Lydia Goehr | Columbia University (original) (raw)
Papers by Lydia Goehr
University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc. eBooks, Dec 10, 2024
Paradigmi (ISSN 1120-3404), 2023
The essay is about arranging furniture as a furniture art for the mind. The immediate cause is th... more The essay is about arranging furniture as a furniture art for the mind. The immediate cause is the chair in the Tate’s exhibition in London “Hogarth in Europe”: the mahogany chair on which William Hogarth sits in his late self-portrait. In question are the associations of the chair with a slave trade of colonialism and nation-building in the eighteenth century. The essay investigates the “chair” in the history of philosophy and the arts as a string of connected images – from Lichtenberg to Walter Benjamin and Arthur Danto. It looks at perspective, form, and posture, but even more at the experimental-experiential wit that forces a rearrangement and revisioning of one’s most sedimented thoughts about things. What, it asks, does it mean to engage an armchair thinking for culture and the mind?
Goehr L. Agon und Hybris in Politik und Kunst. Schmidt F, tran.; In: Wulf C, Triki F, Poulain J, ... more Goehr L. Agon und Hybris in Politik und Kunst. Schmidt F, tran.; In: Wulf C, Triki F, Poulain J, eds. Erziehung und Demokratie. Europäische, muslimische und arabische Länder im Dialog. Berlin: Akademie Verlag; 2009
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 2021
Oxford University Press eBooks, Jan 27, 2005
Oxford University Press eBooks, Feb 17, 2022
Chapter 6 draws on the paragone, the comparison and contest among the different arts, and on ekph... more Chapter 6 draws on the paragone, the comparison and contest among the different arts, and on ekphrasis, the rhetorical use of words to evoke visual images for the mind’s eye. It presents a spectrum of examples to prepare for the interpretation, in Chapter 7, of Puccini’s La Bohème. It brings Puccini’s opera onto Parnassus to stand alongside other works that contain ekphrastic moments of biblical, prophetic, or promissory significance. The most obviously pertinent works from among the many self-reflective artist-operas are those aiming for a liberation of life and art through evocations and invocations of the Red Sea Passage.
Oxford University Press eBooks, Feb 17, 2022
The pains of a hard labor bring the final chapter, Chapter 21, to the twins born to be measured o... more The pains of a hard labor bring the final chapter, Chapter 21, to the twins born to be measured on the scales of industry and idleness. Philosophically domesticated all the way into the bedroom, the wit comes to heel one last time with the painter’s brush. The first telling of the Red Sea anecdote is told and the final explanation given for why a single painter in London was named the painter of a blood sport, wherein an entire wall was covered over by the waters of the Red Sea. Why had the sea to be red? Had the sea to be red? The chapter completes the genealogy of liberty as worked through a micrology of wit. The wit, entirely domesticated, binds the Red Sea to the Red Thread given a skewed Red Square placed high up in a ceiling corner. The settlement of a marriage contract becomes the resettlement of art’s contract with modern times.
Oxford University Press eBooks, Feb 17, 2022
Chapter 7 reads Puccini’s La Bohème to highlight the agonistic leitmotifs and life-motifs that th... more Chapter 7 reads Puccini’s La Bohème to highlight the agonistic leitmotifs and life-motifs that thread the concept of bohème back to the Red Sea. What has the landscape of Marcello’s painting, which starts the opera, to do with the portrait of Mimi’s life and final death? If we answer, nothing directly, we play to the idea that the opera’s true beginning is not its first start but its second, when Mimi climbs the stairs to become a muse in the poet’s garret. Yet why not play to both starts, relating them as they are so related in Murger’s scenes?
Oxford University Press eBooks, Feb 17, 2022
Chapter 8 explores the more and less serious conditions for an artist to turn the first subject o... more Chapter 8 explores the more and less serious conditions for an artist to turn the first subject of a painting into another subject. Why did Murger make Marcel paint a Red Sea Passage as the first image in a repetitive string of so many more political and social passages of liberation? Whence came the models for Marcel? One answer, the more familiar, uses facts of art-history; the other, less familiar, turns to a literary world of fiction, to find behind Murger’s story the most Parisian tellings of the Red Sea anecdote.
Oxford University Press eBooks, Feb 17, 2022
Chapter 3 asks when and how Danto became acquainted with the Red Sea anecdote. It sifts through h... more Chapter 3 asks when and how Danto became acquainted with the Red Sea anecdote. It sifts through his many responses to critics, artists, and earlier writers to explain why he designed his thought experiment with images that were red and square. The explanation continues to rest with his commitment to an emancipation narrative drawn from his American times, of which the result for art’s concept was not a partial but a full inclusion. By stretching the red and by stretching the square, he sought the analytical terms to admit all art to his Promised Land from sea to shining sea. Toward its end, the chapter introduces an art-historical and literary material to prepare for the broader enquiry into the Red Sea Passage and its anecdote.
Rivista di Estetica, Aug 1, 2007
Routledge eBooks, Jul 12, 2022
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 1992
Oxford University Press eBooks, Oct 13, 1994
Lays the foundation for an investigation into the concept of a musical work according to the term... more Lays the foundation for an investigation into the concept of a musical work according to the terms of analytic philosophy. It considers a range of analytic positions, but focuses ultimately on Nelson Goodman's influential nominalist and extensionalist account of musical works and performance compliance. Goodman's view that the musical score is a uniquely specified character in a notational system generates strict theoretical criteria to distinguish between constitutive and contingent features of works and compliant and non‐compliant performances. The critical examination of Goodman's theory is used to prepare the ground for a more general argument against the possibility of reaching a satisfactory account of the complex relation between philosophical theory and musical practice while working within the parameters of analytic philosophy.
University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc. eBooks, Dec 10, 2024
Paradigmi (ISSN 1120-3404), 2023
The essay is about arranging furniture as a furniture art for the mind. The immediate cause is th... more The essay is about arranging furniture as a furniture art for the mind. The immediate cause is the chair in the Tate’s exhibition in London “Hogarth in Europe”: the mahogany chair on which William Hogarth sits in his late self-portrait. In question are the associations of the chair with a slave trade of colonialism and nation-building in the eighteenth century. The essay investigates the “chair” in the history of philosophy and the arts as a string of connected images – from Lichtenberg to Walter Benjamin and Arthur Danto. It looks at perspective, form, and posture, but even more at the experimental-experiential wit that forces a rearrangement and revisioning of one’s most sedimented thoughts about things. What, it asks, does it mean to engage an armchair thinking for culture and the mind?
Goehr L. Agon und Hybris in Politik und Kunst. Schmidt F, tran.; In: Wulf C, Triki F, Poulain J, ... more Goehr L. Agon und Hybris in Politik und Kunst. Schmidt F, tran.; In: Wulf C, Triki F, Poulain J, eds. Erziehung und Demokratie. Europäische, muslimische und arabische Länder im Dialog. Berlin: Akademie Verlag; 2009
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 2021
Oxford University Press eBooks, Jan 27, 2005
Oxford University Press eBooks, Feb 17, 2022
Chapter 6 draws on the paragone, the comparison and contest among the different arts, and on ekph... more Chapter 6 draws on the paragone, the comparison and contest among the different arts, and on ekphrasis, the rhetorical use of words to evoke visual images for the mind’s eye. It presents a spectrum of examples to prepare for the interpretation, in Chapter 7, of Puccini’s La Bohème. It brings Puccini’s opera onto Parnassus to stand alongside other works that contain ekphrastic moments of biblical, prophetic, or promissory significance. The most obviously pertinent works from among the many self-reflective artist-operas are those aiming for a liberation of life and art through evocations and invocations of the Red Sea Passage.
Oxford University Press eBooks, Feb 17, 2022
The pains of a hard labor bring the final chapter, Chapter 21, to the twins born to be measured o... more The pains of a hard labor bring the final chapter, Chapter 21, to the twins born to be measured on the scales of industry and idleness. Philosophically domesticated all the way into the bedroom, the wit comes to heel one last time with the painter’s brush. The first telling of the Red Sea anecdote is told and the final explanation given for why a single painter in London was named the painter of a blood sport, wherein an entire wall was covered over by the waters of the Red Sea. Why had the sea to be red? Had the sea to be red? The chapter completes the genealogy of liberty as worked through a micrology of wit. The wit, entirely domesticated, binds the Red Sea to the Red Thread given a skewed Red Square placed high up in a ceiling corner. The settlement of a marriage contract becomes the resettlement of art’s contract with modern times.
Oxford University Press eBooks, Feb 17, 2022
Chapter 7 reads Puccini’s La Bohème to highlight the agonistic leitmotifs and life-motifs that th... more Chapter 7 reads Puccini’s La Bohème to highlight the agonistic leitmotifs and life-motifs that thread the concept of bohème back to the Red Sea. What has the landscape of Marcello’s painting, which starts the opera, to do with the portrait of Mimi’s life and final death? If we answer, nothing directly, we play to the idea that the opera’s true beginning is not its first start but its second, when Mimi climbs the stairs to become a muse in the poet’s garret. Yet why not play to both starts, relating them as they are so related in Murger’s scenes?
Oxford University Press eBooks, Feb 17, 2022
Chapter 8 explores the more and less serious conditions for an artist to turn the first subject o... more Chapter 8 explores the more and less serious conditions for an artist to turn the first subject of a painting into another subject. Why did Murger make Marcel paint a Red Sea Passage as the first image in a repetitive string of so many more political and social passages of liberation? Whence came the models for Marcel? One answer, the more familiar, uses facts of art-history; the other, less familiar, turns to a literary world of fiction, to find behind Murger’s story the most Parisian tellings of the Red Sea anecdote.
Oxford University Press eBooks, Feb 17, 2022
Chapter 3 asks when and how Danto became acquainted with the Red Sea anecdote. It sifts through h... more Chapter 3 asks when and how Danto became acquainted with the Red Sea anecdote. It sifts through his many responses to critics, artists, and earlier writers to explain why he designed his thought experiment with images that were red and square. The explanation continues to rest with his commitment to an emancipation narrative drawn from his American times, of which the result for art’s concept was not a partial but a full inclusion. By stretching the red and by stretching the square, he sought the analytical terms to admit all art to his Promised Land from sea to shining sea. Toward its end, the chapter introduces an art-historical and literary material to prepare for the broader enquiry into the Red Sea Passage and its anecdote.
Rivista di Estetica, Aug 1, 2007
Routledge eBooks, Jul 12, 2022
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 1992
Oxford University Press eBooks, Oct 13, 1994
Lays the foundation for an investigation into the concept of a musical work according to the term... more Lays the foundation for an investigation into the concept of a musical work according to the terms of analytic philosophy. It considers a range of analytic positions, but focuses ultimately on Nelson Goodman's influential nominalist and extensionalist account of musical works and performance compliance. Goodman's view that the musical score is a uniquely specified character in a notational system generates strict theoretical criteria to distinguish between constitutive and contingent features of works and compliant and non‐compliant performances. The critical examination of Goodman's theory is used to prepare the ground for a more general argument against the possibility of reaching a satisfactory account of the complex relation between philosophical theory and musical practice while working within the parameters of analytic philosophy.