Aesthetics and the political turn in art
Journal Title: Art Inquiry. Recherches sur les arts - Year 2015, Vol 0, Issue
Abstract
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 „aesthetic regime“ of the interpretation of art reveals the competence that combines all artistic practices, past and present, into one concept of art: art as politics. The foundations for setting such perspective were already provided by Schiller and Kant – the classics of modern philosophical aesthetics.
Authors and Affiliations
Rafał Czekaj
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP315819
- DOI -
- Views 90
- Downloads 0
From painted decoration to the screen. The turn in stage illusion in the late 20th and early 21st century
The painted decoration discovered in the Renaissance dominated the European stage for almost 300 years. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the so-called Great Reforms theater challenged this tradition, but it...
The linguistic turn in Conceptualism and after
One of the most spectacular turns in the art of the 20th century was based on the linguistic reorientation of philosophy, whose extreme manifestation was Wittgenstein's non- denotational conception of meaning. It inspire...
Can we talk about contemporary avant-garde outside Western cultures? The case of contemporary art in the Republic of South Africa
The appreciation of the importance of the avant-garde, and of its re-thinking of the sociocultural reality, ensues from its fundamental role for 20th and 21st century art practice and theory. However, in the contemporary...
The Living Death: ‘Trick or treat!’ The Vivid Presence of Death Symbolism in Contemporary Art and a Philosophical Interpretation of its Existential Role
The paper covers the symbolism of death, which seems to be largely overlooked, trivialized or narrowly read both by the public and by some authors of texts on contemporary aesthetics. Numerous artists of the 20th and 21s...
Telling images? The self-reflexive turn in contemporary American graphic novels
This article proposes to see graphic novel as the epitome of a twofold turn. First, as the genre of the pictorial turn, a form that demonstrates the transition from the verbal to the visual. Indeed, the graphic novel can...