scholarly journals Od własności bytu do przedmiotu estetycznego: studium piękna w "Gottfried Künstler: A Mediæval Story" Vity Sackville-West

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (XXIII) ◽  
pp. 215-228
Author(s):  
Dagmara Kottke

Vita Sackville-West was an English Modernist writer, poet and gardener. In her short narrative Gottfried Künstler: A Mediæval Story (1932), a skater-artist Gottfried loses his memory due to an accident on ice and, as a result, becomes some-body else. The aim of this article is to prove that the work explores the development of the philosophy of beauty: negating classic theories, according to which beauty is grounded in being or nature, the story heads towards the contemporary concept of the aesthetic object, saying that beauty stems from art. The analysis of the story is divided into three parts: the exploration of being, the study of nature, and the discussion of the concept of the aesthetic object.

Author(s):  
Bart Vandenabeele

Schopenhauer explores the paradoxical nature of the aesthetic experience of the sublime in a richer way than his predecessors did by rightfully emphasizing the prominent role of the aesthetic object and the ultimately affirmative character of the pleasurable experience it offers. Unlike Kant, Schopenhauer’s doctrine of the sublime does not appeal to the superiority of human reason over nature but affirms the ultimately “superhuman” unity of the world, of which the human being is merely a puny fragment. The author focuses on Schopenhauer’s treatment of the experience of the sublime in nature and argues that Schopenhauer makes two distinct attempts to resolve the paradox of the sublime and that Schopenhauer’s second attempt, which has been neglected in the literature, establishes the sublime as a viable aesthetic concept with profound significance.


Author(s):  
Simon Gikandi

This chapter presents two instances of how slave money shaped the moment of taste in both pragmatic and conceptual terms. It provides a substantive exploration of the cultural traffic between Britain and its colonial outposts in order to show how the experience of slavery was turned into an aesthetic object that was woven into the fabric of everyday life. It then seeks to connect slave money and the power and prestige of art by focusing on the aesthetic lives of William Beckford and Christopher Codrington, famous heirs to slave fortunes, who sought to remake their social standing through the patronage of art and the mastery of taste.


Author(s):  
Hans Blumenberg

This chapter examines Hans Blumenberg's “Socrates and the objet ambigu: Paul Valéry's Discussion of the Ontology of the Aesthetic Object and Its Tradition” (1964). It discusses the origin story of Paul Valéry's dialogue Eupalinos. More than ten years after his letter to Paul Souday, Valéry returns to this prehistory and confirms that he had chosen the form of the dialogue for its elasticity and malleability. And there can be no doubt that it is this form that led to Socrates carrying the dialogue. All this, including the choice of the name “Eupalinos” — an ancient architect Valéry found in an encyclopedia — is of paramount facticity, which, if not labored, was certainly perceived as adequate. But this facticity, which befell the poet, was at the same time provoked by the needs of his poetic self-understanding — and was, of course, stylized in retrospect.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2018 (3) ◽  
pp. 269-281
Author(s):  
Stefan Majetschak

Abstract At present, the theoretical approaches of Baumgarten and Kant continue to constitute the framework for discussing the nature of aesthetic judgments about art, including the question of what such judgments are really articulating. In distinction to those two eighteenth-century theorists, today we would largely avoid an assumption that aesthetic judgments necessarily attribute beauty to the objects being judged; we would as a rule take a far more complex approach to the topic. But whatever we say about art, even today many theorists wish to ground aesthetic judgments in particularities of the aesthetic object, like Baumgarten, or in specific moments of the aesthetic experience, like Kant.


Mind ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 129 (516) ◽  
pp. 1127-1156 ◽  
Author(s):  
C Thi Nguyen

Abstract There seems to be a deep tension between two aspects of aesthetic appreciation. On the one hand, we care about getting things right. Our attempts at aesthetic judgments aim at correctness. On the other hand, we demand autonomy. We want appreciators to arrive at their aesthetic judgments through their own cognitive efforts, rather than through deferring to experts. These two demands seem to be in tension; after all, if we want to get the right judgments, we should defer to the judgments of experts. How can we resolve this tension? The best explanation, I suggest, is that aesthetic appreciation is something like a game. When we play a game, we try to win. But often, winning isn’t the point; playing is. Aesthetic appreciation involves the same flipped motivational structure: we aim at the goal of correctness, but having correct judgments isn’t the point. The point is the engaged process of interpreting, investigating, and exploring the aesthetic object. When one defers to aesthetic testimony, then, one makes the same mistake as when one looks up the answer to a puzzle, rather than solving it for oneself. The shortcut defeats the whole point. This suggests a new account of aesthetic value: the engagement account. The primary value of the activity of aesthetic appreciation lies in the process of trying to generate correct judgments, and not in having correct judgments.


1971 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 221
Author(s):  
Allan Shields

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 478-498 ◽  
Author(s):  
Varvara Kobyshcha

In studying visual and plastic arts, social researchers tend to assume that an aesthetic object is pre-given to a viewer who does not participate in the process of the object’s becoming. They problematise the aesthetic status of an artwork, but not its objectness. This article shows that audience perception, considered as interaction and situated practice, does not merely define the meanings and emotions attached to a certain object, but plays a constitutive role in the object’s physical state and its very existence as an object, i.e. as an integrated unity extracted from its surroundings and affording a direct, intensive encounter. Synthesising the conceptual resources of Hennion’s pragmatics of taste, Simmel’s aesthetic theory, gestalt theory, and social phenomenology, I explain various ways an object in the situation of perception happens and achieves a certain mode of existence or fails to happen and disappears. The article is based on three empirical examples derived from the ethnographic study of the open-air land art/architectural festival ‘Archstoyanie’. The first case illustrates how an object is extracted from the environment and the festival’s infrastructure; the second, how the visitors destroy the incomplete boundaries of an object so that it dissolves into the surroundings; and the third, how an object maintains its integrity despite its inner complexity and multiple centres that attract the visitor’s attention.


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