Human Agency in the Asian City

Author(s):  
Shiqiao Li

Instead of yearning for absolute freedom as in the Western city, human agency as an idea seems to be generally understood as conditional in the Asian city. This chapter discusses the obscuring of indigenous urban traditions in Asia, the role of human agency in relation to the meanings of property ownership, conceptions of human labor, and the aesthetic experience of contingency, in an attempt to explore alternative ideas and practices of the place of human life in the environment. Human agency in Asian cities contains elements of intellectual and urban insights that have potential for future cities. However, these potentials and insights must be excavated and reformulated in order to gain theoretical and political efficacy in our fast-changing world today.

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.


2021 ◽  
pp. 003329412110021
Author(s):  
Sizhe Liu ◽  
Wei Zhang ◽  
Xianyou He ◽  
Xiaoxiang Tang ◽  
Shuxian Lai ◽  
...  

There is evidence that greater aesthetic experience can be linked to artworks when their corresponding meanings can be successfully inferred and understood. Modern cultural-expo architecture can be considered a form of artistic creation and design, and the corresponding design philosophy may be derived from representational objects or abstract social meanings. The present study investigates whether cultural-expo architecture with an easy-to-understand architectural appearance design is perceived as more beautiful and how architectural photographs and different types of descriptions of architectural appearance designs interact and produce higher aesthetic evaluations. The results showed an obvious aesthetic preference for cultural-expo architecture with an easy-to-understand architectural appearance design (Experiment 1). Moreover, we found that the aesthetic rating score of architectural photographs accompanied by an abstract description was significantly higher than that of those accompanied by a representational description only under the difficult-to-understand design condition (Experiment 2). The results indicated that people preferred cultural-expo architecture with an easy-to-understand architectural appearance design due to a greater understanding of the design, providing further evidence that abstract descriptions can provide supplementary information and explanation to enhance the sense of beauty of abstract cultural-expo architecture.


Children with Asperger syndrome still need to be adjusted, in regulating their emotion, to their enjoyment in an activity that will be their emotional allocation. Art is able to improve their self-ability, to strengthen their self-confidence, and also to re-shape lack of knowledge about their own identity. This is because activity of art becomes a collection of inspiration, the aspect of imagination that is closely related to the aesthetic experience. This was a qualitative research as a study intended to understand the phenomenon of something that is experienced by the subject of research. For example: behaviour, perception, motivation, and action in holistic way and described in form of words and language, in a specific-natural context and by utilizing various methods. The research findings show that ability of emotional regulation is the ability of the subject in receiving and understanding a command, and then in minimizing tantrum, so that the subject is able to achieve a treatment therapy; including the subject's ability to identify and draw an object or other objects around them, to recognize some painting tools and to answer questions orally or in writing through the image media. The therapy can be packaged through art education based on painting activity which is the advantage of an area itself. Schools present learning programs that also support character education and the creative potential of the children, so that they can live independently later.


Author(s):  
Budiyatmi Budiyatmi

Competition in all sectors and of human life : in local, national and global, requires the role of art education as a strategic choice. Arts education as part of character education is to obtain aesthetic experience and discover the value of beauty. Tomohon as one of the tourist city has a natural potential and very interesting to visit. Predicate ‘city of flowers’ is an attraction in itself too. Business opportunities in the field of Flora, make businessmen and investors keep to develop business in the field of this industrial. Then training dercoration art or art flower arrangement, became a media that needs to be selected in the creation of quality works. Media is easily obtained and if they supported with a design concept, this is can be interesting artwork in the middle of the competition and the development of applied arts. The charm of the plant is able to present the beauty of the room decor. They can complete by combining various types of flowers in a container, and inserted along with a variety of foliage. Set of parts of the plant will appear more attractive if they knew about the art of stringing. The problem is, there have some basic things who can make wild flowers or leaves to make it look attractive. Based on these ideas, skills need to be provided in an attempt to tackle the problem a lack of interest to pursue business in the field of art is one of the alternatives to bring in additional revenue source. Keywords: art education, aesthetic values, flora, flower, decoration.


2021 ◽  
pp. 199-202
Author(s):  
Beatriz Calvo-Merino

The article reviewed in this chapter discusses how questions initially originated in cognitive neuroscience can be answered with collaborations with nonscientific disciplines, such as performing arts. The author describes the first study that showed dancer’s brain activity when observing dance movements. By investigating how the expert brain works, they demonstrated the important role of sensorimotor processing for movement perception, emotion perception, and aesthetic judgment. This work opened a channel of communication between neuroscientists and performing artists, enabling conversations that have generated novel questions of interest to both disciplines. The chapter discusses three fundamental insights: the importance of prior experience for perception, the importance of motor representations for perception, and the existence of a system for embodied aesthetics. Finally, the author provides some consideration on neuroscientists’ capacity to dissect the aesthetic experience and how this knowledge can be absorbed by the performing artist during the artistic and choreographic process.


2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 146-169
Author(s):  
Roberta Dreon

This article explores the significance of Hegel’s aesthetic lectures for Dewey’s approach to the arts. Although over the last two decades some brilliant studies have been published on the “permanent deposit” of Hegel in Dewey’s mature thought, the aesthetic dimension of Dewey’s engagement with Hegel’s heritage has not yet been investigated. This inquiry will be developed on a theoretical level as well as on the basis of a recent discovery: in Dewey’s Correspondence traces have been found of a lecture on Hegel’s Aesthetics delivered in 1891 within a summer school run by a scholar close to the so-called St. Louis Hegelians. Dewey’s deep and long-standing acquaintance with Hegel’s Aesthetics supports the claim that in his mature book, Art as Experience, he originally appropriated some Hegelian insights. First, Dewey shared Hegel’s strong anti-dualistic and anti-autonomistic conception of the arts, resisting post-Kantian sirens that favored instead an interpretation of art as a separate realm from ordinary reality. Second, they basically converged on an idea of the arts as inherently social activities as well as crucial contributions to the shaping of cultures and civilizations, based on the proximity of the arts to the sensitive nature of man. Third, this article argues that an original re-consideration of Hegel’s thesis of the so-called “end of art” played a crucial role in the formulation of Dewey’s criticism of the arts and of the role of aesthetic experience in contemporary society. The author suggests that we read Dewey’s criticism of the removal of fine art “from the scope of the common or community life” (lw 10, 12) in light of Hegel’s insight that the experience of the arts as something with which believers or citizens can immediately identify belongs to an irretrievable past.


2017 ◽  
Vol 25 (51) ◽  
Author(s):  
Morten Kyndrup

The role and influence of Modernism is the focus of this article. Modernism’s lasting and unforeseeable influence is due to its key importance to the development of the general conditions of art within modernity. Along with Modernism, the implications of the modern system of art became visible for real. Modernism produced the necessity of rethinking the distinction between “art” and “the aesthetic,” based on their original foundations in the 18th century, respectively – a call for a “divorce” after the long-lived marriage between the two, installed by Romanticism. Furthermore so-called postmodernism and today’s contemporary art have in fact not, as often assumed, really broken with high Modernism. What we see is rather a transformation of a time-based modus into a more spatially defined approach. The interpretations of Modernism itself are thus being altered, when regarded with a postmodern awareness of its surrounding enunciative space. The interrelationship between the modernisms, and what followed, is therefore achieving the character of an entanglement rather than that of a straight and clear development. Modernism’s influence, it is finally asserted, is seemingly not at its conclusion, but rather at its reoccurring beginning.


2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 160-167
Author(s):  
Camilla Pagani

Background: According to the Latin poet Virgil, art is capable of revealing to us what no science can ever reveal to a human mind. The main thesis of this paper is that art can play an extremely beneficial role in society as it can strongly foster humans’ efforts to attain a deeper and broader comprehension of reality. Objective: The experience of art can provide a powerful contribution to the efforts to avoid resorting to violence and to address conflicts constructively. Violence or, more exactly, unjustified violence, basically rests on an irrational and short-sighted analysis and interpretation of reality. Results: The psychological processes relating to the aesthetic experience and to its connections with violence are described. It is also pointed out that this theoretical perspective does not fully coincide with the theoretical theses underpinning art therapy. In fact, in this paper art is not considered as a mere therapeutic instrument. Instead, an attempt has been made to consider art and our relationship with art in their more complex and partly still unexplored aspects, where neither art or the individual is “at the service” of the other. Conclusion: Art can provide the possibility to experience a new dimension, where no power relations exist and where new ways of seeing and feeling are made possible. It can hence foster the development of less primitive and richer personalities. In this way violence should lose its raison d’être. So it appears that this theoretical approach might be particularly helpful in order to better understand and countervail violence.


2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (5) ◽  
pp. 537-556
Author(s):  
David T. Schwartz

This paper examines Allen Carlson's influential view that knowledge from natural science offers the best (and perhaps only) framework for aesthetically appreciating nature for what it is in itself. Carlson argues that knowledge from the natural sciences can play a role analogous to the role of art-historical knowledge in our experience of art by supplying categories for properly 'calibrating' one's sensory experience and rendering more informed aesthetic judgments. Yet, while art history indeed functions this way, Carlson's formulation leaves out a second (and often more important) role played by art-historical knowledge over the last century - namely, providing the context needed for interpretations of meaning. This paper explores whether natural science can also inform our aesthetic experience of nature in this second sense. I argue that a robust sense of meaning from our aesthetic experience of nature is indeed made possible by coupling our aesthetic experience of animals with knowledge from the natural science of animal ethology. By extending the scope of Carlson's analogy to include interpretations of meaning, my argument shows that the cognitive, scientific model can accommodate a wider range of aesthetic engagement with nature than previously recognised.


2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
André G. Pinto

In this article I outline the idea of an empirical/experiential reconnection to the natural non-human world through the practice of deep listening. I believe that the aesthetic experience is central to a more ecological positioning of the human being on earth and that aesthetic experience should involve a ‘rewilding of the ear’. To discuss this concept, I build an argument from Edgard Varèse’s music as ‘organised sound’ and approach it from a perceptual point of view. This leads to the discussion of other concepts, such as David Dunn’s ‘grief of incommunicability’ (Dunn 1997) and Jean-François Augoyard and Henry Torgue’s ‘sharawadgi effect’ (Bick 2008). Further to this I discuss parallels between Truax’s continuum (Speech–Music–Soundscape) and Peirce’s semiotic system. Taking points from these theories, we can discuss the possibility of the re-tuning of our ears to the wider sound palette of the world. I consider George Monbiot’s concepts of ‘rewilding’ and ‘rewilding of the human life’ (Monbiot 2014), in order to create a parallel to our relationship with the soundscape.


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