Description
Aesthetics: A Reader in Philosophy of the Arts, fourth edition, contains a selection of ninety-six readings organized by individual art forms as well as a final section of readings in philosophical aesthetics that cover multiple art forms. Sections include topics that are familiar to students such as painting, photography and movies, architecture, music, literature, and performance, as well as contemporary subjects such as mass art, popular arts, the aesthetics of the everyday, and the natural environment. Essays are drawn from both the analytic and continental traditions, and multiple others that bridge this divide between these traditions. Throughout, readings are brief, accessible for undergraduates, and conceptually focused, allowing instructors many different syllabi possibilities using only this single volume.
Key Additions to the Fourth Edition
The fourth edition is expanded to include a total of ninety-six essays with nineteen new essays (nine of them written exclusively for this volume), updated organization into new sections, revised introductions to each section, an increased emphasis on contemporary topics, such as stand-up comedy, the architecture of museums, interactivity and video games, the ethics of sexiness, trans/gendered beauty, the aesthetics of junkyards and street art, pornography, and the inclusion of more diverse philosophical voices. Nevertheless, this edition does not neglect classic writers in the traditional aesthetics: Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Collingwood, Bell, and writers of similar status in aesthetics. The philosophers writing new chapters exclusively for this fourth edition are:
• Sondra Bacharach on street art
• Aili Bresnahan on appreciating dance
• Hina Jamelle on digital architecture
• Jason Leddington on magic
• Sheila Lintott on stand-up comedy
• Yuriko Saito on everyday aesthetics
• Larry Shiner on art spectacle museums in the twenty-first century
• Peg Brand Weiser on how beauty matters
• Edward Winters on the feeling of being at home in vernacular architecture, as in such urban places as bars.
Table of Contents
Table of contents
Special Acknowledgements for the 4th Edition
General Introduction
Part 1: Painting
Against Imitation
Plato
The Limits of Likeness
Ernst Gombrich
Reality Remade
Nelson Goodman
The "Perfect" Fake
Nelson Goodman
Artistic Crimes
Denis Dutton
Form in Modern Painting
Clive Bell
A Formal Analysis
Edmund Burke Feldman
Intentional Visual Interest
Michael Baxandall
Works of Art and Mere Real Things
Arthur C. Danto
The Origin of the Work of Art
Martin Heidegger
Why Are There No Great Women Artists?
Linda Nochlin
Painting and Ethics
A. W. Eaton
Art and Corruption
David Alfaro Siqueiros
Part II: Photography and Moving Pictures
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Walter Benjamin
Transparent Pictures
Kendall L. Walton
Why Photography Does Not Represent Artistically
Roger Scruton
The Hubble Photographs as Aesthetic Objects
Flo Leibowitz
Architectural Photography: The "Urban Photogénie" of Architainment
Jennifer Burris
How Beauty Matters
Peg Brand Weiser
Allegory of the Cave
Plato
Towards an Ontology of the Moving Image
Noël Carroll
Moving Pictures
Arthur C. Danto
Woman as Image, Man as Bearer of the Look
Laura Mulvey
Beauty and Evil: The Case of Leni Riefenstahl
Mary Devereaux
The Last King of Scotland—The Ethics of Race on Film
Paul C. Taylor
Part III: Architecture
The Problem of Architecture
Roger Scruton
Home is Where the Heart Is: Taking Architecture Personally
Edward Winters
Ornament and Crime: Tattoos
Adolf Loos
Towards an Architecture
Le Corbusier
Architecture as Decorated Shelter
Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown
A Discussion of Architecture (with Christopher Norris)
Jacque Derrida
How to Experience Architecture
Jenefer Robinson
Spectacular vs. Deferential Art Museums in the 21st Century
Larry Shiner
Architectural Ghosts
Jeanette Bicknell
Digital Architecture and the New Elegance
Hina Jamelle
Part IV: Music
On the Concept of Music
Jerrold Levinson
Ontology of Music
Ben Caplan and Carl Matheson
Making Tracks: The Ontology of Rock Music
Andrew Kania
Is Live Music Dead?
Lee B. Brown
The Expression of Emotion in Music
Stephen Davies
Representation in Music
Roger Scruton
Sound and Semblance
Peter Kivy
African Music
John Miller Chernoff
Jazz and Language
Robert Kraut
A Topography of Musical Improvisation
Philip Alperson
Fakin’ It: Is There Authenticity in Commercial Music?
Theodore Gracyk
Can White People Sing the Blues?
Joel Rudinow
Social Consciousness in Dancehall Reggae
Anita M. Waters
Part V: Literature
What is Literature?
Terry Eagleton
The Poetic Expression of Emotion
R. G. Colingwood
The Paradox of Expression
Garry L. Hagberg
The Intention of the Author
Monroe C. Beardsley
What is an Author?
Michel Foucault
Criticism as Retrieval
Richard Wollheim
Beneath Interpretation
Richard Shusterman
The Art of Writing
Lu Chi
How to Eat a Chinese Poem
Richard Bodman
Imagination and Make-Believe
Gregory Currie
Part VI: Performance
Ion
Plato
On Tragedy
Aristotle
The Birth of Tragedy
Friedrich Nietzsche
What Is Going On in a Dance?
Monroe C. Beardsley
Working and Dancing
Noël Carroll and Sally Banes
Appreciating Dance: The View from the Audience
Aili Bresnahan
Literature as a Performing Art
J. O. Urmson
The Artwork as Performance
David Davies
Why (not) Philosophy of Stand-up Comedy?
Sheila Lintott
Ventriloquism and Art
David Goldblatt
Magic: The Art of the Impossible
Jason Leddington
Part VII: Mass Art
Defining Mass Art
Noël Carroll
Plato and the Mass Media
Alexander Nehamas
Adorno’s Case Against Popular Music
Lee B. Brown
In Defense of Popular Arts
Richard Shusterman
Television and Aesthetics
Umberto Eco
Relating Comics, Cartoons, and Animation
Henry John Pratt
Videogames, Interactivity and Art
Grant Tavinor
Is It Only a Game? The Ethics of Video Game Play
Stephanie Patridge
Part VIII: Nature and Everyday Aesthetics
Aesthetic Appreciation of the Natural Environment
Allen Carlson
Everyday Aesthetics
Yuriko Saito
Kitsch
Robert Solomon
The Aesthetics of Junkyards
Thomas Leddy
Nonsense in Public Places: Songs of Black Vocal Rhythm and Blues or Doo-Wop
David Goldblatt
Street Art
Sondra Bacharach
Jokes
Ted Cohen
Racist Humor
Luvell Anderson
A Sensible Anti-Porn Feminism
A. W. Eaton
Falling in Lust: Sexiness, Feminism, and Pornography
Hans Maes
Part IX: Art in General
Of the Standard of Taste
David Hume
The Sublime
Edmund Burke
Judgments about the Beautiful
Immanuel Kant
The Philosophy of Fine Art
G. W. F. Hegel
Aesthetic Concepts
Frank Sibley
Categories of Art
Kendall L. Walton
The Role of Theory in Aesthetics
Morris Weitz
Art and Natural Selection
Denis Dutton
Feminism in Context
Peg Brand Weiser
Contributors
