Imagination and Art: Explorations in Contemporary Theory, 2020
How many imaginations do we have? This question makes sense once you consider the candidates. Ass... more How many imaginations do we have? This question makes sense once you consider the candidates. Associations, for instance, come up without a clear perceptual clue; imagery pops up whilst we read a novel; and while watching a film we process weird lapses between disparate images pasted together, sometimes by inferring what happened between the shots, sometimes we fill in the emotional aspect of the events. Many examples are connected to the various art forms, and seem to share that they are not built from what we see or hear before us. Should we distinguish different sorts of imagination or are they all just acts of one imagination? Is imagination a receptive or a spontaneous mode of thinking? And what is its connection with perception? Some imaginations are connected to the perceived by thought, others by mere causation.
DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals), Sep 1, 2021
In this Editor's column I suggest a more modern aesthetics, in order to fill in some of the promi... more In this Editor's column I suggest a more modern aesthetics, in order to fill in some of the promise the current Special Issue on The Birth of the Discipline has in store for us. I base my suggestion more on Kant and Aristotle, though.
DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals), Dec 1, 2017
A viable way to defend the rights of later picture makes to use and change the works of their pre... more A viable way to defend the rights of later picture makes to use and change the works of their predecessors is by reference to the artistic merit of the later works. Rob Scholte intentionally infringes on copyright law by making new works, and it is the artistic merit of his work that should give him that liberty.
Imagination and Art. Explorations in Contemporary Theory, Jul 9, 2020
How many imaginations do we have? This question makes sense once you consider the candidates. Ass... more How many imaginations do we have? This question makes sense once you consider the candidates. Associations, for instance, come up without a clear perceptual clue; imagery pops up whilst we read a novel; and while watching a film we process weird lapses between disparate images pasted together, sometimes by inferring what happened between the shots, sometimes we fill in the emotional aspect of the events. Many examples are connected to the various art forms, and seem to share that they are not built from what we see or hear before us. Should we distinguish different sorts of imagination or are they all just acts of one imagination? Is imagination a receptive or a spontaneous mode of thinking? And what is its connection with perception? Some imaginations are connected to the perceived by thought, others by mere causation.
A viable way to defend the rights of later picture makes to use and change the works of their pre... more A viable way to defend the rights of later picture makes to use and change the works of their predecessors is by reference to the artistic merit of the later works. Rob Scholte intentionally infringes on copyright law by making new works, and it is the artistic merit of his work that should give him that liberty.
In this Editor’s column I suggest a more modern aesthetics, in order to fill in some of the promi... more In this Editor’s column I suggest a more modern aesthetics, in order to fill in some of the promise the current Special Issue on The Birth of the Discipline has in store for us. I base my suggestion more on Kant and Aristotle, though.
Certain art theorists think of what artists do as artistic research. But research is fact- and th... more Certain art theorists think of what artists do as artistic research. But research is fact- and theory-driven, whereas when a film is being made what directors do is scrutinise what they see happening before their eyes. This scrutiny is guided by aesthetic judgement, individual style, and subjective intuition. It makes good sense to investigate the research that went on before a work was made, and to look at the theoretical implications of that work. But the most important work to be done is our paying attention to the scrutiny that went on during the work's actual creation. The importance and meaning of art are in the artist's scrutiny.
In this Editor's column I discuss certain fruits and limits of applying the notion of 'pe... more In this Editor's column I discuss certain fruits and limits of applying the notion of 'performance' to works of art. Art works can be viewed as perfor- mances, the public furnishing of works' final form. Concerts can be viewed as performances of a work scored by someone else, the composer, but not all arts are double in this sense. Moreover, art can be viewed as mirroring the psychological, phenomenological and rhetorical aspects of human interaction, which exemplify the way people scrutinise moral situations. Not all performances are artistic, let alone art.
We may compare art with science, but must not understand it as science. In my view, modern scienc... more We may compare art with science, but must not understand it as science. In my view, modern science brought subjectivity into trouble, whereas art itself has the subjective as its main motivating force. For one, narrative arts tell stories, and are acclaimed for conveying the subjective aspect of events. Artistic creativity aims at regulating the appreciative experience. Lastly, to assess a work's artistic merit is to look for the artist's achievement, which involves looking for the way they realised their intentions with their audiences. It is thus that one wants to say that art is concerned with the subjective, and that one wants to distinguish it sharply from how sciences treat their subject matters: aiming for quantification and universalisation, applying objectivist methodologies, and conveying the thought that all knowledge hangs together---and that it be objectivist.
Robert Bresson's cinematography allows him to show the affordances that things and situations... more Robert Bresson's cinematography allows him to show the affordances that things and situations have for characters in a film. By intimating these affordances, Bresson authentically presents the affordances as well as the characters. The fact that Bresson views and conceives of his `actors' as models, rather than as malleable actors, illustrates, again, an effort to authentically film real persons in real situations. Recognising people authentically is done in real-life through a reciprocal gaze, which is not automatically available to the camera's lens, an apparatus that does not look back at one. Perhaps, Nuri Bilge Ceylan's approach fits this effort better: not a writing with sounds and images, but an intuitive use of homeliness.
This Editor's column summarises some of the insights I got from Richard Wollheim over the yea... more This Editor's column summarises some of the insights I got from Richard Wollheim over the years, and from a recent Teams-chat with students in my class. Most notably: the role of suitable prompting in aesthetic normativity. In a sense, these insights help me understand this remark from Wittgenstein: `The existence of the experimental method makes us think we have the means of solving the problems which trouble us; though problem and method pass one another by.' (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 232e).
Perhaps, a work of fiction's truth is the unfaltering manner in which its details guide the s... more Perhaps, a work of fiction's truth is the unfaltering manner in which its details guide the spectator, reader or listener to the coherent whole of the work, and never disappoint their experience, or at least never for long. This view requires us to hold back the inclination to think of truth as short for the correspondence of some representation to something beyond itself, which is the normal way to view truth in real life, in journalism and in science. A work that is true to itself may be said to generate a particularist type of universal knowledge, like Aristotle characterised poetry at the expense of history in his Poetics.
Treating exceptional cases as marks of an essence is as bad as essentialism. I suggest we underst... more Treating exceptional cases as marks of an essence is as bad as essentialism. I suggest we understand art as a practice, not as something we could, or should find the eternally necessary and sufficient conditions of.
In pornografie krijgt de kijker op een heerlijk gemakkelijke manier seksualiteit te zien waarbij ... more In pornografie krijgt de kijker op een heerlijk gemakkelijke manier seksualiteit te zien waarbij hij kan fantaseren daar deel van uit te maken. Voor de lezer van pornografische literatuur valt er echter niets te bekijken. In dit artikel onderzoek ik de conceptuele mogelijkheid van een “literaire pornografie”, gegeven de standaard opvatting dat pornografie noodzakelijk beeld veronderstelt (en dit bij literatuur af- wezig is, aangezien literatuur met taal werkt) en een fantasie dat het waargenomene zich werkelijk aan de masturbant voordoet (hoewel er hiervoor bij lectuur gaan enkele zintuiglijke indicatie voor handen is).
Imagination and Art: Explorations in Contemporary Theory, 2020
How many imaginations do we have? This question makes sense once you consider the candidates. Ass... more How many imaginations do we have? This question makes sense once you consider the candidates. Associations, for instance, come up without a clear perceptual clue; imagery pops up whilst we read a novel; and while watching a film we process weird lapses between disparate images pasted together, sometimes by inferring what happened between the shots, sometimes we fill in the emotional aspect of the events. Many examples are connected to the various art forms, and seem to share that they are not built from what we see or hear before us. Should we distinguish different sorts of imagination or are they all just acts of one imagination? Is imagination a receptive or a spontaneous mode of thinking? And what is its connection with perception? Some imaginations are connected to the perceived by thought, others by mere causation.
DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals), Sep 1, 2021
In this Editor's column I suggest a more modern aesthetics, in order to fill in some of the promi... more In this Editor's column I suggest a more modern aesthetics, in order to fill in some of the promise the current Special Issue on The Birth of the Discipline has in store for us. I base my suggestion more on Kant and Aristotle, though.
DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals), Dec 1, 2017
A viable way to defend the rights of later picture makes to use and change the works of their pre... more A viable way to defend the rights of later picture makes to use and change the works of their predecessors is by reference to the artistic merit of the later works. Rob Scholte intentionally infringes on copyright law by making new works, and it is the artistic merit of his work that should give him that liberty.
Imagination and Art. Explorations in Contemporary Theory, Jul 9, 2020
How many imaginations do we have? This question makes sense once you consider the candidates. Ass... more How many imaginations do we have? This question makes sense once you consider the candidates. Associations, for instance, come up without a clear perceptual clue; imagery pops up whilst we read a novel; and while watching a film we process weird lapses between disparate images pasted together, sometimes by inferring what happened between the shots, sometimes we fill in the emotional aspect of the events. Many examples are connected to the various art forms, and seem to share that they are not built from what we see or hear before us. Should we distinguish different sorts of imagination or are they all just acts of one imagination? Is imagination a receptive or a spontaneous mode of thinking? And what is its connection with perception? Some imaginations are connected to the perceived by thought, others by mere causation.
A viable way to defend the rights of later picture makes to use and change the works of their pre... more A viable way to defend the rights of later picture makes to use and change the works of their predecessors is by reference to the artistic merit of the later works. Rob Scholte intentionally infringes on copyright law by making new works, and it is the artistic merit of his work that should give him that liberty.
In this Editor’s column I suggest a more modern aesthetics, in order to fill in some of the promi... more In this Editor’s column I suggest a more modern aesthetics, in order to fill in some of the promise the current Special Issue on The Birth of the Discipline has in store for us. I base my suggestion more on Kant and Aristotle, though.
Certain art theorists think of what artists do as artistic research. But research is fact- and th... more Certain art theorists think of what artists do as artistic research. But research is fact- and theory-driven, whereas when a film is being made what directors do is scrutinise what they see happening before their eyes. This scrutiny is guided by aesthetic judgement, individual style, and subjective intuition. It makes good sense to investigate the research that went on before a work was made, and to look at the theoretical implications of that work. But the most important work to be done is our paying attention to the scrutiny that went on during the work's actual creation. The importance and meaning of art are in the artist's scrutiny.
In this Editor's column I discuss certain fruits and limits of applying the notion of 'pe... more In this Editor's column I discuss certain fruits and limits of applying the notion of 'performance' to works of art. Art works can be viewed as perfor- mances, the public furnishing of works' final form. Concerts can be viewed as performances of a work scored by someone else, the composer, but not all arts are double in this sense. Moreover, art can be viewed as mirroring the psychological, phenomenological and rhetorical aspects of human interaction, which exemplify the way people scrutinise moral situations. Not all performances are artistic, let alone art.
We may compare art with science, but must not understand it as science. In my view, modern scienc... more We may compare art with science, but must not understand it as science. In my view, modern science brought subjectivity into trouble, whereas art itself has the subjective as its main motivating force. For one, narrative arts tell stories, and are acclaimed for conveying the subjective aspect of events. Artistic creativity aims at regulating the appreciative experience. Lastly, to assess a work's artistic merit is to look for the artist's achievement, which involves looking for the way they realised their intentions with their audiences. It is thus that one wants to say that art is concerned with the subjective, and that one wants to distinguish it sharply from how sciences treat their subject matters: aiming for quantification and universalisation, applying objectivist methodologies, and conveying the thought that all knowledge hangs together---and that it be objectivist.
Robert Bresson's cinematography allows him to show the affordances that things and situations... more Robert Bresson's cinematography allows him to show the affordances that things and situations have for characters in a film. By intimating these affordances, Bresson authentically presents the affordances as well as the characters. The fact that Bresson views and conceives of his `actors' as models, rather than as malleable actors, illustrates, again, an effort to authentically film real persons in real situations. Recognising people authentically is done in real-life through a reciprocal gaze, which is not automatically available to the camera's lens, an apparatus that does not look back at one. Perhaps, Nuri Bilge Ceylan's approach fits this effort better: not a writing with sounds and images, but an intuitive use of homeliness.
This Editor's column summarises some of the insights I got from Richard Wollheim over the yea... more This Editor's column summarises some of the insights I got from Richard Wollheim over the years, and from a recent Teams-chat with students in my class. Most notably: the role of suitable prompting in aesthetic normativity. In a sense, these insights help me understand this remark from Wittgenstein: `The existence of the experimental method makes us think we have the means of solving the problems which trouble us; though problem and method pass one another by.' (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 232e).
Perhaps, a work of fiction's truth is the unfaltering manner in which its details guide the s... more Perhaps, a work of fiction's truth is the unfaltering manner in which its details guide the spectator, reader or listener to the coherent whole of the work, and never disappoint their experience, or at least never for long. This view requires us to hold back the inclination to think of truth as short for the correspondence of some representation to something beyond itself, which is the normal way to view truth in real life, in journalism and in science. A work that is true to itself may be said to generate a particularist type of universal knowledge, like Aristotle characterised poetry at the expense of history in his Poetics.
Treating exceptional cases as marks of an essence is as bad as essentialism. I suggest we underst... more Treating exceptional cases as marks of an essence is as bad as essentialism. I suggest we understand art as a practice, not as something we could, or should find the eternally necessary and sufficient conditions of.
In pornografie krijgt de kijker op een heerlijk gemakkelijke manier seksualiteit te zien waarbij ... more In pornografie krijgt de kijker op een heerlijk gemakkelijke manier seksualiteit te zien waarbij hij kan fantaseren daar deel van uit te maken. Voor de lezer van pornografische literatuur valt er echter niets te bekijken. In dit artikel onderzoek ik de conceptuele mogelijkheid van een “literaire pornografie”, gegeven de standaard opvatting dat pornografie noodzakelijk beeld veronderstelt (en dit bij literatuur af- wezig is, aangezien literatuur met taal werkt) en een fantasie dat het waargenomene zich werkelijk aan de masturbant voordoet (hoewel er hiervoor bij lectuur gaan enkele zintuiglijke indicatie voor handen is).
Recently, in the scholarship, one can see a growing academic interest in the pre-Kantian period o... more Recently, in the scholarship, one can see a growing academic interest in the pre-Kantian period of the discipline, even though some newer great narratives seem to insist on the old teleological scheme of interpretation based mostly on Kant’s aesthetics. Addison, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Baumgarten, Burke and their masters and followers have received increasing interest again, the analyses of their ideas can clearly show the multifarious and multidisciplinary nature of the emerging aesthetic, can point at its anthropological, theological, moral, social-political, economic and medicinal interests. The current collection of papers offers a contribution to this stream of the scholarship. It aims to re-consider and re-interpret some intriguing aspects of the pre-Kantian history of modern aesthetics and to draw some conclusions for its sometimes biased and oversimplified historiography. From the revision of the history of a discipline, the re-discovery of its genealogy always ensues the opening of old-new perspectives for the contemporary aesthetics as well.
1. Endre Szécsényi: Introduction: The Birth of the Discipline 2. Colin McQuillan: "The Science of Aesthetics, the Critique of Taste, and the Philosophy of Art: Ambiguities and Contradictions" 3. Brian Michael Norton: "Shaftesbury and the Stoic Roots of Modern Aesthetics" 4. Gabriel Trop: "Spinoza and the Genesis of the Aesthetic" 5. Alessandro Nannini: "Critical Aesthetics. Baumgarten and the Logic of Taste" 6. Julia Jacob: "Beauty and Civilization. Buffon’s considerations on human somatic features in 'Histoire Naturelle de l’Homme'"
CALL FOR ARTICLES
The birth of the Discipline (guest editor: Prof. Endre Szécsényi, with Rob van Gerwen) -- We would expect papers which re-consider and re-interpret the pre-Kantian history of modern aesthetics (cca. from the middle of the 17C to the 1780s) in order to show the multifarious and multidisciplinary nature of the emerging aesthetic, to analyse the conflicts and tensions between this new type of experience and its first theoretical treatments, to offer, on the one hand, new interpretations of the familiar key-concepts of this period (including the beautiful, the sublime, the picturesque, taste, imagination, genius, originality, wit, humour, pity, laughter, sensibility, etc.) and, on the other, some earlier not discussed key-concepts for re-shaping the scholarly discourse about this period, to demonstrate how modern aesthetic is inseparable from theology, moral and social philosophy, economy, natural jurisprudence, medicine, and, finally, to make it clear that many of aesthetic issues of this period can be seen as fruitful theoretical resources or sources of inspiration for contemporary aesthetic thinking from environmental and every day aesthetics to somaesthetics. (Prof. Endre Szécsényi, Institute for Art Theory and Media, Department of Aesthetics, Budapest, Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Aberdeen.) -- Deadline for submissions: May 15, 2020 -- extended to June 15, 2020
Uploads
Papers by Rob van Gerwen
1. Endre Szécsényi: Introduction: The Birth of the Discipline
2. Colin McQuillan: "The Science of Aesthetics, the Critique of Taste, and the Philosophy of Art: Ambiguities and Contradictions"
3. Brian Michael Norton: "Shaftesbury and the Stoic Roots of Modern Aesthetics"
4. Gabriel Trop: "Spinoza and the Genesis of the Aesthetic"
5. Alessandro Nannini: "Critical Aesthetics. Baumgarten and the Logic of Taste"
6. Julia Jacob: "Beauty and Civilization. Buffon’s considerations on human somatic features in 'Histoire Naturelle de l’Homme'"
CALL FOR ARTICLES
The birth of the Discipline (guest editor: Prof. Endre Szécsényi, with Rob van Gerwen) -- We would expect papers which re-consider and re-interpret the pre-Kantian history of modern aesthetics (cca. from the middle of the 17C to the 1780s) in order to show the multifarious and multidisciplinary nature of the emerging aesthetic, to analyse the conflicts and tensions between this new type of experience and its first theoretical treatments, to offer, on the one hand, new interpretations of the familiar key-concepts of this period (including the beautiful, the sublime, the picturesque, taste, imagination, genius, originality, wit, humour, pity, laughter, sensibility, etc.) and, on the other, some earlier not discussed key-concepts for re-shaping the scholarly discourse about this period, to demonstrate how modern aesthetic is inseparable from theology, moral and social philosophy, economy, natural jurisprudence, medicine, and, finally, to make it clear that many of aesthetic issues of this period can be seen as fruitful theoretical resources or sources of inspiration for contemporary aesthetic thinking from environmental and every day aesthetics to somaesthetics. (Prof. Endre Szécsényi, Institute for Art Theory and Media, Department of Aesthetics, Budapest, Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Aberdeen.) --
Deadline for submissions: May 15, 2020 -- extended to June 15, 2020