Aestheticization of Reality (original) (raw)
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Aesthetics and the political turn in art
2015
It was observed as early as the mid-twentieth century that aesthetics as a philosophical theory of art differs from its objects. The products of contemporary artistic practice go beyond the horizon of traditional aesthetics. Artists are involved increasingly often and on a wide scale in the actions aimed at transforming and constructing the common space. In the face of such activities as took place, for example, as part of the 7th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art in 2012, traditional aesthetics seems to be helpless. That is why, if art is to continue to be the focus of aesthetic investigations, it must, as it were, redefine itself. Jacques Rancière is one of the authors who have outlined the new horizon of aesthetics. In my paper I will briefly present his conception. It provides some theoretical tools which I will use for the description and interpretation of some selected examples of contemporary socially engaged artistic practices. I will show that his distinction of the „aes...
Political Theory of Art. Foundations, Perspectives, Figures
Political Theory of Art. Foundations, Perspectives, Figures, 2024
The book enters the debate on the relationship between aesthetics and politics with an original and comprehensive theory. As Fransoni makes clear, a political theory is not a theory of politics, but a theory that deals with things, in this case art, in order to read them in the light of the political, i.e. in relation to human plurality. In the light of the political, the work of art and other common notions of art criticism find new and surprising definitions. At the same time, it is revealed how the work of art manifests some of the crucial relationships of politics, such as that between freedom and world. A political theory ultimately looks at art from the same perspective of plurality that art, together with other concepts of the political, helps to define.
Understanding the Work of Aesthetics in Modern Life
Proceedings of the 30th International Academic Conference, Venice, 2017
NeoMarxists scholars of education writing on urban life have tended to place aesthetics on the boundaries of critical practices, treating aesthetics as a surplus set of practices that could only be made fully usefully relevant when added on to a more concentrated attention to economy and politics. The main claim I want to make in this presentation is that aesthetic practices now underwrite the fibre of everyday modern life. As Arjun Appadurai usefully argues in Modernity at Large and History as Cultural Fact aesthetics are no longer to be simply understood as the practices of the artist, a maverick citizen creating images about the past, present and the future of human existence. But aesthetics are linked to the work of imagination of ordinary people and connected even more earnestly to the work of capitalism and its reorganization on a global scale. Contrary to the neoMarxist tradition, aesthetic practices are at the epicenter of lived experience and the commodified and institutional practices of modern societies. These practices, as CLR James allerted us to in American Civilization, constitute a great window on contemporary life revealing central contradictions, tensions and discontinuities. This, after all, was the burden of the Latin American and Caribbean Writers Forum of Intellectual and Cultural workers (George Lamming, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and others) who had publicly opposed the Reagan government invasion of Grenada in 1983. They insisted, as did Arnaldo Roche-Rabel, that aesthetics were imbricated in economy and politics-that artistic militancy is critical to production of democracy. The work of aesthetics is crucial to any formula for democratic transformation. In this presentation, I would like to call attention to the following issues. First, the entanglement of the diffusion of modernization to the third world in aesthetics. Second, I want to point as well to the deepening role of aesthetics in the organization capitalism in the new millenium in which we live. Third, I will discuss briefly the crisis of language that the aestheticization of everyday life has imposed/precipitated in neoMarxist efforts to grasp the central dynamics of comtemporary society. The latter has led to a depreciation of the value and insightfulness of neoMarxist analysis in our time-old metaphors associated with the class, economy, state ("production," "reproduction," "resistance," "the labor/capital" contradiction) are all worn down by the transformations of the past decades in which the saturation of economic and political practices in aesthetic mediations has proceeded full scale.
On the crisis of modernity. A reading from the perspective of art
Pensamiento, 2017
In this article I propose a reflection on art as an expression of the redefinition of modern culture. Art, in effect, expresses the lines that define the world, but at the same time produces a dif- ferent form of truth. That is why a discourse on art cannot ignore an analysis of the world in which it originates and that somehow it tries to express. In this direction, three readings of the question of mo- dernity are considered: the Dialectic of Enlightenment by Horkheimer and Adorno, Barbarism by Henry, and The End of Modernity by Vattimo. In the second part, the discourse focuses on the manifestation of the crisis in art, trying to offer other meanings, from different philosophical approaches, to the transition from modernity to postmodernity.
The relationship between Aesthetics and Politics: about the possibility of Political Art today
In his most recent book Boris Groys brings up the current discussion on Art Activism, that is “the ability of art to function as arena and medium of political protest and social activism”.He considers the critique towards it on the notion of aethetization should be readressed by rethinking its definition. For this purpose he suggests to trace back and to reformulate Walter Benjamin’s concepts of aestheticization of politics - instrumentalization of art at the service of totalitarian powers enhancing the values of ritual, genious, eternity associated to the artwork’s aura- and politization of art -deployment of art in its political dimension, to the service of social transformation through the employment of new reproduction’s techniques that erase the aura-; as well as to take into consideration contemporary technological advances that are transforming works of art’s and image’s reproduction, distribution and reception. It is under the contemporary historical context that I inquire about the possibility and necessity of Political Art, departing from Walter Benjamin’s essay “ The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and research the problems, risks and critiques it currently faces. First, a clarification of what he meant by aestheticization of politics and politization of art is needed in order to consider those features which could be of help today and to be compared to Groys’ approach and conceptualization of artistic aesthetization. This clarification would lead to the question of whether a new definition of Political Art is needed and what its functions might be, regarding our present time and whether historical circumstances make it necessary or not. At the time of asking which might be Political Art’s functions, I would like to develop this question in relation to my own artwork on the Spanish Civil War - which I consider Political Art- and how this notion could play a role in the remembering of the past, how could it assist us to look the hopes of the past in the present, and thus awakening a political consciousness on the individual. However, I am well aware that if a new definition of Political Art is needed, so too is to draw its boundaries and limitations. It is precisely on this point that Benjamin’s theory, as Adorno criticized him, resulted ambiguous as to the boundary line between aesthetization of politics and politization of art. Consequently and finally, it is of great importance to try to find as unequivocal separation as possible between a political art waking up consciousness and political art as propaganda, if we are going to stand for the claim of the possibility and necessity of Political Art.
SAJ, 2019
The subject of my paper is the dynamic and transformational relations between aesthetics and art from 1919 to 2019. The first problem to be discussed will be the relationship between art and politics at the Bauhaus and art institutes of the Soviet avant-garde. Next, I will point to differences in Marxist concepts of socialist realism and critical theory on modern culture and art. I will analyse the relationship between the concept of the autonomy of art, especially painting and minimal art. A comparison will be derived between anti-art (Dada, Neo-Dada) and anti-philosophy (Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jacques Lacan). I will highlight approaches from analytical meta-aesthetics to the interpretation of Duchamp's readymade, deriving a theory of art in conceptual art. Special attention will be paid to the "theoretical conflicts" between phenomenology and structuralism, as well as poststructuralism. I will conclude my discussion by identifying the "aesthetic condition" in relation to "contemporary art" (feminist, activist, political, ecological, participatory, and appropriative art). The aim of my discussion will be to highlight the character of modern and contemporary aesthetics in relation to art theory, by way of diagrammatic reflection on the binaries, differences, and reconstructions of dialectics.
СОЦИОЛОШКИ ДИСКУРС, 2020
Aesthetics raises the question - Is the relationship between art andreality based on the relationship between the imaginary world in theworks of art and the ”real” world? In the relationship between art andreality, the engaged artist is tasked with witnessing the truth in thelanguage of art. The avant-garde/engaged artists test the foundationsof their own existence. The question/s of the relationship between artand reality is/are reduced to the dimension of freedom. The artist doesnot hesitate to turn his ”primary engagement” into his own ”self-selection”.Engaged artists of the 20th century do not stop at basing theirworks of art on primarily aesthetic and artistic values, but regardpolitical, cultural and existential values as primary. Their rebellionand demand for revaluation of the existing values had a wide echo.Engaged artists of the 20th and 21st century, in their broad artisticexpression, seemed to be guided by the idea, “I rebel therefore I exist“.
Art and Design Review, 2018
The objective of this article is to investigate two opposed models of approaching the relationship between art and society. The first one—that of Jacques Rancière—stresses the idea of aesthetic autonomy as a result of a historical process that began with Kant's Critique of Judgement, reaching its most developed form in contemporaneity, and the second model, represented here by Richard Shusterman (inspired by John Dewey pragmatist aesthetics), focuses on the deep roots that artistic phenomena have in society and culminates with his analysis of the hip hop culture. Taking into account as well their respectively fruitfulness as some of their limitations and inspired by Theodor Adorno, I propose the concept of " social-aesthetic construct " , which is meant to be a mediation between the aforementioned opposed models.