Aesthetics of the twentieth century

Emerged in the twentieth century, are the main movements of contemporary aesthetics. They fit in the particular concern of the language (central question of philosophy of the twentieth century and the emergence of new sciences.


Phenomenology: Being and Art

Starry Night, 1889, Van Gogh

Later approaches artistoteliciennes of Being and Time, is from 1933 in the text "The original work of art" studying the poetry of Hölderlin and the painting of Van Gogh, that 'appear aesthetic concerns of Heidegger (1889-1976). This moves the whole question ontological ( "What is being?") On the arts. In its approach to phenomenological, it means the work of art as an implementation of an unveiling (Aletheia) of the Being of beings. Opposing well aware objectivist (which establishes the truth by a comparison with the idea of reality), Heidegger defines art as the preferred means of an "implementation of the truth by the mind: The development en carried out by a dual process, bringing into light (revelation) and reserve (dissimulation), or control (technical) between "World" man and "Earth."

"Only through the work of art, as the being who is, that anything that appears elsewhere and is already confirmed and there is available, investigate and understandable, as being contrary or as non-existent. Because art (Kunst), in a sense signal, the door to be held in the work and it shows as being, he can claim as the power-save-in short-work, such as techne. "- Heidegger


The Frankfurt School: Utopia and art industry

The philosophers of the Frankfurt School are strongly influenced by materialist thought, inspired by Marxism and the study of crises of the twentieth century. Their design is based on a critical analysis of social sciences and a study of mass culture.

For Adorno (1903-1969), especially in his Aesthetic Theory (1970), art remains an area of freedom, challenge and creativity in a technocratic world. Art has a critical role vis-à-vis society, and remains a utopia, if it rejects his own past (conservatism, dogmatism, serialism). Adorno also oppose the facilities of mass culture (cultural industry)

Benjamin among his subjects of study disparate, including developing the concept of the will of the artwork (1917), it extends further to the study of photography and film, and the reproducibility of technical works Art. The concept has become an important critique of the contemporary art (ready-made, Warhol)


Aesthetics "the difference"


Jean-François Lyotard
Gilles Deleuze: Immanence, events, Baroque
Jacques Derrida: Deconstruction and dissemination of aesthetics


Aesthetics Analytical

Fountain of Marcel Duchamp, 1917.

Emerged in the 1950s, analytic aesthetics is the mainstream thinking in the Anglo-Saxon. Outcome of the empiricism and pragmatism, this aesthetic is based on research by instruments and logico-philosophical analysis of language in the extension of analytic philosophy. This aesthetic is formed by a set of consistent theories, related mainly to the analysis of issues and definitions of art. These theories assert beyond aesthetics "traditional", as the restriction of its objects (are excluded: the question of beauty, the history of aesthetics) than the specific record of his research methods (to Referring to the logical and not speculative). The metaphysical approach follows this trend, including the "forms of truth"
"The aesthetic claims to record a new version of the aesthetic, a way of conceiving that cuts its tradition as a unique language that we pretend to substitute the common language in which it would be difficult to translate." - Dominique Chateau.

The first important works of aesthetics are following the posthumous publication of Philosophical Investigations (1953) Wittgenstein around the theory of language games better able to allow analysis of under ordinary language: for example, the word " art "or the question" What is Art? "(" What is art? "without identifying grammatical). This research is in constant dialogue with the works of avant-garde of the contemporary art, including those of Duchamp and Warhol. The analytical approach included: indéfinissabilité art (Weitz, "The role of theory in aesthetics," 1956; Mandelbaum); the institutionalization of art (Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic. An Institutional Analysis, 1974), the "art world" (Dickie, Danto) identification of the work of art (Danto, The Transfiguration of the commonplace, 1981); aesthetic experience, art as a symbol (Goodman , Languages of Art, 1968).

This transition from "This is beautiful" to "This is Art" by Duchamp will question the definition of the word he has been given over the centuries. While being confronted with the taste, nothing escapes then the same aesthetics as something that we find "ugly" is primarily about a trial. So finally the definition of the word as synonymous with beautiful, beautiful can be seen as wrong (The term "unsightly" would not make sense then that when man will no longer be there to watch things).


The new science of art

The objects of aesthetics are also covered by some sciences have recently emerged, enriching the aesthetic of new theoretical and methodological approaches.


The social sciences, art and society

Two fans of art, the Musée d'Orsay.

In line with the cultural history of the nineteenth, the social history of art studies the collective forces working in the art. Opposing the idealistic philosophy, the sociology is initially influenced by Marxism (historical materialism), it highlights the main socio-economic and seeks to link the struggle for artistic development and social classes.

In opposition to determinism begins later Marxist approaches in place to separate the study of social contexts of art, more attentive to the internal mechanisms of the "art world": a study of contextual listing works in cultural background, including the cultural history and the anthropology of art (Levi-Strauss, Boas), a study sociology in the habit of art (Bourdieu), a sociology of action and interaction Contextual (Becker).

These new approaches to confront the art such as the common idea of a work born of a "free" inspiration of the artist, or a logical intrinsic aesthetic art and independent of social background . Also revealed are social mechanisms for receipt of works (distinction, codes ...). However, these social science evade the study of the works themselves, perhaps conferring a reductionism "social" in art is the basis for new approaches addressing not only environmental, but the practice see the work itself


Psychology of Art: mental processes of artistic creation and reception

The psychology of art is to study states of consciousness and phenomena unconscious at work in artistic creation or receipt of the work.

The analysis of artistic creation takes the idea of the primacy of the artist himself in the interpretation of art; idea developed from Renaissance and Romanticism, and already included in the biographical approach of some historians art of the nineteenth (See Kunstwissenschaft). Starting in 1905, with the draft by Freud's theory of instincts, art becomes an object of psychoanalysis. This approach does not assess the value of the work, but to explain the mental processes inherent in its development.
"Finding the relationship between the impressions of childhood and the destiny of the artist on one side and works as responses to these stimuli on the other hand, belongs to the most attractive object of screening -- Freud

This analysis is based particularly on the concept of sublimation; artistic creation is regarded as the transposition of an instinct (desire): the attempt to overcome the artist's dissatisfaction with the creation of a socially valued object, capable of meeting his desire. Similarly, by this approach, art is considered as a symptom: it becomes the tool can be a clinical diagnosis or therapy (art therapy).

The analysis extends the reception of Gestalt theory, Gestalt psychology (twentieth). This analysis of art seeks to determine the psychological processes of reception of works by the viewer. This reception is no longer regarded as mere perception and discovery (knowledge of the artist), but as recognition of knowledge specific audience, its own culture and social environment (Gombrich, Arnheim).

These psychological tests are extended through the various approaches to cognitive (cognitive psychology, philosophy of mind, etc.), including recent discoveries in neuroscience (nervous system: brain, senses, etc.), which deal with new ways the perception study or an aesthetic factors, even the concepts of creativity and of imagination.



Semiotics of art: the art of language and language of art

Umberto Eco

Following the theories of Ferdinand de Saussure and structuralism begins slowly up a semiotics of art. This "science of signs" examines not the motives or the meanings of works, but the mechanisms of significance (how the work means), the work is considered here as an area of signs and symbols, whose articulation is to decrypt .

The language works (eg pictorial language) is not considered a system identical to the language: in fact, this "language" is not composed of units devoid of meaning (such as phonemes language), or signs of pure convention. This language exists primarily by reports of analogy. While some codes specific to the language of art can be determined (the role of shape, orientation, scale ...), the involvement of actual hardware components (related to the subject: pigments, light. ..) still do not fully reduce the art of language systems.

Another approach to mediation semiotic analysis of the art in language (spoken and written), including the study of art discourse (description, criticism, etc.). This speech, considered a "meta-language 'works would be capable of clarifying the meaning of games in art. This approach has been variously criticized by philosophers and art historians because of its logocentrism, through reducing the visual works only with text (descriptive and interpretive), to the detriment of their materiality and aesthetic experience (the viewer)



Non-Western Aesthetics

Chinese Aesthetics: Confucius, Buddhism, Taoism, insipid, time ...
The Japanese aesthetic.
Indian Aesthetics:
The African aesthetic: Wise, oral tradition, through Western ethnological ...
Aesthetics Arab-Muslim


Indicative Bibliography


Manuscript on papyrus: The Banquet (v.380 BC.), Of Plato.
Structues of the founding philosophy of art or aesthetic reflection:
Hellenistic Aesthetic
Plato, The Banquet, Hippias Major, Phaedrus, Phaedo and The Republic
Aristotle, Poetics, Rhetoric and Policies (in music, including the book VIII)
Horace, Art of Poetry
Plotinus, the beautiful (I, 6)
Saint Augustine, Treatise on Music
Boethius, The Institution musical
Modern aesthetics
Boileau, Art poétique (1674)
Batteux, The Fine Arts Reduced to a single principle (1746)
Diderot, Salons (1759-1781) and Encyclopedia, article "Beau"
Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary Portable, Article "Beautiful"
Burke, Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757)
Hume, Essays aesthetic
Lessing, Laocoon (1766)
Kant, Observations on the feeling of beauty and the sublime (1764) and Critique of the judge (1790)
Aesthetic romantic
Hölderlin, Notes on Sophocles (1804) and Letter to Bohlendorff (December 4, 1801)
Hegel, Lectures on Aesthetics (1818-1829)
Schelling, Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and criticism (1797), Philosophy of Art (1802-1803) and Philosophy of Mythology (1842, 1847-1852)
Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation (1819, 1844) (wikisource)
Kierkegaard, The Alternative (1843), The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress (1848) and Point of View on my work as a writer (1851)
Baudelaire, Halls (1845, 1846, 1859) and L'Art Romantique (1869)
Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (1872) and The Case of Wagner (1888)
Contemporary Aesthetics
Abstract Art
Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1910)
Klee, Theory of Modern Art (published in 1998)
Surrealism
Breton, Manifestos of Surrealism (1924, 1930) and Surrealism and Painting (1928)
Marxism (social aesthetics)
Lukács, The Theory of the Novel (1916)
Bakhtin, aesthetics and theory of the novel (1978, posthumous)
Hermeneutics and phenomenology (aesthetic sense)
Heidegger, Essais et Conferences (trad. fr. 1958) and Paths that lead nowhere: "The origin of the artwork" (1950)
Gadamer, Truth and Method (1960)
Merleau-Ponty, The Eye and the Mind (1961)
Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1970)
Derrida, Dissemination (1972) and The Truth in Painting (1978)
Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor (1975)
Jauss, for an aesthetic of reception (trad. fr. 1975)
Eco, Lector in fabula (1979)
Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (1981) and What is Philosophy? (1991)
Castoriadis, Window on Chaos (published in 2007)
Jennifer Clancy, From Aesthetics of Violence, Reissue Comp'Act, 2004 [thesis with Gilles Deleuze]
Aesthetics Analytical
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1949) Lessons and conversations on aesthetics, psychology and religious belief (trad. fr. 1992)
Danto, The Art World (1964) and the transfiguration of the commonplace (1981)
Goodman, Languages of Art (1968)