Aesthetics for Birds

Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art for Everyone

Tag Archives: tv

December 17, 2019
by Aesthetics for Birds
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8 Experts Reveal Their Top 5 TV Shows of the Decade

This year marks the end of the second decade of the 2000s. In honor of this, we thought we’d take a look back at our decade with an end-of-year series. The internet loves lists, especially year-end ones, and we’ll feed that love a little bit this December. We’ll be hosting seven lists of expert Decade-Best picks. We’ve done movies, games, and writing so far, and you can look forward to music, traditional visual arts, and one surprise list at the end. Our experts include philosophers and other academics whose work concerns these topics, and people working in the relevant media. Up today: TV shows! This decade, as everybody is well aware, has seen an immense boom in quality television. Niche programming and subscription streaming services, and the corresponding influx of money into TV production that has meant, have brought us into a new Golden Age of television. But it can … Continue reading →

June 26, 2019
by Aesthetics for Birds
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The Philosophical Beauty of Black Mirror

What follows is a guest post from Laura Di Summa, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at William Paterson University. Black Mirror, the TV series created by enfant terrible Charlie Brooker, is often described as the quintessential embodiment of grim poststructuralist criticisms of the ideology. But this, I believe, is just one way of looking at it. One, if I may, that has little to do with how it actually looks.

May 15, 2018
by Aesthetics for Birds
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JAAC X AFB: Why Do We Resist Rough Heroines?

What follows is a post in our ongoing collaborative series with the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. This is based on a new article by Adriana Clavel-Vazquez, “Sugar and spice, and everything nice: What rough heroines tell us about imaginative resistance.” After five seasons of House of Cards, it was finally Claire Underwood’s turn to be a proper rough heroine. In seasons one to four we find an interesting contrast between the moral transgressions that make Claire and Frank Underwood rough heroes: she is a ruthless, selfish, and drunk-with-power woman who is uninterested in motherhood; he is a ruthless, selfish, drunk-with-power man who has murdered several people. But in season five, Claire (finally!) murders Tom Yates, her journalist lover who had been given full access to the Underwood’s in previous seasons, and who was ready to publish an incriminating tell-all book. After poisoning him, Claire gives herself a couple … Continue reading →

May 8, 2018
by Aesthetics for Birds
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JAAC X AFB: Is Monday Night Football a Documentary?

What follows is a post in our ongoing collaborative series with the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. This is based on a new article by Henry Pratt, “Are You Ready for Some Football? A Monday Night Documentary?” When I lived in Wisconsin, I had a large, hairy housemate named Brian who watched a lot of hockey and football on TV. Sometimes he’d even do so shirtless to avoid stains from marinara sauce. It turns out that, unbeknownst to me at the time, he’d seen thousands of documentaries and was something of an expert on them. Wait—what? Quoth Gregory Currie, in his prominent article on the category: “game shows turn out to be documentaries about their participants, chat shows documentaries about the interviewer and interviewees, and sports programs documentaries about the activities of the athletes” (294).