The State as a Work of Art

The State as a Work of Art
Author: Eric Slauter
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 387
Release: 2009-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 0226761959

The founding of the United States after the American Revolution was so deliberate and monumental in scope that the key actors considered this new government to be a work of art framed from natural rights. Recognizing the artificial nature of the state, these early politicians believed the culture of a people should inform the development of their governing rules and bodies. The author explores these central ideas in this account of the origins and meanings of the U.S. Constitution. He reveals the cultural histories upon which the document rests, highlights the voices of ordinary people, and considers how the artifice of the state was challenged in its effort to sustain inalienable natural rights alongside slavery and to achieve political secularization at a moment of growing religious expression.

William Morris and the Aesthetic Constitution of Politics

William Morris and the Aesthetic Constitution of Politics
Author: Bradley J. Macdonald
Publisher:
Total Pages: 208
Release: 1999
Genre: Art
ISBN:

In this book, Bradley Macdonald offers a brilliant reappraisal of one of the most influential and revered British intellectuals of the Victorian age. William Morris was, by turns, an artist, writer, social critic, and political radical. Here, Macdonald focuses on the interplay between Morris' aesthetic vision and his socialist ideology. He argues compellingly that, because these two sides of Morris' personality have generally been examined by art or literary historians and social theorists respectively, their integral relationship has often been lost sight of.

Law and the Image

Law and the Image
Author: Costas Douzinas
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 292
Release: 1999-06
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780226569543

Discussing the diverse relationships between law and the artistic image, this book includes coverage of the history of the relationship between art and law, and the ways in which the visual is made subject to the force of the law.

The Changing Constitution of the Present

The Changing Constitution of the Present
Author: Jacob Lund
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2022-11-15
Genre: Art
ISBN: 3956796403

How our experience of presence, time, and history is articulated in contemporary artistic practices. Our present is defined by contemporaneity: the interconnection of heterogeneous times, histories, and temporalities. These many and various times do not merely exist in parallel with one another, simultaneously. Rather, they interconnect and are brought to bear on the same present, forming a sort of planetary present, and—at least in principle—a global sharing of time, although one not shared equally. In The Changing Constitution of the Present: Essays on the Work of Art in Times of Contemporaneity, Jacob Lund explores how the conditions for politically engaged art and aesthetic practice, for questioning the present, have changed in recent decades, while considering how our historical present and its temporal quality differ significantly from previous presents.

Plastic Sovereignties

Plastic Sovereignties
Author: Arne De Boever
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 416
Release: 2017-04-19
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0748684999

Does sovereignty have a future in the 21st century?Through a sustained engagement with the work of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, and against the background of contemporary political phenomena, Arne De Boever explores what positive political possibilities the notion of sovereignty might still hold. Using the philosophy of Catherine Malabou, he argues that these possibilities reside in an aesthetic reconceptualisation of sovereignty as a plastic power that is able to give, receive and explode the forms of our political future.

The Aesthetics of Global Protest

The Aesthetics of Global Protest
Author: Aidan McGarry
Publisher: Protest and Social Movements
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2019-12-09
Genre: Aesthetics
ISBN: 9789463724913

Protestors across the world use aesthetics in order to communicate their ideas and ensure their voices are heard. This book looks at protest aesthetics, which we consider to be the visual and performative elements of protest, such as images, symbols, graffiti, art, as well as the choreography of protest actions in public spaces. Through the use of social media, protestors have been able to create an alternative space for people to engage with politics that is more inclusive and participatory than traditional politics. This volume focuses on the role of visual culture in a highly mediated environment and draws on case studies from Europe, Thailand, South Africa, USA, Argentina, and the Middle East in order to demonstrate how protestors use aesthetics to communicate their demands and ideas. It examines how digital media is harnessed by protestors and argues that all protest aesthetics are performative and communicative.

The Aesthetic Imperative

The Aesthetic Imperative
Author: Peter Sloterdijk
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2018-03-15
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 074569988X

In this wide-ranging book, renowned philosopher and cultural theorist Peter Sloterdijk examines art in all its rich and varied forms: from music to architecture, light to movement, and design to typography. Moving between the visible and the invisible, the audible and the inaudible, his analyses span the centuries, from ancient civilizations to contemporary Hollywood. With great verve and insight he considers the key issues that have faced thinkers from Aristotle to Adorno, looking at art in its relation to ethics, metaphysics, society, politics, anthropology and the subject. Sloterdijk explores a variety of topics, from the Greco-Roman invention of postcards to the rise of the capitalist art market, from the black boxes and white cubes of modernism to the growth of museums and memorial culture. In doing so, he extends his characteristic method of defamiliarization to transform the way we look at works of art and artistic movements. His bold and original approach leads us away from the well-trodden paths of conventional art history to develop a theory of aesthetics which rejects strict categorization, emphasizing instead the crucial importance of individual subjectivity as a counter to the latent dangers of collective culture. This sustained reflection, at once playful, serious and provocative, goes to the very heart of Sloterdijk’s enduring philosophical preoccupation with the aesthetic. It will be essential reading for students and scholars of philosophy and aesthetics and will appeal to anyone interested in culture and the arts more generally.

Political Aesthetics in the Era of Shakespeare

Political Aesthetics in the Era of Shakespeare
Author: Christopher Pye
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2020-06-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0810142198

The turn to political concerns in Renaissance studies, beginning in the 1980s, was dictated by forms of cultural materialism that staked their claims against the aesthetic dimension of the work. Recently, however, the more robustly political conception of the aesthetic formulated by theorists such as Theodor Adorno and Jacques Rancière has revitalized literary analysis generally and early modern studies in particular. For these theorists, aesthetics forms the crucial link between politics and the most fundamental phenomenological organization of the world, what Rancière terms the “distribution of the sensible.” Taking up this expansive conception of aesthetics, Political Aesthetics in the Era of Shakespeare suggests that the political stakes of the literary work—and Shakespeare’s work in particular—extend from the most intimate dimensions of affective response to the problem of the grounds of political society. The approaches to aesthetic thought included in this volume explore the intersections between the literary work and the full range of concerns animating the field today: political philosophy, affect theory, and ecocritical analysis of environs and habitus.