April 19, 2017
by Alex King
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Performance art has always inhabited an ambiguous space between everyday behavior and marked-off ‘art’ behavior. And now ultra-conservative Infowars’ Alex Jones says that his vitriolic on-air personality is performance art. He refers to a recent incident as “clearly tongue-in-cheek and basically art performance, as I do in my rants, which I admit I do, as a form of art.” Now everyone is talking about whether or not he’s a performance artist.
March 22, 2017
by Rebecca Millsop
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WHEN: 4/5/17-4/8/17 WHERE: Bucknell University CONTACT: Sheila Lintott (sheila.lintott@bucknell.edu) The American Society for Aesthetics has awarded $7,000 in partial support for the Conference on the Ethics and Aesthetics of Stand-Up Comedy at Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA, April 5-8, 2017. The conference was organized by Sheila Lintott, Associate Professor, and Jason Leddington, Associate Professor, both of the Department of Philosophy. NEW! Complete schedule for the Conference NEW! Registration form for the Conference The interdisciplinary conference will explore the intersections of stand-up comedy with other art forms and its potential for dialogue with social and political critiques. In addition to academic papers and presentations, the conference will include a performance workshop, an “open-mic” night, roundtable discussions with comedians, and stand-up comedy performances. The Conference Organizing Committee includes faculty from English, Interdisciplinary Arts, and Women’s and Gender Studies, representing several colleges in the region. For more information, click http://www.bucknell.edu/BUStandUpComCon
April 15, 2016
by Aesthetics for Birds
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What follows is a guest post by Nils-Hennes Stear (University of Michigan) Last July, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (BMFA) put on an exhibition featuring Claude Monet’s La Japonaise (1875), a painting of Camille, Monet’s wife, dressed in a resplendent red kimono. For some of that period, the museum also invited visitors to “dress up” in a replica of the depicted kimono beside the painting, to take selfies, and share them with the museum. Protestors accused the BMFA of Orientalism and cultural appropriation, after which the museum cancelled the dress-up activity in favour of one in which visitors could interact with the garment in other ways. More details about the case are here and here.
November 20, 2015
by Aesthetics for Birds
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The Headlines Will Italy Back Down on Hermann Nitsch Show? Italian animal rights activists have launched an online petition to stop a Nitsch performance, slated to kick off in Palermo on July 10, and continue throughout the summer until September 20… The full story can be found here. Animal Rights Activists Protest Untitled (12 Horses) Animal activists turned up at Gavin Brown’s West Greenwich Village gallery space in New York to protest the showstopping final exhibit there before the gallery moves uptown to Harlem. The work in question is Jannis Kounellis’s Arte Povera masterpiece, 12 Horses, which debuted in Rome in 1969. The installation features 12 horses tethered to the wall, eating hay, on a rubberized floor… The full story can be found here. The Roundtable Cynthia Freeland, Anthony Cross, Ross Cameron, John Rapko
June 10, 2015
by Aesthetics for Birds
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What follows is a guest post by Daniel Abrahams and Shen-yi Liao. This blog post is primarily written by Daniel Abrahams, a PhD student specializing in aesthetics at University of Leeds, and supplemented by Shen-yi Liao (in brackets), a Marie Curie fellow at University of Leeds. Liao was a co-organizer of the conference and Abrahams was a conference assistant. However, we would like to stress that these are just our own perspectives rather than any “official” account. Photos are by Shen-yi Liao and Sara Protasi. Race & Aesthetics: A British Society of Aesthetics Connections Conference ran the 19th and 20th of May, at the Leeds Art Gallery. Fourteen speakers and several dozen more participants gathered to share thoughts on any of the points of intersection between the philosophies of race and aesthetics. Topics ranged from sexual attraction to humour to Brett Bailey’s Exhibit B. In what follows, I’ll try to present short but … Continue reading
November 13, 2014
by Aesthetics for Birds
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Meena Krishnamurthy is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Manitoba. She works in political philosophy. Her current work focuses on exploitation, coercion, oppression, and gossip. Issues that lie at the intersection of philosophy of language and political philosophy have recently come to fascinate her. There are many aspiring photographers who take photographs of vulnerable people, people who are down on their luck, often poor and homeless, and label their images as “street photography.” There are many things that might be morally suspect about street photography that involves vulnerable people. One idea that I would that like to develop here, using Robin Jeshion’s recent discussion of slurs, is that these types of pictures are dehumanizing of their subjects.
August 25, 2014
by Aesthetics for Birds
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What follows is a guest post by John Rapko. John is a Bay Area-based philosopher of art and art critic. Currently he teaches art history at the College of Marin and ethics and the philosophy of art at the California College of the Arts. He previously taught the philosophy of art and the theory of contemporary art at UC Berkeley, Stanford, and the San Francisco Art Institute. He has published academic writing in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, British Journal of Aesthetics, and Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, and art criticism in Artweek and artcritical.com. A volume of his lectures on the philosophy of contemporary art, Achievement, Failure, Aspiration: Three Attempts to Understand Contemporary Art was recently published by the Universidad de los Andes Press. In late March of 2008 the San Francisco Art Institute’s Walter McBean Gallery mounted a show of the artist Adel Abdessemed’s work, entitled “Don’t Trust Me.” Within days the show became the … Continue reading
August 16, 2014
by Aesthetics for Birds
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What follows is a guest post by James Harold. James is a Professor of Philosophy at Mount Holyoke College. He works primarily in aesthetics and meta-ethics, and is particularly interested in the intersection of those two fields. He has also written about the role of principles in critical evaluation, philosophical psychopathology, empirical ethics and aesthetics, and ancient Greek and Classical Chinese philosophy. In a universe not terribly distant from this one, however, he’s still working in scene design and carpentry, probably at some small regional theater. When a contemporary philosopher condemns a work of art for being morally flawed, you can bet good money that she does not mean that the artwork has pernicious effects on its audiences.[i]More likely she means that the work sympathizes with a vicious protagonist, that it endorses a morally odious viewpoint, or something along these lines. In the twenty years or so since the revival of “ethical … Continue reading
March 7, 2014
by Aesthetics for Birds
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What follows is a guest post by Henry Pratt. Sometimes, when asked what I work on, I’ve been known to reply, “Philosophy of the mustache.” In the past, this has always been a lie. This site seems like an appropriate venue for correcting the problem and mitigating my guilt, particularly because of esteemed Professor Mag Uidhir’s own fondness for sporting a mustache most appropriate to the genre of seedy 1970’s biker films. Though ridiculous, the philosophy of facial hair is actually a pretty interesting topic, one that raises a number of issues in aesthetics and ethics and the intersection of the two.
October 15, 2013
by Aesthetics for Birds
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What follows is a guest post by Simon Fokt. Simon is a recent graduate of University of St. Andrews and a professional musician. His work focuses on classification of art, aesthetic properties and art ontology, and exploring the borderlines of art and the aesthetic. His publications include ‘Pornographic art – a case from definitions’ (British Journal of Aesthetics 52.3, 2012) and ‘Solving Wollheim’s Dilemma: A Fix for the Institutional Definition of Art’ (Metaphilosophy 44, 2013). Aestheticism doesn’t fare very well these days. Modern artists not only aren’t very interested in making aesthetically pleasing works, but have developed a certain disdain towards them. Being aesthetically pleasing is often seen as being at best passé, and at worst an expression of artistic naivety or acclaim seeking. Of course, this is not without reasons – a great deal of aesthetic ideas have been exploited, beauty may be an obstruction on the road to art’s … Continue reading
