The Search For A Democratic Aesthetics

Author : Alexander Leicht
Publisher : Universitatsverlag Winter
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 2012
Category : Aesthetics, American
ISBN : 3825359484

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The Search for a Democratic Aesthetics by Alexander Leicht Pdf

If democracy were an artwork, what would it look like? -Starting from this question and examining the work of three crucial figures from 20th century American painting, photography, and poetry, this monograph proposes a specific way of conceptualising the link between democracy and aesthetics. The book argues that a democratic aesthetics can be properly understood by interpreting a number of formal features of artworks as metaphors for particular key elements of democracy as it is framed in important strands of democratic theory. For example, a certain kind of loose collage coposition can be seen to stand in a metaphorical relationshiop with the structure of a pluralist democratic polity. Systematically developed, this account helps better to udnerstand the democratic quality of individual artworks, and also makes plausible how aesthetics can contribute to the discourse of democratice society.

Author : Thomas Docherty
Publisher : Stanford University Press
Page : 210 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 2006
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 0804751897

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Aesthetic Democracy by Thomas Docherty Pdf

Aesthetic Democracy argues that the possibility of social and political democracy depends primarily upon art and aesthetics, and that it is art which determines the possibilities of human freedom.

Author : Kajri Jain
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 267 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2021-01-08
Category : Art
ISBN : 9781478012887

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Gods in the Time of Democracy by Kajri Jain Pdf

In 2018 India's prime minister, Narendra Modi, inaugurated the world's tallest statue: a 597-foot figure of nationalist leader Sardar Patel. Twice the height of the Statue of Liberty, it is but one of many massive statues built following India's economic reforms of the 1990s. In Gods in the Time of Democracy Kajri Jain examines how monumental icons emerged as a religious and political form in contemporary India, mobilizing the concept of emergence toward a radical treatment of art historical objects as dynamic assemblages. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork at giant statue sites in India and its diaspora and interviews with sculptors, patrons, and visitors, Jain masterfully describes how public icons materialize the intersections between new image technologies, neospiritual religious movements, Hindu nationalist politics, globalization, and Dalit-Bahujan verifications of equality and presence. Centering the ex-colony in rethinking key concepts of the image, Jain demonstrates how these new aesthetic forms entail a simultaneously religious and political retooling of the “infrastructures of the sensible.”

Author : Fred Evans
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 235 pages
File Size : 42,6 Mb
Release : 2018-11-20
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780231547369

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Public Art and the Fragility of Democracy by Fred Evans Pdf

Public space is political space. When a work of public art is put up or taken down, it is an inherently political statement, and the work’s aesthetics are inextricably entwined with its political valences. Democracy’s openness allows public art to explore its values critically and to suggest new ones. However, it also facilitates artworks that can surreptitiously or fortuitously undermine democratic values. Today, as bigotry and authoritarianism are on the rise and democratic movements seek to combat them, as Confederate monuments fall and sculptures celebrating diversity rise, the struggle over the values enshrined in the public arena has taken on a new urgency. In this book, Fred Evans develops philosophical and political criteria for assessing how public art can respond to the fragility of democracy. He calls for considering such artworks as acts of citizenship, pointing to their capacity to resist autocratic tendencies and reveal new dimensions of democratic society. Through close considerations of Chicago’s Millennium Park and New York’s National September 11 Memorial, Evans shows how a wide range of artworks participate in democratic dialogues. A nuanced consideration of contemporary art, aesthetics, and political theory, this book is a timely and rigorous elucidation of how thoughtful public art can contribute to the flourishing of a democratic way of life.

Author : Beth Hinderliter,Vered Maimon,Jaleh Mansoor,Seth McCormick
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 382 pages
File Size : 45,6 Mb
Release : 2009-09-18
Category : Art
ISBN : 9780822390978

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Communities of Sense by Beth Hinderliter,Vered Maimon,Jaleh Mansoor,Seth McCormick Pdf

Communities of Sense argues for a new understanding of the relation between politics and aesthetics in today’s globalized and image-saturated world. Established and emerging scholars of art and culture draw on Jacques Rancière’s theorization of democratic politics to suggest that aesthetics, traditionally defined as the “science of the sensible,” is not a depoliticized discourse or theory of art, but instead part of a historically specific organization of social roles and communality. Rather than formulating aesthetics as the Other to politics, the contributors show that aesthetics and politics are mutually implicated in the construction of communities of visibility and sensation through which political orders emerge. The first of the collection’s three sections explicitly examines the links between aesthetics and social and political experience. Here a new essay by Rancière posits art as a key site where disagreement can be staged in order to produce new communities of sense. In the second section, contributors investigate how sense was constructed in the past by the European avant-garde and how it is mobilized in today’s global visual and political culture. Exploring the viability of various models of artistic and political critique in the context of globalization, the authors of the essays in the volume’s final section suggest a shift from identity politics and preconstituted collectivities toward processes of identification and disidentification. Topics discussed in the volume vary from digital architecture to a makeshift museum in a Paris suburb, and from romantic art theory in the wake of Hegel to the history of the group-subject in political art and performance since 1968. An interview with Étienne Balibar rounds out the collection. Contributors. Emily Apter, Étienne Balibar, Carlos Basualdo, T. J. Demos, Rachel Haidu, Beth Hinderliter, David Joselit, William Kaizen, Ranjanna Khanna, Reinaldo Laddaga, Vered Maimon, Jaleh Mansoor, Reinhold Martin, Seth McCormick, Yates McKee, Alexander Potts, Jacques Rancière, Toni Ross

Author : Jason Frank
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 281 pages
File Size : 44,6 Mb
Release : 2021-03-15
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780190658182

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The Democratic Sublime by Jason Frank Pdf

The transition from royal to popular sovereignty during the age of democratic revolutions--from 1776 to 1848--entailed not only the reorganization of institutions of governance and norms of political legitimacy, but also a dramatic transformation in the iconography and symbolism of political power. The personal and external rule of the king, whose body was the physical locus of political authority, was replaced with the impersonal and immanent self-rule of the people, whose power could not be incontestably embodied. This posed representational difficulties that went beyond questions of institutionalization and law, extending into the aesthetic realm of visualization, composition, and form. How to make the people's sovereign will tangible to popular judgment was, and is, a crucial problem of democratic political aesthetics. The Democratic Sublime offers an interdisciplinary exploration of how the revolutionary proliferation of popular assemblies--crowds, demonstrations, gatherings of the "people out of doors"--came to be central to the political aesthetics of democracy during the age of democratic revolutions. Jason Frank argues that popular assemblies allowed the people to manifest as a collective actor capable of enacting dramatic political reforms and change. Moreover, Frank asserts that popular assemblies became privileged sites of democratic representation as they claimed to support the voice of the people while also signaling the material plenitude beyond any single representational claim. Popular assemblies continue to retain this power, in part, because they embody that which escapes representational capture: they disrupt the representational space of appearance and draw their power from the ineffability and resistant materiality of the people's will. Engaging with a wide range of sources, from canonical political theorists (Rousseau, Burke, and Tocqueville) to the novels of Hugo, the visual culture of the barricades, and the memoirs of popular insurgents, The Democratic Sublime demonstrates how making the people's sovereign will tangible to popular judgment became a central dilemma of modern democracy, and how it remains so today.

Author : Martín Plot
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 176 pages
File Size : 47,5 Mb
Release : 2014-10-23
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781441195661

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The Aesthetico-Political by Martín Plot Pdf

This study uses new arguments to reinvestigate the relation between aesthetics and politics in the contemporary debates on democratic theory and radical democracy. First, Carl Schmitt and Claude Lefort help delineate the contours of an aesthetico-political understanding of democracy, which is developed further by studying Merleau-Ponty, Rancière, and Arendt. The ideas of Merleau-Ponty serve to establish a general "ontological" framework that aims to contest the dominant currents in contemporary democratic theory. It is argued that Merleau-Ponty, Arendt, and Rancière share a general understanding of the political as the contingently contested spaces and times of appearances. However, the articulation of their thought leads to reconsider and explore under-theorized as well as controversial dimensions of their work. This search for new connections between the political and the aesthetic thought of Arendt and Merleau-Ponty on one hand and the current widespread interest in Rancière's aesthetic politics on the other make this book a unique study that will appeal to anyone who is interested in political theory and contemporary continental philosophy.

Author : Richard Tahvildaran-jesswein
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 2011-02-10
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 0757588182

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Democracy and Difference Through the Aesthetics of Film by Richard Tahvildaran-jesswein Pdf

Author : Henrik Kaare Nielsen
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 148 pages
File Size : 46,7 Mb
Release : 2018-03-09
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781351123167

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Aesthetics and Political Culture in Modern Society by Henrik Kaare Nielsen Pdf

Do aesthetic appeals to senses and emotions in political debate necessarily marginalise political reason and reduce citizens to consumers – thus dangerously undermining democracy? Or is sensuous-emotional engagement, on the contrary, a basic fact of the political process and a crucial precondition for revitalising democracy? Aesthetics and Political Culture in Modern Society investigates the current interrelationship between aesthetic practice and political practice in Western democracies, focusing on its impact on democratic political culture. Henrik Kaare Nielsen argues that aesthetic interventions in the political process do not by definition undermine politics’ content of reason. Instead, a differentiation must be made between a multiplicity of aesthetic forms of intervention – some of which tend to weaken the political judgement of citizens while other forms tend to stimulate competent judgement. This book will be of interest to scholars in the fields of political science, sociology, media studies, and cultural studies.

Author : Russ Castronovo
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 604 pages
File Size : 44,9 Mb
Release : 2009-05-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780226096308

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Beautiful Democracy by Russ Castronovo Pdf

The photographer and reformer Jacob Riis once wrote, “I have seen an armful of daisies keep the peace of a block better than a policeman and his club.” Riis was not alone in his belief that beauty could tame urban chaos, but are aesthetic experiences always a social good? Could aesthetics also inspire violent crime, working-class unrest, and racial murder? To answer these questions, Russ Castronovo turns to those who debated claims that art could democratize culture—civic reformers, anarchists, novelists, civil rights activists, and college professors—to reveal that beauty provides unexpected occasions for radical, even revolutionary, political thinking. Beautiful Democracy explores the intersection of beauty and violence by examining university lectures and course materials on aesthetics from a century ago along with riots, acts of domestic terrorism, magic lantern exhibitions, and other public spectacles. Philosophical aesthetics, realist novels, urban photography, and black periodicals, Castronovo argues, inspired and instigated all sorts of collective social endeavors, from the progressive nature of tenement reform to the horrors of lynching. Discussing Jane Addams, W.E.B. Du Bois, Charlie Chaplin, William Dean Howells, and Riis as aesthetic theorists in the company of Kant and Schiller, Beautiful Democracy ultimately suggests that the distance separating academic thinking and popular wisdom about social transformation is narrower than we generally suppose.

Author : Ken Hirschkop
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 358 pages
File Size : 45,9 Mb
Release : 1999
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780198159605

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Mikhail Bakhtin by Ken Hirschkop Pdf

Hirschkop treats Bakhtin not as a metaphysician or a philosopher for the ages, but as a writer inevitably drawn into the historical conflicts produced by a modernizing and democratizing Europe."--BOOK JACKET.

Author : Masamichi Ueno
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 195 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 2015-07-30
Category : Education
ISBN : 9781317564959

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Democratic Education and the Public Sphere by Masamichi Ueno Pdf

This book considers John Dewey’s philosophy of democratic education and his theory of public sphere from the perspective of the reconstruction and redefinition of the dominant liberalist movement. By bridging art education and public sphere, and drawing upon contemporary mainstream philosophies, Ueno urges for the reconceptualization of the education of mainstream liberalism and indicates innovative visions on the public sphere of education. Focusing on Dewey’s theory of aesthetic education as an origin of the construction of public sphere, chapters explore his art education practices and involvement in the Barnes Foundation of Philadelphia, clarifying the process of school reform based on democratic practice. Dewey searched for an alternative approach to public sphere and education by reimagining the concept of educational right from a political and ethical perspective, generating a collaborative network of learning activities, and bringing imaginative meaning to human life and interaction. This book proposes educational visions for democracy and public sphere in light of Pragmatism aesthetic theory and practice. Democratic Education and the Public Sphere will be key reading for academics, researchers and postgraduate studies in the fields of the philosophy of education, curriculum theory, art education, and educational policy and politics. The book will also be of interest to policy makers and politicians who are engaged in educational reform.

Author : Jacques Rancière
Publisher : A&C Black
Page : 145 pages
File Size : 47,6 Mb
Release : 2013-06-27
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781780935355

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The Politics of Aesthetics by Jacques Rancière Pdf

In this influential sequence of linked interviews, Ranciere explores the interplay of art and politics.

Author : D.T. Schwartz
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 190 pages
File Size : 50,8 Mb
Release : 2013-03-14
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9789401594448

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Art, Education, and the Democratic Commitment by D.T. Schwartz Pdf

In reflecting on this book and the process of writing it, the most pervasive theme I find is that of confluence. I drew much of the energy needed to write the book from the energy that resides at the confluence, or nexus, of contrasting ideas. At the most general level, the topic of arts subsidy offered a means of exploring simultaneously two of my favorite philosophical subjects-aesthetics and politics. The risk of a dual focus is of course that you do neither topic justice. However, the bigger payoff of this strategy resides in finding new and interesting connections between two otherwise disparate topics. Developing such connections between art and politics led directly to many of the book's positive arguments for subsidy. At a deeper level, the book exploits a confluence of contrasting philosophical methodologies. The central problem of the book politically justifying state support of the arts-is cast in the Anglo American tradition of analytical philosophy. Here normative arguments of ethics and politics are scrutinized with an eye toward developing a defensible justification of state action. Yet while the book initially situates the subsidy problem within this analytical tradition, its positive arguments for subsidy draw heavily from the ideas and methods of Continental philosophy. Rather than adjudicating normative claims of ethical and political ttuth, the Continental tradition aims at the hermeneutical task of interpreting and describing sttuctures of human meaning.

Author : Scott Durham,Dilip Gaonkar
Publisher : Northwestern University Press
Page : 388 pages
File Size : 45,5 Mb
Release : 2019-06-15
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780810140295

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Distributions of the Sensible by Scott Durham,Dilip Gaonkar Pdf

Jacques Rancière’s work is increasingly central to several debates across the humanities. Distributions of the Sensible confronts a question at the heart of his thought: How should we conceive the relationship between the “politics of aesthetics” and the “aesthetics of politics”? Specifically, the book explores the implications of Rancière’s rethinking of the relationship of aesthetic to political democracy from a wide range of critical perspectives. Distributions of the Sensible contains original essays by leading scholars on topics such as Rancière’s relation to political theory, critical theory, philosophical aesthetics, and film. The book concludes with a new essay by Rancière himself that reconsiders the practice of theory between aesthetics and politics.