Description
This volume brings philosophers, art historians, intellectual historians, and literary scholars together to argue for the philosophical significance of Michael Fried’s art history and criticism. It demonstrates that Fried’s work on modernism, artistic intention, the ontology of art, theatricality, and anti-theatricality can throw new light on problems in and beyond philosophical aesthetics. Featuring an essay by Fried and articles from world-leading scholars, this collection engages with philosophical themes from Fried’s texts, and clarifies the relevance to his work of philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, Morris Weitz, Elizabeth Anscombe, Arthur Danto, George Dickie, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schiller, G. W. F. Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Denis Diderot, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Roland Barthes, Jacques Rancière, and Søren Kierkegaard. As it makes a case for the importance of Fried for philosophy, this volume contributes to current debates in analytic and continental aesthetics, philosophy of action, philosophy of history, political philosophy, modernism studies, literary studies, and art theory.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Michael Fried and Philosophy
Mathew Abbott
1. Modernism and the Discovery of Finitude
Mathew Abbott
2. "When I raise my arm": Michael Fried’s Theory of Action
Walter Benn Michaels
3. Why Does Photography Matter as Art Now, as Never Before? On Fried and Intention
Robert Pippin
4. Schiller, Schopenhauer, Fried
David Wellbery
5. Deep Relationality and the Hinge-like Structure of History: Michael Fried’s Photographs
Stephen Mulhall
6. Becoming Medium
Stephen Melville
7. Formulism and the Appearance of Nature
Richard Moran
8. Michael Fried, Theatricality, and the Threat of Skepticism
Paul J. Gudel
9. Michael Fried’s Intentionality
Rex Butler
10. On the (So-Called) Problem of Detail: Michael Fried, Roland Barthes, and Roger Scruton on Photography and Intentionality
Diarmuid Costello
11. The Aesthetics of Absorbtion
Magdalena Ostas
12. Grace and Equality, Fried and Rancière (and Kant)
Knox Peden
13. Diderot’s Conception of Aesthetic Subjectivity and the Possibility of Art
Andrew Kern
14. The Promise of the Present: Michael Fried’s Poetry Now
Jennifer Ashton
15. Constantin Constantius Goes to the Theater
Michael Fried
