American Aesthetics

2020-05-01 Philosophy

Author : Walter B. Gulick
Release : 2020-05-01
Genre : Philosophy
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 577/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis American Aesthetics by : Walter B. Gulick

Download or read book American Aesthetics written by Walter B. Gulick. This book was released on 2020-05-01. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although there are distinctly American artists--Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Grandma Moses, Thomas Hart Benton, and Andy Warhol, for example--very little attention has been devoted to formulating any distinctively American characteristics of aesthetic judgment and practice. This volume takes a step in this direction, presenting an introductory essay on the possibility of such a distinctly American tradition, and a collection of essays exploring particular examples from a variety of angles. Some of the essays in this collection extend pragmatist and process insights about the important place aesthetics has in molding and assessing experience. Other essays examine the place of American aesthetics in relation to such particular forms of art as painting, literature, music, and film. Three essays attend to the aesthetic aspects of a flourishing life. In each of the essays, American aesthetics is understood to arise out of deeply felt personal, historical, and cultural backgrounds. Consequently, not only are such relatively abstract notions as harmony, fit, elegance, proportion, and the like involved in aesthetic judgment, but also religious, political, and social factors become embroiled in aesthetic discernment. Thus the ongoing pattern of American aesthetics is shown to be distinguishable from such other varieties of aesthetic thought as analytic aesthetics, New Criticism, and postmodern approaches to aesthetics.

Arab American Aesthetics

2018-01-19 Social Science

Author : Therí Pickens
Release : 2018-01-19
Genre : Social Science
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 527/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Arab American Aesthetics by : Therí Pickens

Download or read book Arab American Aesthetics written by Therí Pickens. This book was released on 2018-01-19. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arab American Aesthetics enlists a wide range of voices to explore, if not tentatively define, what could constitute Arab American aesthetics in literature, material culture, film, and theatre. This book seeks to unsettle current conversations within Arab American Studies that neglect aesthetics as a set of choices and constraints. Rather than divorce aesthetics from politics, the book sutures the two more closely together by challenging the causal relationship so often attributed to them. The conversations include formal choices, but also extend to the broad idea of what makes a work distinctly Arab American. That is, what about its beauty, ugliness, sublimity, or humor is explicitly tied to it as part of a tradition of Arab American arts? The book opens up the ways that we discuss Arab American literary and fine arts, so that we understand how Arab American identity and experience begets Arab American artistic enterprise. Split into three sections, the first offers a set of theoretical propositions for understanding aesthetics that traverse Arab American cultural production. The second section focuses on material culture as a way to think through the creation of objects as an aesthetic enterprise. The final section looks at narratives in theatre and how the impact of such a medium has the potential to recreate in both senses of the word: play and invention. By shifting the conversation from identity politics to the relationship between politics and aesthetics, this book provides an important contribution to Arab American studies. It will also appeal to students and scholars of ethnic studies, museum studies, and cultural studies.

African American Arts

2019 ART

Author : Sharrell D. Luckett
Release : 2019
Genre : ART
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 569/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis African American Arts by : Sharrell D. Luckett

Download or read book African American Arts written by Sharrell D. Luckett. This book was released on 2019. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Signaling recent activist and aesthetic concepts in the work of Kara Walker, Childish Gambino, BLM, Janelle Monáe, and Kendrick Lamar, and marking the exit of the Obama Administration and the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, this anthology explores the role of African American arts in shaping the future, and further informing new directions we might take in honoring and protecting the success of African Americans in the U.S. The essays in African American Arts: Activism, Aesthetics, and Futurity engage readers in critical conversations by activists, scholars, and artists reflecting on national and transnational legacies of African American activism as an element of artistic practice, particularly as they concern artistic expression and race relations, and the intersections of creative processes with economic, sociological, and psychological inequalities. Scholars from the fields of communication, theater, queer studies, media studies, performance studies, dance, visual arts, and fashion design, to name a few, collectively ask: What are the connections between African American arts, the work of social justice, and creative processes? If we conceive the arts as critical to the legacy of Black activism in the United States, how can we use that construct to inform our understanding of the complicated intersections of African American activism and aesthetics? How might we as scholars and creative thinkers further employ the arts to envision and shape a verdant society?"--

Abstractionist Aesthetics

2015-12-25 Art

Author : Phillip Brian Harper
Release : 2015-12-25
Genre : Art
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 435/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Abstractionist Aesthetics by : Phillip Brian Harper

Download or read book Abstractionist Aesthetics written by Phillip Brian Harper. This book was released on 2015-12-25. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An artistic discussion on the critical potential of African American expressive culture In a major reassessment of African American culture, Phillip Brian Harper intervenes in the ongoing debate about the “proper” depiction of black people. He advocates for African American aesthetic abstractionism—a representational mode whereby an artwork, rather than striving for realist verisimilitude, vigorously asserts its essentially artificial character. Maintaining that realist representation reaffirms the very social facts that it might have been understood to challenge, Harper contends that abstractionism shows up the actual constructedness of those facts, thereby subjecting them to critical scrutiny and making them amenable to transformation. Arguing against the need for “positive” representations, Abstractionist Aesthetics displaces realism as the primary mode of African American representational aesthetics, re-centers literature as a principal site of African American cultural politics, and elevates experimental prose within the domain of African American literature. Drawing on examples across a variety of artistic production, including the visual work of Fred Wilson and Kara Walker, the music of Billie Holiday and Cecil Taylor, and the prose and verse writings of Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, and John Keene, this book poses urgent questions about how racial blackness is made to assume certain social meanings. In the process, African American aesthetics are upended, rendering abstractionism as the most powerful modality for Black representation.

Quaker Aesthetics

2003-01-26 Art

Author : Emma Jones Lapsansky-Werner
Release : 2003-01-26
Genre : Art
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 927/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Quaker Aesthetics by : Emma Jones Lapsansky-Werner

Download or read book Quaker Aesthetics written by Emma Jones Lapsansky-Werner. This book was released on 2003-01-26. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The notion of a uniquely Quaker style in architecture, dress, and domestic interiors is a subject with which scholars have long grappled, since Quakers have traditionally held both an appreciation for high-quality workmanship and a distrust of ostentation. Early Quakers, or members of the Society of Friends, who held "plainness" or "simplicity" as a virtue, were also active consumers of fine material goods. Through an examination of some of the material possessions of Quaker families in America during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, the contributors to Quaker Aesthetics draw on the methods of art, social, religious, and public historians as well as folklorists to explore how Friends during this period reconciled their material lives with their belief in the value of simplicity. In early America, Quakers dominated the political and social landscape of the Delaware Valley, and, because this region held a position of political and economic strength, the Quakers were tightly connected to the transatlantic economy. Given this vantage, they had easy access to the latest trends in fashion and business. Detailing how Quakers have manufactured, bought, and used such goods as clothing, furniture, and buildings, the essays in Quaker Aesthetics reveal a much more complicated picture than that of a simple people with simple tastes. Instead, the authors show how, despite the high quality of their material lives, the Quakers in the past worked toward the spiritual simplicity they still cherish.

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