Aesthetic Creation


Book Description

What is the purpose of art? What drives us to make it? Why do we value it? Nick Zangwill argues that the function of art is to have certain aesthetic properties in virtue of its non-aesthetic properties, and this function arises because of the artist's insight into the nature of these dependence relations and her intention to bring them about.




Digital Art, Aesthetic Creation


Book Description

Is art created with computers really art? This book answers ‘yes.’ Computers can generate visual art with unique aesthetic effects based on innovations in computer technology and a Postmodern naturalization of technology wherein technology becomes something we live in as well as use. The present study establishes these claims by looking at digital art’s historical emergence from the 1960s to the start of the present century. Paul Crowther, using a philosophical approach to art history, considers the first steps towards digital graphics, their development in terms of three-dimensional abstraction and figuration, and then the complexities of their interactive formats.




Art and Identity


Book Description

Art has the capacity to shape and alter our identities. It can influence who and what we are. Those who have had aesthetic experiences know this intimately, and yet the study of art’s impact on the mind struggles to be recognized as a centrally important field within the discipline of psychology. The main thesis of Art and Identity is that aesthetic experience represents a prototype for meaningful experience, warranting intense philosophical and psychological investigation. Currently psychology remains too closed-off from the rich reflection of philosophical aesthetics, while philosophy continues to be sceptical of the psychological reduction of art to its potential for Subjective experience. At the same time, philosophical aesthetics cannot escape making certain assumptions about the psyche and benefits from entering into a dialogue with psychology. Art and Identity brings together philosophical and psychological perspectives on aesthetics in order to explore how art creates minds.







A Study of Shang Dynasty Aesthetic Consciousness


Book Description

This book explores the aesthetic consciousness of the Shang Dynasty and its influence on Chinese aesthetic development and contemporary aesthetic creation. The Shang Dynasty is the first era in China with authentic historical documentation. Its artifacts and inscriptions have great aesthetic value and serve as vivid and rich records of aesthetic concepts. By examining the production and use of pottery, jade, bronze, and oracle bone inscriptions, the book sheds light on the functions of these creations as media for conveying emotions driven by human nature. By discussing how the Shang script was invented and used, the author explores the significant role it played in the development of the aesthetic consciousness of the Chinese ancients. Based on surviving documents, including the hexagrams in the Book of Changes, the Pan Geng in the Book of Documents, and the Shang Songs in the Book of Songs, he further examines the poetic characteristics of Shang literature, recognizing it as both historically and literarily significant. The title is essential reading for scholars, students, and general readers interested in Chinese aesthetics, ancient Chinese civilization, culture, and art.




On Beauty of Artworks as Aesthetic True Representations of Reality


Book Description

This book is aimed to explain the creation of artworks and their evaluation, and offers a new concept of aesthetics and beauty of artworks. Following and reconstructing Peircean realist epistemology, Aesthetics is one of the three normative sciences, along with Logic (Theoretic) and Ethics, which are the three different modes of representing reality. Aesthetics is the mode of artistic representation of reality, and the created artworks are judged beautiful when proven as an aesthetic true representation of reality. Artists aim to represent reality truly, and hence, beautifully, in order to enhance our knowledge of it and to afford us insights on how to better conduct our life in society.




Emerging Visions of the Aesthetic Process


Book Description

Emerging Visions of the Aesthetic Process explores the processes underlying aesthetics and play from the perspectives of psychologists, philosophers, and semiologists. It reveals the different ways in which scholars think about the following questions: (1) What is the origin of the creative process? (2) How do biological, social, and cognitive processes shape the activities of artists and the responses of viewers? (3) How does literary activity draw on our experiences of everyday life and how is it tied to other kinds of media? (4) How does play affect the process of growth from childhood to adulthood? The contributors consider artistic, literary, and play activity from its most biological roots through individual cognitive and emotional processing to its expression at the social level. Emerging Visions of the Aesthetic Process offers a stimulating basis for the discussion of aesthetic processes and will serve as an integrative, comprehensive treatise on the topic for researchers and students.




Religion and Aesthetic Experience in Joyce and Yeats


Book Description

This monograph is based on archival research and close readings of James Joyce's and W. B. Yeats's poetics and political aesthetics. Georges Sorel's theory of social myth is used as a starting point for exploring the ways in which the experience of art can be seen as a form of religious experience.




Aesthetic and Artistic Autonomy


Book Description

Whether art can be wholly autonomous has been repeatedly challenged in the modern history of aesthetics. In this collection of specially-commissioned chapters, a team of experts discuss the extent to which art can be explained purely in terms of aesthetic categories. Covering examples from Philosophy, Music and Art History and drawing on continental and analytic sources, this volume clarifies the relationship between artworks and extra-aesthetic considerations, including historic, cultural or economic factors. It presents a comprehensive overview of the question of aesthetic autonomy, exploring its relevance to both philosophy and the comprehension of specific artworks themselves. By closely examining how the creation of artworks, and our judgements of these artworks, relate to society and history, Aesthetic and Artistic Autonomy provides an insightful and sustained discussion of a major question in aesthetic philosophy.




The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic


Book Description

Aesthetic desire and distaste prime everyday life in surprising ways. The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic casts much-needed light on the complex mix of meanings our aesthetic activities weave into cultural existence. Anchoring aesthetic experience in our relationships with persons, places, and things, Monique Roelofs explores aesthetic life as a multimodal, socially embedded, corporeal endeavor. Highlighting notions of relationality, address, and promising, this compelling study shows these concepts at work in visions of beauty, ugliness, detail, nation, ignorance, and cultural boundary. Unexpected aesthetic pleasures and pains crop up in sites where passion, perception, rationality, and imagination go together but also are in conflict. Bonds between aesthetics and politics are forged and reforged. Cross-disciplinary in outlook, and engaging the work of theorists and artists ranging from David Hume to Theodor W. Adorno, Frantz Fanon, Clarice Lispector, and Barbara Johnson, The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic lays open the interpretive web that gives aesthetic agency its vast reach.