Aesthetics for Birds

Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art for Everyone

Tag Archives: artistic expression

October 22, 2021
by utahphilosoraptor
4 Comments

The Challenge Of Canceling: Comedy, Chappelle, And The Closer

If Chappelle’s art dines on controversy, cancellation serves it dessert. Continue reading →

April 2, 2020
by Alex King
1 Comment

AFB’S TERMS OF ART #9: EXPRESSION

Now that increasing numbers of people are stuck at home and sheltering in place, I figured I’d do a little series. Every weekday for the duration of this intense period, I’ll post a short definition of some term in/related to aesthetics and philosophy of art. Let’s see how this goes! See them all here. Terms of Art #9: expression

May 21, 2019
by Aesthetics for Birds
2 Comments

Game of Thrones’ Final Season: When our Great Expectations are Illegitimate [spoilers]

What follows is a guest post by Sean T. Murphy. Those who haven’t finished the series should beware of spoilers below! Legitimate Artistic Expectations “Almost nothing [showrunners David] Benioff and [D.B.] Weiss do will be enough to please (or appease) everyone.” So says critic Tim Goodman in a recent article in the Hollywood Reporter. It became clearer by the week just how great everyone’s expectations were for the final season of HBO’s Game of Thrones. Anyone taking a quick peak at Twitter following any episode this season could see fans breathing more fiery criticism, and wreaking more havoc on the show than Drogon did on King’s Landing. On the one hand, this is not surprising. After waiting two years for the series finale, there was no stopping the heights to which our expectations were ascending (although you would have thought that the lackluster seventh season would have tempered them a … Continue reading →

October 4, 2017
by Aesthetics for Birds
3 Comments

What’s So Wrong with Free Expression, Abusive Art, and Understanding?

What follows is a guest post by John Rapko about the recent Guggenheim Museum controversy. The controversy On Friday, September 22, a friend sent me an e-mail alerting me to an on-line petition. This time the issue was that the Guggenheim Museum in New York City had released a list of the names of the artists and their works to be included in the upcoming show “Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World.” Among the 150 works were three involving live animals, including a video of an installation by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu wherein dogs were strapped into opposing treadmills, where they ran in place, tugged, and snarled at each other to exhaustion. The two other pieces are by artists better-known outside China: a notorious piece by Huang Yong Ping, “Theater of the World”, which shows a large structure wherein many reptiles and insects have been placed, … Continue reading →

April 25, 2017
by Rebecca Millsop
0 comments

Narrowing the Field: the Fate of Genius in the Age of the Readymade

Philosopher John Rapko reviews recently published Art in the Making: Artists and their Materials from the Studio to Crowdsourcing by Glenn Adamson and Julia Bryan-Wilson A peculiar characteristic of contemporary art is that it is accompanied by an enormous amount of talk from artists, curators, and academics about its distinctive features, both what they are and what they should be. A widely shared assumption of such talk is that contemporary art is marked by the acceptance of Marcel Duchamp’s invention of the readymade as an art-making strategy. A readymade is not so much made as chosen: the artist starts with an idea or concept, and then chooses some object to which the idea is attached. The artist’s creative activity is focused on articulating the idea and scanning the world for a suitable vehicle. How, then, could such a narrow conception of artistic activity give rise to the great range of practices in contemporary … Continue reading →