Title & Author:

Aesthetics equals politics : new discourses across art, architecture, and philosophy / Mark Foster Gage, editor ; Matt Shaw, managing editor.

Publication:

Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, [2019]

Description:

viii, 317 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Notes:
Includes bibliographical references.
The new foundations of aesthetic discourse. Introduction / Mark Foster Gage -- Politics equals aesthetics : a conversation between Jacques Rancière and Mark Foster Gage -- Building and breath : beauty and the pact of aliveness / Elaine Scarry -- A new sense of mimesis / Graham Harman -- Use the force / Timothy Morton -- Framing the aesthetic. In pursuit of the allusive object / Ferda Kolatan -- Aesthetics postdigital / Adam Fure -- The aesthetics of abstraction / Michael Young -- Aesthetics and the politics of practice. Cosmogramic design : a cultural model of the aesthetic response / Nettrice R. Gaskins -- Absolutely small : sketch of an anarchist aesthetic / Roger Rothman -- Aesthetics as alienation / Diann Bauer -- Reorienting criticism : against an a priori reductionism / Matt Shaw -- The unbearable lightness of architectural aesthetic discourse / Albena Yaneva and Brett Mommersteeg -- Aesthetic alternatives. Bigdog, or, the precarious aesthetics of tumbling / Lydia Kallipoliti -- Feral architecture / Ariane Lourie Harrison -- Architecture, deep and cryptic / Rhett Russo -- Aesthetic critique/aesthetic activism / Peggy Deamer -- The strangers among us / Caroline Picard.

Summary:

How aesthetics--understood as a more encompassing framework for human activity--might become the primary discourse for political and social engagement. These essays make the case for a reignited understanding of aesthetics--one that casts aesthetics not as illusory, subjective, or superficial, but as a more encompassing framework for human activity. Such an aesthetics, the contributors suggest, could become the primary discourse for political and social engagement. Departing from the "critical" stance of twentieth-century artists and theorists who embraced a counter-aesthetic framework for political engagement, this book documents how a broader understanding of aesthetics can offer insights into our relationships not only with objects, spaces, environments, and ecologies, but also with each other and the political structures in which we are all enmeshed. The contributors--philosophers, media theorists, artists, curators, writers and architects including such notable figures as Jacques Rancire, Graham Harman, and Elaine Scarry--build a compelling framework for a new aesthetic discourse. The book opens with a conversation in which Rancirë tells the volume's editor, Mark Foster Gage, that the aesthetic is "about the experience of a common world." The essays following discuss such topics as the perception of reality; abstraction in ethics, epistemology, and aesthetics as the "first philosophy"; Afrofuturism; Xenofeminism; philosophical realism; the productive force of alienation; and the unbearable lightness of current creative discourse.

ISBN:

9780262039437 hardcover ; alkaline paper
0262039435 hardcover ; alkaline paper

Subject:

Aesthetics Political aspects.
08.41 esthetics.
17.92 comparative literature: general.
20.06 philosophy of art.
Ästhetik
Politik
Aesthetics.

Added entries:

Gage, Mark Foster, editor.

Holdings:

Location: Library main 304674
Call No.: BIB 250334
Status: Available