Aesthetics for Birds

Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art for Everyone

Tag Archives: diversity

October 18, 2016
by Rebecca Millsop
2 Comments

Kelley Walker & A Manifesto for the Artworld Institution

Perhaps you heard about the recent controversy at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis: Since opening in mid-September at CAM, a solo exhibition of white male artist Kelley Walker has been under fire over a series of works that appropriate images from the Civil Rights Movement and magazine covers of black women streaked with toothpaste and chocolate. After failing to offer adequate explanation for the works during an artist talk at the museum on September 17, both Walker and Uslip—who is said to have had a crucial role in realizing the exhibition—incited criticism from the local community, who found the works malicious in nature. A September 18th letter called for the removal of four offending works; among signees were three black members of the CAM staff. The museum refused to remove the works, and instead added barrier walls and signage to warn museum-goers that Walker’s works “may be difficult for some … Continue reading →

May 18, 2016
by Aesthetics for Birds
0 comments

ASA Curriculum Diversification Grants Announced for 2016

The American Society for Aesthetics is pleased to announce the winners of the 2016 Curriculum Diversification Grant competition: Meilin Chinn, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Santa Clara University. Project title: Asian Aesthetics. Hans Maes, Senior Lecturer, History and Philosophy of Art, and Director, Aesthetics Research Centre, University of Kent (UK). Project title: The Aesthetics of Portraiture. Mariana Ortega, Professor of Philosophy, John Carroll University. Project title: Aesthetic Othering—The Case of Photographic Representation. Each will receive a grant of $5,000 to prepare the proposed diversity curriculum. These will be posted on the ASA web site in September 2016. This is a project of the ASA Diversity Committee, chaired by A.W. Eaton. To see the final curricula of the 2015 winners, click here. The ASA has a three-year commitment to this project. Three more awards will be made in 2017. Guidelines will be available in the spring of 2017.

May 3, 2016
by Aesthetics for Birds
0 comments

Elisa Caldarola on Becoming an Analytic Aesthetician

Elisa Caldarola, an Italian philosopher working in analytic aesthetics, has written an illuminating piece for cheFare about her education and academic career so far. Her story starts: I earned a philosophy degree in my native country, Italy. I enrolled, at eighteen, because I wanted to understand art through philosophy. I had this idea that art could give meaning to life and that philosophy could explain how this is. And then she fell down the rabbit hole of contemporary analytic philosophy to try to answer this question. [A]t Oxford I finally realized that there were some intermediate stops I couldn’t bypass: I had to turn myself into an analytic philosopher and, concomitantly, into one who thinks in English and writes in English, because that was the language of analytic philosophy. So my question about art in general had turned into a question about how pictures work, which had brought to the … Continue reading →

April 15, 2016
by Aesthetics for Birds
4 Comments

Cultural Appropriation and La Japonaise

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.

April 13, 2016
by Aesthetics for Birds
0 comments

ASA-sponsored Speaker at Rutgers Diversity Institute

Anna Ribeiro named ASA-sponsored speaker at Rutgers Diversity Institute Anna Christina Ribeiro will be the ASA-sponsored speaker at the 2016 Rutgers Summer Institute for Diversity in Philosophy. She is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, TX. She was selected by the Institute Director from an exceptionally strong field of candidates who applied to ASA for this appointment. For more information about Professor Ribeiro: https://sites.google.com/site/annachristinaribeiro/

June 16, 2015
by Aesthetics for Birds
0 comments

Diversity Reading List

This announcement comes courtesy of Simon Fokt (Leeds) The Diversity Reading List enables teachers to quickly locate high-quality texts from under-represented groups that are directly relevant to their teaching. Currently, the list focuses on ethics, but in the near future it will be expanded to all areas of philosophy. The List exists largely thanks to the involvement and recommendations of all those who care about making philosophy a discipline of equal opportunity. It is a new and evolving resource, and we would welcome recommendations of texts to be included. We also encourage you to share your experiences of using specific texts in teaching by posting comments to particular list entries. Please use our Contribute page for recommendations and all other comments and suggestions.

June 10, 2015
by Aesthetics for Birds
0 comments

Race & Aesthetics 2015: A Retrospective

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 →

December 10, 2014
by Aesthetics for Birds
4 Comments

Diversity in Aesthetics Publishing

What follows is a guest post by Sherri Irvin. Sherri is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oklahoma. She specializes in aesthetics and the philosophy of art with strong interests in ethics and philosophy of race. She has written extensively on matters related to contemporary art and on aesthetic experience in everyday life and is currently working on two books, both under contract with Oxford University Press: Immaterial: A Philosophy of Contemporary Art, which argues for a view of the ontology of contemporary artworks, and Body Aesthetics, a multi-authored collection that treats the aesthetics of the body in relation to art, evolutionary theory, ethical considerations, race, age, gender, disability, sexuality and sport. Sherri is also a member of the editorial boards of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, and Philosophy Compass. UPDATE(12/10/2014)******************************************************************************** Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism editors Ted Gracyk and Bob Stecker have announced some changes to … Continue reading →

July 6, 2013
by Aesthetics for Birds
4 Comments

Towards a Gender-balanced Philosophy of Art Syllabus

by Christy Mag Uidhir ***UPDATED 07/31/13. I encourage readers to continue to send suggestions.***[minor update by Alex King in 2020] Lamarque & Olsen’s Aesthetics & The Philosophy of Art: The Analytic Tradition is arguably the best general anthology in Contemporary Anglo-American Aesthetics. Unfortunately, this anthology distinguishes itself yet another way by having only 2 of its 46 articles written by women (in fact, the very same woman as it turns out). A friend of mine teaching philosophy of art for the first time recently discovered this and asked me to suggest some articles written by women with which to supplement the anthology. I’ve copied the list I sent him below so that it might be a useful resource for others in similar situations. I welcome and actively encourage readers to suggest additions in the comments section at which point I’ll update the list accordingly. However, please note that my interest … Continue reading →