The Sublime, Ugliness and Contemporary Art: A Kantian Perspective (original) (raw)

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The aim of this paper is twofold. First, to explain the distinction between Kant's notions of the sublime and ugliness, and to answer an important question that has been left unnoticed in contemporary studies, namely why it is the case that even though both sublime and ugliness are contrapurposive for the power of judgment, occasioning the feeling of displeasure, yet that after all we should feel pleasure in the former, while not in the latter. Second, to apply my interpretation of the sublime and ugliness to contemporary art, and to resolve certain issues that have been raised in accounting for the possibility of artistic sublimity. I argue that an experience of a genuine artistic sublimity is an uncommon occurrence. I propose that the value of contemporary art can be best explained by referring to Kant's notion of ugliness and his theory of aesthetic ideas. Resumen La intención de este trabajo es doble. En primer lugar, pretendo explicar la distinción entre las nociones kantianas de lo sublime y de lo feo, así como responder a una importante pregunta que ha

Lo sublime, la fealdad y el arte contemporáneo: una perspectiva kantiana

2015

The aim of this paper is twofold. First , to explain the distinction between Kant’s notions of the sublime and ugliness, and to answer an important question that has been left unnoticed in contemporary studies, namely why it is the case that even though both sublime and ugliness are contrapurposive for the power of judgment, occasioning the feeling of displeasure, yet that after all we should feel pleasure in the former, while not in the latter. Second, to apply my interpretation of the sublime and ugliness to contemporary art, and to resolve certain issues that have been raised in accounting for the possibility of artistic sublimity. I argue that an experience of a genuine artistic sublimity is an uncommon occurrence. I propose that the value of contemporary art can be best explained by referring to Kant’s notion of ugliness and his theory of aesthetic ideas.

Beauty, ugliness, the sublime, and truth in art

South African Journal of Art History, 2007

Is it possible to articulate an aesthetic of the beautiful today, at a time when what Kundera's character, Sabina, describes as the 'uglification' of the world, has become pervasive, on the one hand, and when, on the other, social reality has become so complex that the harmonies required by the beautiful, conceived of as belonging within aesthetic space, can no longer be systematically justified in aesthetic terms? The answer given to this question here is negative, and goes hand in hand with the claim, put forward by Lyotard, that after Auschwitz one can no longer cling to the metanarrative of the universal emancipation of humankind. Similarly, it is argued, although beauty may still be experienced at an everyday, intuitive level, at a reflective, aesthetic-theoretical level it cannot be systematically sustained, given the complex, interrelated character of historical events, culture and social reality. It is further pointed out that Lyotard's claim, that the aesthetic of the modern as well as the postmodern amounts to an aesthetic of the sublime, albeit of different kinds, casts light on the reasons why, today, when one is surrounded by so much ugliness in the form of pseudo-beautiful kitsch, one cannot escape an aesthetic of the sublime, and several artists' work is alluded to, to substantiate this argument.

The Aesthetic of Ugliness — A Kantian Perspective

In the history of aesthetic thought, beauty has been construed as aesthetic value par excellence. According to aesthetic theories, beautiful is that which gives rise to the feeling of pleasure within us. Hence, aesthetic value of both nature and art works is measured in terms of the feeling of pleasure they occasion in us. Ugliness, correlated to the feeling of displeasure, on the other hand, has been traditionally theorized as an aesthetic category that stands in opposition to beauty, and therefore associated with aesthetic disvalue and worthlessness. In recent years, and particularly with the development of modern art, this traditional aesthetic picture has been widely criticized. It has been pointed out, based on the proliferation of art works that evoke intense feelings of displeasure, that ugliness can be greatly appreciated. A general objective of this paper is to propose an account of ugliness that entails, as its necessary part, the explanation of its possible appeal. In particular, I propose a solution to the problem, known in philosophical aesthetics as 'the paradox of ugliness', namely how we can value something that we prima facie do not like and find positively displeasing. I develop my explanation of ugliness in light of Kant's theory of taste. *

Aesthetic of Ugliness: a Kantian Perspective

2013

Understandings of Ugliness in Kant’s Aesthetics

While Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment is an important landmark in the history of aesthetic philosophy, the language in which his discussion is framed was in many ways unoriginal. Not only was the term aesthetic in use, but also the general issues and divisions had been established – most immediately to Kant by 18th century empiricists like Hume and Burke. So Kant’s focus on the beautiful and the sublime may simply be understood as conventions of the day. Yet readers looking for Kant’s treatment of ugliness will find very little of his writing dedicated to negative judgments of taste dealing with the repulsive. What makes this paucity so tantalizing is that there seems to be a number of ways we might imagine Kant giving an account of our experience of ugliness. This has been pursued by interpreters such as Christian Helmut Wenzel and Alix Cohen, and in some sense this involves the reader building an edifice by reversing Kant’s views on beauty. But is ugliness merely the reversal of beauty for Kant, or for anyone? Other interpreters have found it impossible that Kant would countenance ugliness in his discussion of reflective judgments, such as David Shier and Paul Guyer. The reasons for this disallowance are various, and some even ask the reader to reconsider the legitimacy of Kant’s entire aesthetic on account of its failure to feature ugliness. This paper explores the state of opinion on Kant’s view of ugliness, and notes the implications that these views have for Kant’s entire aesthetic. I then proceed to show how ugliness forces itself into any thorough account of aesthetic experience, showing us something of the emotional, visceral, and cognitive force of the repulsive, unsettling, disgusting, and many other forms of the ugly. Woven through this conclusion is the ability of artisans and audiences to tolerate, accommodate, and even embrace ugliness in contexts of art and aesthetic pleasure.

Mori2016 The aesthetic experience of bad art

Proceedings of ICA2016

In contemporary aesthetics, there is a continuing debate on aesthetic experience: the content approach vs. the evaluative approach. Recently Noel Carroll has claimed that the evaluative approach cannot properly explain the aesthetic value of bad art. The aim of my paper is to examine Carroll's objection and to reconsider the aesthetic experience of bad art from the point of view of the evaluative approach. ! assert that there might be a miscommunication at the base of Carroll's criticism and that this miscommunication arises from the difference of terminology of "valuable (valued) for its own sake."

The Sublime Conditions of Contemporary Art

Deleuze's relationship to Kant is intricate and fundamental, given that Deleuze develops his transcendental philosophy of difference in large part out of Kant's work. In doing so he utilises the moment of the sublime from the third Critique as the genetic model for the irruption of the faculties beyond their capture within common sense. In this sense, the sublime offers the model not only for transcendental genesis but also for aesthetic experience unleashed from any conditions of possibility. As a result, sensation in both its wider and more specifically artistic senses (senses that become increasingly entwined in Deleuze's work) will explode the clichés of human perception, and continually reinvent the history of art without recourse to representation. In tracing Deleuze's 'aesthetics' from Kant we are therefore returned to the viciously anti-human (and Nietzschean) trajectory of Deleuze's work, while simultaneously being forced to address the extent of its remaining Idealism. Both of these elements play an important part in relation to Deleuze's 'modernism', and to the discussion of his possible relevance to contemporary artistic practices.

Contemporary echoes of Kantian aesthetics

In the early 1990s, the Esprit and Télérama journals dedicated several issues to what was called a “crisis” in contemporary art , namely the supposed loss of normative criteria allowing one to judge and evaluate works of art. Following their publication, several French philosophers – among which Marc Jimenez, Jean-Pierre Cometti, Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Gérard Genette, Yves Michaud and Rainer Rochlitz – took part in a public debate which more or less explicitly centered around the Critique of Judgment, in terms similar to those employed by Kant himself in 1790. Indeed, the art world has appeared divided since then: one side (which includes, among others, Jean-Marie Schaeffer and Gérard Genette ) argues that judgment can only be subjective (left to each individual’s appreciation), while the other side (on which Rainer Rochlitz can notably be found) contends that judgment can be objective (by resting on impartial properties or criteria). Not only do these two antagonistic positions correspond respectively to the thesis and antithesis of the Kantian antinomy relative to the judgment of taste , they also exclude what allowed Kant to resolve this apparent aporia: the notion of common sense. A detailed analysis of the aforementioned positions nevertheless calls for a complexification of this somewhat schematic description of the current debate. Other philosophical legacies deserve to be recognized and examined; a semiotic study of the main expressions used (“contemporary art”, “aesthetic judgment”, “artistic criteria”) also sheds light on linguistic differences – which can contribute to the distortion of the debate and to the caricaturing of the positions at hand; contemporary art, finally, has redefined the debate’s fundamental terms, since it has questioned several notions and definitions which seemed to be given until recently – starting with the very idea of “work of art”. If, in its general outline, the current debate therefore can be apprehended through the Kantian treatment of the issue of the aesthetic judgment, it is not limited to his framework of analysis, and those convergences and divergences will be highlighted here. This presentation will therefore reexamine the issue of the judgment of works of art, by challenging Kantian aesthetics through contemporary artistic philosophical discourses and practices.

The Sublime, Ugliness and Contemporary Art: A Kantian Perspective (original) (raw)

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