The Aesthetics of Disturbance
| Author | : David Graver |
| Publisher | : University of Michigan Press |
| Total Pages | : 274 |
| Release | : 1995 |
| Genre | : Art |
| ISBN | : 9780472105076 |
Explores interconnections among early 20th-century visual, literary, and performance art
Peter Clenott
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The Aesthetics of Survival
| Author | : George Rochberg |
| Publisher | : University of Michigan Press |
| Total Pages | : 292 |
| Release | : 2004 |
| Genre | : Music |
| ISBN | : 9780472030262 |
A revised paperback edition of composer George Rochberg's landmark essays "Rochberg presents the rare spectacle of a composer who has made his peace with tradition while maintaining a strikingly individual profile. . . . [H]e succeeds in transforming the sublime concepts of traditional music into contemporary language." ---Washington Post "An indispensable book for anyone who wishes to understand the sad and curious fate of music in the twentieth century." ---Atlantic Monthly "The writings of George Rochberg stand as a pinnacle from which our past and future can be viewed." ---Kansas City Star As a composer, George Rochberg has played a leading role in bringing about a transformation of contemporary music through a reassessment of its relation to tonality, melody, and harmony. In The Aesthetics of Survival, the author addresses the legacy of modernism in music and its related effect on the cultural milieu, particularly its overemphasis on the abstract, rationalist thinking embraced by contemporary science, technology, and philosophy. Rochberg argues for the renewal of holistic values in order to ensure the survival of music as a humanly expressive art. A renowned composer, thinker, and teacher, George Rochberg has been honored with innumerable awards, including, most recently, an Alfred I. du Pont Award for Outstanding Conductors and Composers, and an André and Clara Mertens Contemporary Composer Award. He lives in Pennsylvania.
Wilderness Survival
| Author | : Anna Bak |
| Publisher | : |
| Total Pages | : 0 |
| Release | : 2015 |
| Genre | : Aesthetics |
| ISBN | : 9789491677427 |
Wilderness survival' is a basic guide for life in the wilderness and survivalism as a phenomenon. Wilderness can be seen as a physical space as well as a mental state. It is a theoretical, practical and philosophical understanding of the survivalist lifestyle. A guide to surviving either real or speculative dangers, survivalism as a poetic, contemporary, historic, social or creative lifestyle choice. This book gives you an insight to some of the main problems and challenges you may face in the wilderness, and provides basic tools to handle these situations.0In addition to the guidebook it includes 4 essays, short-stories and artists texts which put in perspective and visualize survivalism, and determine if and how you can prepare yourself for your future survival. Exhibition: Onomatopee Project Space, Eindhoven, The Netherlands (17.10-15.11.2015).
Survival of the Beautiful
| Author | : David Rothenberg |
| Publisher | : A&C Black |
| Total Pages | : 320 |
| Release | : 2013-01-01 |
| Genre | : Art |
| ISBN | : 1408830566 |
'The peacock's tail makes me sick!' said Charles Darwin. That's because the theory of evolution as adaptation can't explain why nature is so beautiful. It took the concept of sexual selection for Darwin to explain that, a process that has more to do with aesthetic taste than adaptive fitness. Survival of the Beautiful is a revolutionary new examination of the interplay of beauty, art, and culture in evolution. Taking inspiration from Darwin's observation that animals have a natural aesthetic sense, philosopher and musician David Rothenberg probes why animals, humans included, have an innate appreciation for beauty - and why nature is, indeed, beautiful.
Expression and Survival
| Author | : Craig Greenman |
| Publisher | : Cambridge Scholars Publishing |
| Total Pages | : 110 |
| Release | : 2009-03-26 |
| Genre | : Philosophy |
| ISBN | : 1443807850 |
Philosophers know suicide primarily as an ethical problem. But in Expression and Survival, Craig Greenman argues that, when it comes to suicide, the standard ethical approach may do more harm than good. He develops instead an aesthetic approach, arguing that art–making it or experiencing it–can help a suicidal person survive. Drawing on the work of philosophers and artists, as well as his own experiences, Greenman guides the reader through the landscape to which many suicidal people feel condemned. He traces the problem back to antagonism–we harm others and they harm us–and argues that art, broadly construed, can help us survive it. The result will be of interest to ethicists, aestheticians, social and political philosophers, therapists, and anyone who has ever struggled with suicide. Also included in this volume are two essays, “Writing and Ambivalence” and “What Is Philosophy?”
The Longing for Less
| Author | : Kyle Chayka |
| Publisher | : Bloomsbury Publishing USA |
| Total Pages | : 273 |
| Release | : 2020-01-21 |
| Genre | : Art |
| ISBN | : 1635572118 |
The New Yorker staff writer and Filterworld author Kyle Chayka examines the deep roots-and untapped possibilities-of our newfound, all-consuming drive to reduce. “Less is more”: Everywhere we hear the mantra. Marie Kondo and other decluttering gurus promise that shedding our stuff will solve our problems. We commit to cleanse diets and strive for inbox zero. Amid the frantic pace and distraction of everyday life, we covet silence-and airy, Instagrammable spaces in which to enjoy it. The popular term for this brand of upscale austerity, “minimalism,” has mostly come to stand for things to buy and consume. But minimalism has richer, deeper, and altogether more valuable gifts to offer. In The Longing for Less, one of our sharpest cultural critics delves beneath the glossy surface of minimalist trends, seeking better ways to claim the time and space we crave. Kyle Chayka's search leads him to the philosophical and spiritual origins of minimalism, and to the stories of artists such as Agnes Martin and Donald Judd; composers such as John Cage and Julius Eastman; architects and designers; visionaries and misfits. As Chayka looks anew at their extraordinary lives and explores the places where they worked-from Manhattan lofts to the Texas high desert and the back alleys of Kyoto-he reminds us that what we most require is presence, not absence. The result is an elegant synthesis of our minimalist desires and our profound emotional needs. With a new afterword by the author.
Breathing Aesthetics
| Author | : Jean-Thomas Tremblay |
| Publisher | : Duke University Press |
| Total Pages | : 146 |
| Release | : 2022-08-29 |
| Genre | : Literary Criticism |
| ISBN | : 147802349X |
In Breathing Aesthetics Jean-Thomas Tremblay argues that difficult breathing indexes the uneven distribution of risk in a contemporary era marked by the increasing contamination, weaponization, and monetization of air. Tremblay shows how biopolitical and necropolitical forces tied to the continuation of extractive capitalism, imperialism, and structural racism are embodied and experienced through respiration. They identify responses to the crisis in breathing in aesthetic practices ranging from the film work of Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta to the disability diaries of Bob Flanagan, to the Black queer speculative fiction of Renee Gladman. In readings of these and other minoritarian works of experimental film, endurance performance, ecopoetics, and cinema-vérité, Tremblay contends that articulations of survival now depend on the management and dispersal of respiratory hazards. In so doing, they reveal how an aesthetic attention to breathing generates historically, culturally, and environmentally situated tactics and strategies for living under precarity.
Why Only Art Can Save Us
| Author | : Santiago Zabala |
| Publisher | : Columbia University Press |
| Total Pages | : 218 |
| Release | : 2017-09-05 |
| Genre | : Philosophy |
| ISBN | : 0231544960 |
The state of emergency, according to thinkers such as Carl Schmidt, Walter Benjamin, and Giorgio Agamben, is at the heart of any theory of politics. But today the problem is not the crises that we do confront, which are often used by governments to legitimize themselves, but the ones that political realism stops us from recognizing as emergencies, from widespread surveillance to climate change to the systemic shocks of neoliberalism. We need a way of disrupting the existing order that can energize radical democratic action rather than reinforcing the status quo. In this provocative book, Santiago Zabala declares that in an age where the greatest emergency is the absence of emergency, only contemporary art’s capacity to alter reality can save us. Why Only Art Can Save Us advances a new aesthetics centered on the nature of the emergency that characterizes the twenty-first century. Zabala draws on Martin Heidegger’s distinction between works of art that rescue us from emergency and those that are rescuers into emergency. The former are a means of cultural politics, conservers of the status quo that conceal emergencies; the latter are disruptive events that thrust us into emergencies. Building on Arthur Danto, Jacques Rancière, and Gianni Vattimo, who made aesthetics more responsive to contemporary art, Zabala argues that works of art are not simply a means of elevating consumerism or contemplating beauty but are points of departure to change the world. Radical artists create works that disclose and demand active intervention in ongoing crises. Interpreting works of art that aim to propel us into absent emergencies, Zabala shows how art’s ability to create new realities is fundamental to the politics of radical democracy in the state of emergency that is the present.
The Evolution of Beauty
| Author | : Richard O. Prum |
| Publisher | : Anchor |
| Total Pages | : 436 |
| Release | : 2017-05-09 |
| Genre | : Science |
| ISBN | : 0385537220 |
A FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, SMITHSONIAN, AND WALL STREET JOURNAL A major reimagining of how evolutionary forces work, revealing how mating preferences—what Darwin termed "the taste for the beautiful"—create the extraordinary range of ornament in the animal world. In the great halls of science, dogma holds that Darwin's theory of natural selection explains every branch on the tree of life: which species thrive, which wither away to extinction, and what features each evolves. But can adaptation by natural selection really account for everything we see in nature? Yale University ornithologist Richard Prum—reviving Darwin's own views—thinks not. Deep in tropical jungles around the world are birds with a dizzying array of appearances and mating displays: Club-winged Manakins who sing with their wings, Great Argus Pheasants who dazzle prospective mates with a four-foot-wide cone of feathers covered in golden 3D spheres, Red-capped Manakins who moonwalk. In thirty years of fieldwork, Prum has seen numerous display traits that seem disconnected from, if not outright contrary to, selection for individual survival. To explain this, he dusts off Darwin's long-neglected theory of sexual selection in which the act of choosing a mate for purely aesthetic reasons—for the mere pleasure of it—is an independent engine of evolutionary change. Mate choice can drive ornamental traits from the constraints of adaptive evolution, allowing them to grow ever more elaborate. It also sets the stakes for sexual conflict, in which the sexual autonomy of the female evolves in response to male sexual control. Most crucially, this framework provides important insights into the evolution of human sexuality, particularly the ways in which female preferences have changed male bodies, and even maleness itself, through evolutionary time. The Evolution of Beauty presents a unique scientific vision for how nature's splendor contributes to a more complete understanding of evolution and of ourselves.
