Books by Daniel Neofetou
Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2021
Since the 1970s, it has been argued that Abstract Expressionism was exhibited abroad by the post-... more Since the 1970s, it has been argued that Abstract Expressionism was exhibited abroad by the post-war US establishment in an attempt to culturally match and reinforce its newfound economic and military dominance. The account of Abstract Expressionism developed by the American critic Clement Greenberg is often identified as central to these efforts. However, this book rereads Greenberg's account through Theodor Adorno and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in order to contend that Greenberg's criticism in fact testifies to how Abstract Expressionism opposes the ends to which it was deployed.
With reference not only to the most famous artists of the movement, but also female artists and artists of colour whom Greenberg himself neglected, such as Joan Mitchell and Norman Lewis, it is argued that, far from reinforcing the capitalist status quo, Abstract Expressionism engages corporeal and affective elements of experience dismissed or delegitimated by capitalism, and promises a world that would do justice to them.
Papers by Daniel Neofetou
Philosophy & Social Criticism, 2022
Theodor Adorno’s 1960–1961 lecture course Ontology and Dialectics, recently translated into Engli... more Theodor Adorno’s 1960–1961 lecture course Ontology and Dialectics, recently translated into English, provides the most systematic articulation of his critique of Martin Heidegger. When Adorno delivered three of the lectures at the Collège de France, Maurice Merleau-Ponty was reportedly scandalised as he was at that time developing his own ontology, informed by Heidegger. However, this article problematises the assumption that Adorno’s negative dialectic and Merleau-Ponty’s late ontology are incompatible. First, Adorno’s criticism of Heidegger’s ontology is delineated, with particular focus on how Adorno argues that Heidegger’s subordination of the human being to being is homologous with the logic of capitalism. Then, we turn to Merleau-Ponty’s own engagement with Heidegger, with particular focus on how Merleau-Ponty cannot be accused of denigrating ontic beings. Finally, it is argued that Merleau-Ponty’s indirect ontology has the same implications as those which allow Adorno to posi...
Getty Research Journal, 2021
This previously unpublished transcript of an undated and incomplete handwritten essay on surreali... more This previously unpublished transcript of an undated and incomplete handwritten essay on surrealist doyen André Breton by American art critic Clement Greenberg is illuminating in terms of the otherwise somewhat oblique connection between politics and avant-garde art for the younger Greenberg, the precise nature of whose professed Marxism has long been contested. It was composed in response to Breton’s “Political Position of Surrealism” (1935). In his text, Greenberg argues that Breton is correct in his claim that radical artists should not let questions of politics distract them from autonomous work. However, unlike Breton, he does not contend that this is the case because such artists will be vindicated by future audiences and should, accordingly, work in defiance of a mass audience. Rather, Greenberg argues that no other mode of working opens up new fields of aesthetic experience while bemoaning the state of affairs where such art is inaccessible to the working class, ultimately c...
Arts, 2021
Day-to-day art criticism and art theory are qualitatively distinct. Whereas the best art criticis... more Day-to-day art criticism and art theory are qualitatively distinct. Whereas the best art criticism entails a closeness to its objects which is attuned to particularity, art theory inherently makes generalized claims, whether these claims are extrapolated from the process of art criticism or not. However, this article argues that these dynamics are effectively reversed if we consider the disparity between the criticism of so-called political art and attempts over the last century to elaborate theory which accounts for the political in art qua art. Art theory has located the political force of art precisely in the way that its particularity opposes or resists the status quo. Art criticism, on the other hand, tends to treat artwork as a text to be interpreted whose particularity may as well dissolve when translated into discourse. Drawing from the work of Theodor W. Adorno, this article argues that political art theory calls for art criticism more attuned to experience if it is to eluc...
Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Jun 18, 2020
The Depression era Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers vehicle Swing Time (George Stevens, 1936) is th... more The Depression era Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers vehicle Swing Time (George Stevens, 1936) is the fifth film in the duo’s cycle for RKO Pictures (It is the sixth if one counts Flying Down to Rio (1933). However, the actors do not play the protagonists in that film and there was no intention for it to inaugurate a series). In contrast with the preceding films, its protagonists are expressly figured as working class as opposed to the bourgeoisie (In Follow the Fleet from the same year Astaire and Rogers play, respectively, a sailor and a dance hostess, but their class status is not thematised to the same extent). Swing Time tells the story of John “Lucky” Garnett (Astaire), a dancer and gambler who in the outset of the film is preparing to marry Margaret Watson (Betty Furness), a woman from an upper middle-class family with whom he has reconnected having performed in his hometown. Resentful of his abandonment, the rest of his dance troupe delay him to the extent that he is so late that the father of the bride calls the marriage off, and will only deign to agree to it if Lucky manages to raise $25,000. Lucky accordingly sets off to New York with his ageing sidekick Edwin “Pop” Cardetti (Victor Moore) in order to find his fortune, but while he is there, he falls in love with Penny Carroll (Ginger Rogers), a working class dance teacher, and by the end of the film, he has coupled up with her. Due to this narrative trajectory, Graham Cassano has argued in one of the few academic articles to have been published on the film that Swing Time “offers a fiery indictment” of bourgeois values “while, at the same time, portraying an oppositional working class community” (330). However, in this article I want to argue that, while Swing Time certainly opposes the domination of capital, it does so not in its championing of working class culture against the supposed decadence of the wealthy and privileged, but rather by instantiating and engendering a form of reason and rationality which capitalism impedes. Central to this, I will contend, are two scenes near the end of the film in which all of the characters present burst into uncontrollable
Journal of Contemporary Painting, 2019
In his essay on Barnett Newman in Painting as Model, ‘Perceiving Newman’, Bois accounts for the a... more In his essay on Barnett Newman in Painting as Model, ‘Perceiving Newman’, Bois accounts for the appeal of Newman’s address by positing that the artist’s work invokes ‘a world-for-us, neither the “objective” world described by mathematics or physics nor a kind of mythic space that one could [...] thematise with symbols and ideographs’. However, in this article it is contended that this ‘world-for-us’ is prefigured through the experience of decisive otherness. While Bois cites Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s early opus Phenomenoloy of Perception in ‘Perceiving Newman’, in this article Merleau-Ponty’s late writing is read via the aesthetic theory of Theodor W. Adorno to discuss how the in-itselfness of Newman’s art bindingly engages elements of experience that capitalism dismisses in favour of profit as the fundamental determinant of everyday life.
Book Reviews by Daniel Neofetou
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Books by Daniel Neofetou
With reference not only to the most famous artists of the movement, but also female artists and artists of colour whom Greenberg himself neglected, such as Joan Mitchell and Norman Lewis, it is argued that, far from reinforcing the capitalist status quo, Abstract Expressionism engages corporeal and affective elements of experience dismissed or delegitimated by capitalism, and promises a world that would do justice to them.
Papers by Daniel Neofetou
Book Reviews by Daniel Neofetou
With reference not only to the most famous artists of the movement, but also female artists and artists of colour whom Greenberg himself neglected, such as Joan Mitchell and Norman Lewis, it is argued that, far from reinforcing the capitalist status quo, Abstract Expressionism engages corporeal and affective elements of experience dismissed or delegitimated by capitalism, and promises a world that would do justice to them.