Aesthetics 101


Book Description

Aesthetics 101 is a step-by-step guide teaching readers how to achieve an 'aesthetic' physique through weight training, tailored diets, and supplementation. Aesthetics 101 is very detailed and explains every aspect so that the reader will know the exact path to achieve the aesthetic physique he has always been dreaming of, guaranteed.




Arguing about Art


Book Description

Arguing about Art, 2nd Editionis an expanded and revised new edition of this highly acclaimed anthology. This lively collection presents twenty-seven readings in a clear and accessible format discussing the major themes and arguments in aesthetics. Alex Neill and Aaron Ridley's introductions provide a balanced account of each topic and highlight the important questions that are raised in the readings. The new sections of the book are: The Art of Food; Rock Music and Culture; Enjoying Horror; Art and Morality; and Public Art. In addition, many of the introductions have been updated and each section includes suggestions for further reading.




The Difference Aesthetics Makes


Book Description

In The Difference Aesthetics Makes cultural critic Kandice Chuh asks what the humanities might be and do if organized around what she calls “illiberal humanism” instead of around the Western European tradition of liberal humanism that undergirds the humanities in their received form. Recognizing that the liberal humanities contribute to the reproduction of the subjugation that accompanies liberalism's definition of the human, Chuh argues that instead of defending the humanities, as has been widely called for in recent years, we should radically remake them. Chuh proposes that the work of artists and writers like Lan Samantha Chang, Carrie Mae Weems, Langston Hughes, Leslie Marmon Silko, Allan deSouza, Monique Truong, and others brings to bear ways of being and knowing that delegitimize liberal humanism in favor of more robust, capacious, and worldly senses of the human and the humanities. Chuh presents the aesthetics of illiberal humanism as vital to the creation of sensibilities and worlds capable of making life and lives flourish.




Everyday Aesthetics


Book Description

Katya Mandoki advances in this book the thesis that it is not only possible but crucial to open up the field of aesthetics (traditionally confined to the study of art and beauty) toward the richness and complexity of everyday life. She argues that in every process of communication, whether face to face or through the media, fashion, and political propaganda, there is always an excess beyond the informative and functional value of a message. This excess is the aesthetic. Following Huizinga's view of play as an ingredient of any social environment, Mandoki explores how various cultural practices are in fact forms of playing since, for the author, aesthetics and play are Siamese twins. One of the unique contributions of this book is the elaboration and application of a semiotic model for the simultaneous analysis of social interactions in the four registers, namely visual, auditory, verbal and body language, to detect the aesthetic strategies deployed in specific situations. She argues that since the presentation of the self is targeted towards participants' sensibilities, aesthetics plays a key role in these modes of exchange. Consequently, the author updates important debates in this field to clear the way for a socio-aesthetic inquiry through contexts such as the family, school, medical, artistic or religious traditions from which social identities emerge.




Revolutionary Beauty


Book Description

Revolutionary Beauty offers the first sustained study of the German artist John Heartfield's groundbreaking political photomontages, published in the left-wing weekly Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (AIZ) during the 1930s. Sabine T. Kriebel foregrounds the critical artistic practices with which Heartfield directly confronted the turbulent, ideologically charged currents of interwar Europe, exposing the cultural politics of the crucial historical moment that witnessed the consolidation of National Socialism. In this period of radicalization and mass mobilization, the medium of photomontage—the cut-and-paste assemblage of photograph and text—offered a way to deconstruct the visual world and galvanize beholders on a mass scale. Kriebel transforms our understandings of montage as a quintessentially modern practice. Central to that reconceptualization is suture, a concept integral to film theory but recruited in this book to explore the psychic operations of Heartfield’s seamlessly welded AIZ photomontages. Revolutionary Beauty proposes that the language of sutured illusionism constitutes one of the most important and overlooked critiques of modern media, wherein a radical reassessment resides in suture. Scholars of photography, modern and contemporary art history, media studies, and European history will doubtlessly embrace this book.




Network Aesthetics


Book Description

Even as "network" has become a contemporary keyword, its overuse has limited its analytic usefulness. In the enthusiasm that orbits the concept, the network is too easily taken up as a term that we should already know. Patrick Jagoda claims that we do not, in fact, know networks, in part because of their very ubiquity and variety. His book shows how a range of popular aesthetic forms mediate our experience of networks and yield up greater insight into this critical concept. Each chapter of "Network Aesthetics" considers how a different contemporary genre makes sense of decentralized network structure, from fiction, film, and television to popular videogames such as Introversion's "Uplink," experimental games such as Jason Rohrer's "Between," and emergent transmedia storytelling forms such as "Alternate Reality Games." Jagoda wants to show that network aesthetics, in all of these cases, are not simply the quality of a genre; more substantively, they are a critical corollary to an era in which interconnection has become a key cultural framework. "Network Aesthetics" cuts through the cliches of sublime interconnection and illuminates the ordinary, lived aspects of networked life.




Beautiful Democracy


Book Description

The photographer and reformer Jacob Riis once wrote, “I have seen an armful of daisies keep the peace of a block better than a policeman and his club.” Riis was not alone in his belief that beauty could tame urban chaos, but are aesthetic experiences always a social good? Could aesthetics also inspire violent crime, working-class unrest, and racial murder? To answer these questions, Russ Castronovo turns to those who debated claims that art could democratize culture—civic reformers, anarchists, novelists, civil rights activists, and college professors—to reveal that beauty provides unexpected occasions for radical, even revolutionary, political thinking. Beautiful Democracy explores the intersection of beauty and violence by examining university lectures and course materials on aesthetics from a century ago along with riots, acts of domestic terrorism, magic lantern exhibitions, and other public spectacles. Philosophical aesthetics, realist novels, urban photography, and black periodicals, Castronovo argues, inspired and instigated all sorts of collective social endeavors, from the progressive nature of tenement reform to the horrors of lynching. Discussing Jane Addams, W.E.B. Du Bois, Charlie Chaplin, William Dean Howells, and Riis as aesthetic theorists in the company of Kant and Schiller, Beautiful Democracy ultimately suggests that the distance separating academic thinking and popular wisdom about social transformation is narrower than we generally suppose.




Everyday Aesthetics


Book Description

Everyday aesthetic experiences and concerns occupy a large part of our aesthetic life. However, because of their prevalence and mundane nature, we tend not to pay much attention to them, let alone examine their significance. Western aesthetic theories of the past few centuries also neglect everyday aesthetics because of their almost exclusive emphasis on art. In a ground-breaking new study, Yuriko Saito provides a detailed investigation into our everyday aesthetic experiences, and reveals how our everyday aesthetic tastes and judgments can exert a powerful influence on the state of the world and our quality of life. By analysing a wide range of examples from our aesthetic interactions with nature, the environment, everyday objects, and Japanese culture, Saito illustrates the complex nature of seemingly simple and innocuous aesthetic responses. She discusses the inadequacy of art-centered aesthetics, the aesthetic appreciation of the distinctive characters of objects or phenomena, responses to various manifestations of transience, and the aesthetic expression of moral values; and she examines the moral, political, existential, and environmental implications of these and other issues.




The Extraordinary in the Ordinary: The Aesthetics of Everyday Life


Book Description

This book explores the aesthetics of the objects and environments we encounter in daily life. Thomas Leddy stresses the close relationship between everyday aesthetics and the aesthetics of art, but places special emphasis on neglected aesthetic terms such as ‘neat,’ ‘messy,’ ‘pretty,’ ‘lovely,’ ‘cute,’ and ‘pleasant.’ The author advances a general theory of aesthetic experience that can account for our appreciation of art, nature, and the everyday.




Hip Hop Underground


Book Description

Race and authenticity in America, explored through the Bay Area's multiracial underground hip hop scene.