The aim of the journal Aesthetic Investigations is to develop contemporary debates in the philosophy of aesthetics, and initiate new ones—and to do this from any available angle. We are open to any contributions, but to generate new discussions we also issue specific calls. Please check our calls for Articles, Fresh papers, comments on Art & Artists, and reviews.
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Copyright (c) 2024 Sue Spaid, clinton peter verdonschot https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Part of the people or apart from the people?
Barbie (2023) is both a feminist and a metaphysical film. It is a story of ideas regarding girls and their fantasies and the relation of the two vis-à-vis each other. This critical note draws attention to a way in which the film's metaphysics gets in the way of its feminism. I will argue that the film's conception of Barbie Land and the Real World, as discrete planes of existence, is itself a symptom of the alienated state of existence that Barbie aims to overcome. Consequently, Barbie's escape from this alienated state is doomed to fail from the start.
Copyright (c) 2024 clinton peter verdonschot https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The aesthetic significance of the everyday
Copyright (c) 2024 Mateusz Salwa https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
What (if any) aesthetics of everyday experience should we have?
In this paper, I will show that an aesthetics of everyday experience independent of our analyses of art is absolutely essential. While the aims of discourse about art may be normative, the aims of discourse about everyday aesthetic experience are very different --- such discourse has, in part, epistemic goals, and, to the extent that it has a normative goal, such a goal is not agreement about the judgments of such experiences but about how disparate judgments can both find place in the shared aesthetic space. In other words, discourse about quotidian aesthetic experience is meta-aesthetic in character.
Copyright (c) 2024 Angela Black https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Review of Vid Simoniti, Artists Remake the World: A Contemporary Manifesto (2023), New Haven: Yale University Press
With Artists Remake the World: A Contemporary Manifesto (2023), Vid Simoniti surveys recent exhibition-based contemporary art (most since 2016) that ‘glimpse possibilities for repairing the world’. By deferring to institutional definitions of art, Simoniti avoids having to defend whether exhibited objects are art, yet this approach ignores the fact that not all exhibited objects begin/endure as art, let alone begin/endure as political art. Early on, he admits of a paradox regarding exhibition-based political art, that is, it can feel ‘forbiddingly abstruse, experimental, hard to access, inward looking, even elitist’. Simoniti’s introduction describes his aim to demonstrate how ‘through art, we momentarily remake the world as we know it’. He develops this argument over seven chapters beginning with ‘when and how art contemporary art became political’, then ‘Realism for our time: on art and truth’, ‘unity and utopia: on socially engaged art’, ‘worldmaking: on the role of aesthetics in political art’, ‘spectacle and surveillance: on art in the internet age’, ‘creativity in the face of extinction: on art and climate change’, and finally ‘remaking the world’s hinges’.
Copyright (c) 2024 Sue Spaid https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Everyday aesthetics has been accused of being ontologically and systematically juvenile for a variety of reasons, such as the rejection of some major claims of Kantian aesthetics, its relative newness, its disparate methodologies, and the theoretical and ethical difficulties of outlining a systematic apparatus without reimposing rationalist and colonial perspectives. While it is untrue that everyday aesthetics as a new sub-discipline lacks systematic rigour, another ontology of the everyday will be introduced here. Calvin Seerveld’s aesthetic theory will be outlined and then offered as a resource for understanding the constitutive role imagination plays in analytical and other kinds of thinking. His notion of ‘allusivity’ as the common quality of all aesthetic expression suggests that art, craft, design, and everyday aesthetic appreciation all emerge from the same subjective function of imaginative ‘nuance’. Additionally, his thought comes from within an established tradition of modal ontology begun by 20th century Dutch Continental philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd.
Copyright (c) 2024 Julia de Boer https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This Arts & Artists contribution addresses the concept of `poor image', coined by the German artist Hito Steyerl. I intend to link it with the development of artistic practices based on the use of ordinary materials and images, which are not created with the pretensions of becoming artworks but as a result of a social context. For this, I will delve into the ability to speculate with alternative scenarios in the work of authors such as Jon Mikel Euba or Erlea Maneros Zabala, but I will also review my own activity as an artist. In fact, more than simply describing the use of poor images, I propose to relate them to a situation of displacement: my own, living in Sweden but researching the minoritization of Galician culture in Spain.
Copyright (c) 2024 Breogán Torres Gutiérrez https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The latest film by Hiyao Miyazaki, The Boy and the Heron, unfolds in unexpected and occasionally baffling ways. The film’s second half, especially, takes place in a world that appears to abide by a distinct narrative logic than that which viewers are familiar with. I discuss this as an instance of Miyazaki creating and working within a private, authentic vocabulary, as has been described in Existentialist and Pragmatist traditions. Specifically, I analyze its filmic language as an alloy of the memories, imagined possibilities, and losses of two of its characters, and why this depiction is so affecting.
Copyright (c) 2024 Gabriel Thomas Tugendstein https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Thomas Crow, The Artist in the Counterculture: Bruce Conner to Mike Kelley and Other Tales from the Edge (2023)
Thomas Crow’s book The Artist in the Counterculture: Bruce Conner to Mike Kelley and Other Tales from the Edge reappraises West Coast art as enmeshed in the counterculture. The first five of its twelve chapters discuss Bruce Conner’s development as a multimedia artist in San Franscisco and Los Angeles producing assemblages, films, drawings, magazine illustrations, and light shows for rock concerts. The next five chapters expand Crow’s argument by appraising anti-war manifestations, Black and Latino protest work, Land Art, and West Coast conceptual practices as aspects of the counterculture. Moving forward to the late 1970s, the final two chapters review first Conner’s reemergence as a photographer documenting California punk bands and then Mike Kelley’s transplanting of Detroit’s alternative rock idealism to fuel the development of his own radical art practices.
Copyright (c) 2023 Mark Harris https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Copyright (c) 2023 Sue Spaid; Clinton Peter Verdonschot https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Models and Sitters: the Art and Aesthetics of Posing
Copyright (c) 2023 Aurélie J. Debaene https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Constructing and Using the Portrait Sitting as an Art-Historical Research Object
Portraiture is said to have evolved from a collaborative social practice to an artist-centric one. I challenge this view by focusing on the portrait sitting. I develop a portrait-sitting ontology, and a portrait-sitting database. I do so with reference to works in London's National Portrait Gallery, because the gallery features noteworthy sitters, leading to rich interpersonal exchanges during sittings. An approach from my portrait-sitting database shows the contributions of sitters to portrait production, calls attention to shared social and cultural ideas behind particular types of portrait production, and supports new interpretations of portraits and new periodisations of portraiture.
Copyright (c) 2023 Dawn Kanter https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Review of Gualeni and Fassone’s Fictional Games: A Philosophy of Worldbuilding and Imaginary Play (2022), London: Bloomsbury Publishing
Copyright (c) 2024 Benjamin Micallef https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
I make the case for modelling as a collection of creative practices that work with various art forms as a promising area of work. I achieve this by exploring three questions. First, are models not merely a prop employed by the artist? Using phenomenological considerations informed by my work as a life model, I argue that models often work to vague briefs and are moreover employed precisely because of their unique poses. Second, how do models impact artworks? Overlooking a model's contribution can drastically alter our aesthetic understanding of an artwork. I argue that models contribute creatively and maintain 'model reasons', a formal interest in posing as body-experts. Third, what is the value of research into models and their poses? Deepening our knowledge can constitute a restorative act. Further scholarship will also need to reckon with the realities of changing technologies and working practices. It is especially important, then, to tease out and understand the existing practices of modelling and their interrelations with other artists, artistic media, and technologies.
Copyright (c) 2023 Aurélie Debaene https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This paper focuses on historic anthropological photographs, meant to depict Indigenous individuals as generic models of colonial stereotypes, and examines their later reclamation as portraits. Applying an intention-based account of portraiture, we discuss the historical context and contemporary examples of the utilisation of these images in order to address several questions. What happens when the depicted persons in colonial imagery are treated and presented as sitters, rather than model specimens? Does this change the nature of the image? If a photograph was not originally intended as a portrait, can it come to function as such at a later stage? Regardless of whether they fulfill all the requirements necessary for portraiture, these colonial photographs represent a vital resource for the reclamation of Indigenous cultural heritage. As such, this paper serves as an introductory discussion into the complex issues surrounding the recategorisation, repatriation, and restitution of colonial photographic archives.
Copyright (c) 2023 Michelle Green, Hans Maes https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This paper attempts to bring together two lines of thought that might seem unrelated. The first is the idea that the life class should be a safe space that respects and nurtures the creative autonomy of life models. The second is the idea that it is morally, socially, and aesthetically permissible to be fat and that fat persons are entitled to the same dignity, respect, and celebration to which straight-sized persons are entitled. Putting these two thoughts together, I explore the idea that the life class can be a space for the aesthetic exploration and appreciation of fat bodies and hence an important space for combatting fat oppression. I would like to issue a warning about content that may be upsetting or triggering for my readers. In section II, I briefly discuss sexual harassment and sexual assault. In section III, I give quite a few examples of the kinds of harassment and hostility that fat persons face.
Copyright (c) 2023 A.W. Eaton https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Barbie is not Born, but Rather Becomes, Barbie
I begin this paper by identifying several criticisms of the film Barbie (2023), several of which have been proposed as reasons to deny its feminist content. I then circle back to what I consider the film's most coherent theme, which exemplifies Simone de Beauvoir's best-known quote, `One is not born, but rather becomes, woman.' This claim emphasises that what it is to be a woman is not biological, but social. That is, who we become is influenced by external factors such as family upbringing, available role models, class expectations, and our freedom to navigate our choices. A post-script relates the theme of this film to the current political situation in the U.S., after the re-election of Donald Trump.
On the occasion of this special issue focused on Models and Sitters, I am presenting what Dawn Kanter (in this issue) terms a 'textual account of the sitter'. With this in mind, I revisit a particular era in my life (primarily 1993-1999) when I regularly served as a model, muse, performer, poseur, and sitter. In fact, there was sufficient material to organise 'Used and Amused' (2000), an exhibition focused on ten collaborations, for which I typically self-improvised. Rather than simply detail these events, I've woven various ideas developed by each of this special issue's contributors into this article, so that my narrative here augments their papers.
Copyright (c) 2023 Sue Spaid https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Copyright (c) 2023 Clinton Peter Verdonschot https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Aurélie Debaene cites a lack of aesthetics research on the professional art model, concluding that the artistic enterprise of collaboration or 'partnering' between model and artist can lead viewers to under-appreciate their conjoined creativity and skill. I argue for a collaborative model that extends the notion of art model beyond the professional to the amateur art model/poser/performer. On this model, an artist can achieve success in an artwork by: (1) posing their self in a self-portrait and/or (2) inviting viewers to pose in artworks designed to 'partner' together in creating an aesthetic experience of shared creativity, skill, and pleasure.
Copyright (c) 2023 Peg Brand Weiser https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
In this ‘Editor’s column’, I question whether architecture is what we have come to call Public Art. It seems nonsense to say that architecture is not an art, when it is obviously something that people make for audiences, i.e. for other people who admire it. Moreover, architecture steers and influences people. Evidently, all of culture is by and for people and influences people. But when is culture art? Is design an art – is architecture?
Copyright (c) 2023 Rob van Gerwen https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Excess of matter in form designates the principle that underlies architecture. The surplus of form contains not only a constructive principle, but also an aesthetic principle that enables sensual experience. In the coupling of construction and sensual experience, the basic prerequisites for the aesthetics of architecture are thus named, but at the same time also the difficulties with which architecture is confronted within philosophical aesthetics. For Kant, it was precisely the object character that stood in the way of an architectural aesthetics as part of a general aesthetics. For him, only the architectural drawing, because detached from matter, construction, and function, could meet the criteria of the beautiful, and that only as a façade view and not as a ground plan or sectional drawing. With reference to Aristotle, Kant and Schopenhauer and an outlook on contemporary architecture, the essay outlines the principles of an aesthetics of architecture as it is to be developed out of the specific material conditions of architecture and has its starting point in the surplus of form.
The Problem of the Building (Philosophy of Architecture)
Copyright (c) 2023 Joerg Gleiter https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Introduction to the Special Issue on Philosophy and Architecture
(This is the Guest Editor's introduction)
Copyright (c) 2023 Paul Guyer https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Oana Șerban, After Thomas Kuhn: The Structure of Aesthetic Revolutions (2023)
This paper explores the differences in ‘affect’ between Gehry’s blossoming beacons, whose visibility in the landscape lends them the role of beckoning flowers and the comparable invisibility of Floriade Expo 2022, whose horizontality granted it a subtlety that has thus far failed to elicit any of the thrill associated with the 'Bilbao Effect', even though it proffers an unparalleled botanical paradise. Thus far, it seems that people find biodiverse parks less impressive than buildings, even though thousands of people have worked tirelessly to ensure its viability. One year later, however, people are revaluating flower shows' ecological costs.
One of the many innovations with which performance art can be credited is its revolutionary approach to space-making and inhabitation. Its reanimation of objects, events and bodies takes up space as a material presence, which incidentally engenders a conceptual problem. Philosophical aesthetics has had a lot to say about our relationship with the built form, but this work has not been brought to bear on performance art and the ways this artform complicates such relationships. This paper addresses this void by exploring two dimensions of what architect Daniel Libeskind has called ‘the space of encounter’—the physical and the ethical.
Copyright (c) 2023 Rossen Ventzislavov https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
An odd occurrence within a live model session is that the model, while nude, is drawn in a way which renders irrelevant the nakedness. Participants may focus on the model's face, or draw the pose while heavily blurring breasts or genitalia—the unveiling of which is, presumably, partly what the model is hired for. Why? If a live model presents an opportunity to study human anatomy or embodied gestures without the interruption of clothing, participants would likely focus upon parts which normally remain private. Instead, it is not rare to see sketches and work which could have been produced while permitting the model to wear swimwear or even substantial clothing. Nudity's status within the artist-live model relationship will be one topic of this essay. Three additional questions will be (1) the model's motivation; (2) the degree of agency attributed to the model: for some, a mere prop; for others, a full-fledged performer; (3) the role of 'art' in the live model session given how much of it remains incomplete and not displayed.
Copyright (c) 2023 Tzachi Zamir https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
That human thought is essentially symbolic was Susanne Langer’s “new key” to philosophy. No approach might seem less promising for understanding our experience of architecture: apart from a few academics who have confused architectural drawing with architecture itself, most people think of architecture as comprising three-dimensional, physical objects built of wood, stone, steel, glass, and all sorts of contemporary composites, as real rather than symbolic as it can get. We should begin where she did, namely, by distinguishing what she called “discursive” and “presentational” symbolism. Langer’s main point is not merely that architecture provides ethnic domains, but that it provides images of ethnic domains
Paul Guyer interviews his cousin Laure van Heijenoort, who as a teenager lived for several years with her parents in one of Mies van der Rohe's Lafayette Park townhouses in Detroit and attended school at Eliel Saarinen's Cranbrook campus. She reports on her experiences of living and study in both, experiences still vivid to her and now to a broader audience.
Copyright (c) 2023 Paul Guyer, Laure van Heijenoort https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0