aesthetics became a branch of philosophy. The German philosopher
Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–62) first used the word in his
Reflections on Certain Matters Relating to Poetry of 1735. Then, in 1750,
Baumgarten entitled an unfinished treatise Aesthetica.
AESTHETICS IS A SPECIALIST AREA OF INQUIRY CONCERNED WITH PERCEPTION AND SENSORY EXPERIENCE.
Today, the word “aesthetic” is frequently encountered in its negative form:
“anaesthetic”, which refers to a substance that induces an absence of sensation
and an inability to feel pain.
Aesthetics has come to be used not just in relation to philosophy, but also in
connection with design and fashion (e.g. the designer of a car will refer to its
aesthetics, or an interior designer will use the word to refer to the look and style
of their designs). In a similar way, “aesthetic” is used in connection with art to
describe the sensibility and style of an artist’s work.