Aesthetic Claims Research Articles

On documentary style: ‘anti-graphic photography’ between the Wars

Olivier Lugon's Le Style documentaire. D'August Sander a Walker Evans, 1920–1945, published in 2001, is a thought-provoking book on the ‘documentary style’, a term once used by Walker Evans to distinguish his own artistic purpose from the propagandistic aims then associated with documentary photography. Lugon argues that Evans's works of the 1930s should be considered as testimonies of a style in its own right, and includes in his discussion the work of photographers such as August Sander, Albert Renger-Patzsch and Berenice Abbott. The present study discusses Lugon's meticulous argument. Objections can be made against the author's point that distinctions between the ‘New Objectivity’ and the following ‘documentary style’ are evident, and that Evans's own style agenda—often used as a means of characterising his oeuvre but fully developed as a category only by Lugon—does properly mirror his and his colleagues' practice during the thirties. It is argued here that the more one follows the path of style criticism, the more ambiguous historical concepts and facts become, and that acceptance of Evans's self-apology deflects attention from a long-established tradition of charging documentary pictures with aesthetic claims.

The Last of the Mohicans ou l'incarnat de la nation

The Last of the Mohicans defines the colour red as an embattled imaginary site for negotiating political and aesthetic claims. While devising narrative tactics which eradicate the “Red Skins” from the national landscape, this “Narrative of 1757” fantasizes in retrospect the advent of an all-white nation that could yet declare the legacy of the colour red as the mark of its indigenous character. Aesthetically, the novel pursues contradictory aims: if the colour red is foregrounded as the sign of the new nation’s vitality, it must nevertheless be subdued, as it conjures up the genocidal violence unleashed by territorial conquest. This study suggests how the romance exposes the myth of a “substantial” colour as an ideological construct supporting the dream of a “natural” nation. It then argues that in scenes of cross-dressing and face painting, Cooper’s text, exploring the use of the colour as cosmetics, also becomes the vehicle of metamorphic shapes which defeat the plot’s monochromatic scheme.

‘To create and cherish a true southern literature’: Genre, Gender and Authorship in William Gilmore Simms's Answer toUncle Tom's Cabin

AbstractSince its publication in 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe'sUncle Tom's Cabinhas challenged its readers to respond to the interlocking rhetorics of gender and genre in the aesthetics of sentimentality. Whilst critical reclamations of the novel at the end of the twentieth century have located the novel in a tradition of female readers and writers, few readings have sought to understand the novel's aesthetics within the specific context of southern male responses and criticisms of the novel. This article interrogates William Gilmore Simms's self‐proclaimed answer to Stowe through his refiguring of established notions of gender and genre in the aesthetic claims of his southern plantation hero Captain Porgy for men of the South. Contextualised within the critical discourses of fact and fiction voiced by leading southern intellectuals published in the southern press and Simms's own developing critical language in the 1840s and 1850s, this article identifies Simms's ‘sensible’ southern man as a model of southern male authorship that sought to reconcile Stowe's antithetical aesthetic spaces of the masculine marketplace and the feminine home.

The Roles of the Aesthetic in Mathematical Inquiry

Mathematicians have long claimed that the aesthetic plays a fundamental role in the development and appreciation of mathematical knowledge. To date, however, it has been unclear how the aesthetic might contribute to the teaching and learning of school mathematics. This is due in part to the fact that mathematicians' aesthetic claims have been inadequately analyzed, making it difficult for mathematics educators to discern any potential pedagogical benefits. This article provides a pragmatic analysis of the roles of the aesthetic in mathematical inquiry. It then probes some of the beliefs and values that underlie mathematical aesthetic responses and reveals the important interplay between the aesthetic, cognitive, and affective processes involved in mathematical inquiry.

How Should Historians Think about ‘The Gangs of New York’?

Although ‘Gangs of New York’ offers a gritty and remarkable spectacle of working‐class life in New York City before the Civil War, it is likely to disappoint social historians. Even well‐made historical dramas usually do. If historians want to understand why, they must go beyond critiques of the inaccuracies of particular films, and analyse how the relations of production in culture industries make such an outcome probable. Because cultural products demand novelty and originality, directors, screenwriters, set designers and other cultural workers have some leverage with the corporate executives who ultimately control the production process. Struggles over the production process are often fought on an ideological terrain of art versus money. Cultural workers thus see their assertion of superior artistic and aesthetic vision as a weapon in the politics of production. They do not value the analytical and factual concerns of historians because to do so potentially undermines their aesthetic claims to control the product.

Art and Identity

Early works that advanced narrative understanding of the self, such as Alastair MacIntyre's After Virtue, came as refreshing change from more standard discussions of the metaphysics of identity. The speed at which this conception was embraced is testament to its intuitive power; by now the narrative model of the self holds an almost hegemonic position in theories of identity and has become commonplace to talk of the self as narrative construct. But the popularity of this model has also meant that has undergone very little critical review since its early development. I wish here to raise some questions about the aptness of this model for capturing the complexity of the self and, by highlighting some of its limitations, to suggest possible avenues for broadening the narrative conception into fuller and more nuanced account of identity. To suggest that the self is narrative, or the product of narrative, is implicitly to say that the self is work of art. It is an artwork of particular type-a literary work-that is created by the practice of telling stories. Unlike theories that posit the self as substance on the model of the metaphysics of things, this position has at its heart an aesthetic view of the self as the product of creative and imaginative practice of very specific kind. And while is great theoretical potential in the investigation of the subject along these lines, such an exploration will have to broaden its scope to consider more than literary art forms as the basis for self-identity. While the self may be formed in part by the telling of stories, I will argue that is also formed by much more and has facets that cannot be captured by strict understanding of narrative. At present, the narrative model is the only aesthetic conception of the self available and this conception does not, for the most part, admit or explore its aesthetic roots. The Narrative Self Marya Schechtman, in her recent work The Constitution of Selves, writes: The cornerstone of the narrative self-constitution view is the claim that person's identity is created by self-conception that is narrative in form. More broadly put, this means that constituting an identity requires tthat an individual conceive of his life as having the form and logic of story-more specifically, the of person's life-where story is understood as conventional, linear narrative.1 This view-or ones very similar to it-is prevalent in both psychological and philosophical circles, having been advanced by Donald Spence, Roy Schafer, Donald Polkinghorne, and Jerome Bruner in psychology, and by (among others) Paul Ricoeur, Alistair MacIntyre, and Charles Taylor in philosophy.2 I will take Schechtman's statement as paradigmatic of narrative theory,3 pointing to specific departures from as they become relevant. The narrative theory of the self has much in common with hermeneutic or interpretationalist accounts of identity, such as Charles Taylor's, which hold that the self is (at least in part) constructed through our interactions with others and with the cultural horizon in which we live. It is by our interpretive and imaginative reconstructions, these accounts suggest, that we make sense of the world and our lives-and thereby gain sense of identity. Paul Ricoeur adopts this basic hermeneutic stance, and cautions that there is no self-knowledge without some kind of detour through signs, symbols and cultural works.4 And Joseph Margolis makes stronger aesthetic claim when he notes that the complexities of the art world are the inseparable mates of what is required in understanding ourselves as selves;5 the key to grasping the human subject for Margolis will be the same for understanding both the cultural horizon and the art that condition it. But is the kind of detour we make through our cultural horizons that provides the specific mark of narrative theory. For Ricoeur, self-interpretation finds in narrative a privileged mediation;6 it is in telling our own stories that we give ourselves an identity. …

Quantum field theories and aesthetic disparity

The theoretical physicist Paul Dirac rejected, explicitly on aesthetic grounds, a successful theory known as quantum electrodynamics (QED), which is the prototype for the family of theories known as quantum field theories (QFTs). Remarkably, the theoretical physicist Steven Weinberg, also largely on aesthetic grounds, supports QED and other QFTs. In order to evaluate these opposing aesthetic views a short introduction to the physical properties of QFTs is presented together with a detailed analysis of the aesthetic claims of Dirac and Weinberg. It turns out that Dirac rejected QED, without regard to its success, because this theory fails to yield to what he perceived as beautiful mathematics, whereas Weinberg's support of QFTs is founded primarily on the physical concepts of the theories. In particular, he relies on symmetries that are the basis for the construction of the extremely successful current fundamental theories of particles physics. This success was decisive in leading to Weinberg's conviction of the beauty of QFTs. As a result of the evaluation of these approaches, the factors causing scientists to perceive a theory as being a fundamentally beautiful theory are discussed in detail.

The gendered paragone in late sixteenth-century art theory: Francesco Bocchi and Jacopo Pontormo's S. Lorenzo frescoes1

Jacopo Pontormo's frescoes of the Last Judgement and Deluge in the choir of the Medici church of S. Lorenzo (1546-56) in Florence were the most prestigious Florentine commission during the mid-Cinquecento. Yet, their appearance remains unknown to modern scholars since they were painted over in the eighteenth century during a period of reforming zeal. To reconstruct the programme of the frescoes modern scholars have been forced to rely on preparatory drawings, on an etching made of the choir of S. Lorenzo during the funerary ceremonies for Philip II in 1598 (only the upper range of frescoes is represented): and on descriptions of the narrative and style of the frescoes in contemporary sources. The desire to use these textual sources as verbal documents of the original appearance of the frescoes had led scholars to overlook evidence of another kind, which arises from the complex rhetorical roles these descriptions play within the art criticism and theory of the period. I contend that in these texts, Pontormo's work at S. Lorenzo functions like a fault line where the political, epistemological, aesthetic and historiographic claims of Cinquecento art theory and criticism are tested and submitted to criticism.

"The Poetess" and Poe's Performance of the Feminine

ELIZA RICHARDS "The Poetess" and Poe's Performance of the Feminine . . . forms that no man can discover For the tears that drip all over . . . Poe, "Dream-Land"|oe's aesthetic discourse registers a ctisis of masculine literary sentiment sparked by the influx of women poets to the American marketplace in the 1830s and 40s. At this time, white, middleclass women, supposed embodiments of the emotions associated with privatized domestic life, gained greater sanction not only to write, but also to publish in the most "intimate" of forms, lyric poetry. "The whole tendency of the age is Magazine-ward," Poe proclaims in 1846, and women poets were invited to cultivate this potentially wayward public medium with genteel literary sentiments (Marginalia 139). Concerned that this emerging group might be more constitutionally suited to write poetry than they, male writers sought to define a specifically masculine literary sensibility. Stabilizing the shifting ground of aesthetic authority required delicacy, however, in order not to alienate female readers; for just as women entered the market in unprecedented numbers as producers of literature, they were also gaining influence as a powerful class of literary consumers.1 Poe's solution to the dilemma of women's encroachment in the literary domain did not lie in a simple dismissal of female achievement, because women's attention, both personal and literary, was extremely Arizona Quarterly Volume 55, Number 2, Summer 1999 Copyright © 1999 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004- 1 610 Eliza Richards important to his poetic practices. Instead, he imagined women poets in ways that seek to reconcile their multiple roles: muse, literary competitor , and audience for his own poetry. While designating women as the "natural" site of poetic utterance, Poe also argues that poetic "truth" lies in a theatrical performance of the feminine.2 Identifying women poets with his poetic images of women, Poe enacts a drama of evacuation within his poems in which he drains women of their! poetic potency while claiming that the transfer of powers is in the spirit of feminine mimicry. For an audience of women poets, Poe himself performs a "feminine" poetry which simultaneously mirrors and upstages their own practices. He extends and consolidates these aesthetic claims in his criticism , an almost exclusively male genre in the 1840s. Reappraising the impact of these forgotten women poets upon a canonical figure presents new ways to understand the work of canonical writers, the canonization process, and the structure and habits of American literary criticism.3 Imagining women as the power generators of poetic discourse, Poe's critical interest in their work is extensive and sustained. Although his reviews of women poets outnumber those of male poets in his later criticism , they are rarely treated in studies of his poetics.4 When not ignored altogether, these frequently positive reviews are usually dismissed as either a display of vapid gallantry or an aberration in taste bearing little relation to his more serious considerations of male peers such as Hawthorne and Longfellow. In his own time, however, Poe was considered a leading—and by far the most rigorous—critic of female writers, discriminating at one point between "poetesses (an absurd but necessary word)," and female poets worthy of admiration and serious critique (Marginalia 58-59). To the second category belonged writers like Frances Sargent Osgood, Sarah Helen Whitman, Elizabeth Barrett, Amelia Welby, and Elizabeth Oakes Smith. In a review of Barrett's Drama of Exile, Poe laments that "the inherent chivalry of the critical man" results in the "unhappy lot of the authoress to be subjected, time after time, to the downright degradation of mere puffery" (Complete 12: 1). Poe promises, in contrast, to pay Barrett the respect of telling her "the truth" about her work (2). While proving Poe's critical pronouncements "sincere" at any juncture would be a hopeless task, his critical treatment of women poets is comparable to that of their male counterparts. Poe's critical pronouncements on women's poetry are torn between delimiting a separate character for female genius and rewarding poet- Poe's Performance of the Feminine esses by welcoming them into the male world of the "poet." Poe trounces anthologist Rufus Griswold, for example, for elevating "aristocrats " over "poets" in...

Realism, Supervenience, and Irresolvable Aesthetic Disputes

Three familiar and widely endorsed aesthetic theses get us into trouble, I will argue here; trouble, at least if we desire to avoid subjectivism regarding the ascription of aesthetic properties. Some of us have been trying to have our cake and eat it too, and the only plausible resolution of the problem puts us on a notably different diet whose palatability needs testing. The three theses are: (1) the relational analysis of aesthetic properties, (2) the supervenience of aesthetic properties upon purely descriptive, nonaesthetic properties, and (3) the existence of irresolvable disputes, even among experts, concerning the aesthetic features of artworks. The relational analysis of aesthetic properties claims that a work's having an aesthetic property, F, such as grace, power, or starkness, is for it to have some set of (other) features and relations which makes the work evoke in some relevant class of perceivers or critics certain responses and judgments, including the judgment that it is appropriate to call the work F. Difficult details aside, the plausibility of viewing at least many aesthetic properties as higher order relational properties connecting the evaluative responses of a class of standard or ideal perceivers to lower level properties and relations of the work has long been acknowledged, especially in the empiricist tradition of aesthetics. Supervenience has a shorter (though hardly less BritishI) history. It is usually construed as a metaphysical dependency relation between two sets of properties, but it also has obvious epistemological implications for the rational ascription of the properties that supervene on the "base" set. The idea can be informally stated as, "No difference in supervenient properties without a difference in base properties." More clearly, and specifically about aesthetic properties, we can say that if the aesthetic properties of a work supervene on sets of base properties, then it is impossible that the work should have been different in its aesthetic properties without having been different in some of its base properties.2 It could also be said, following Simon Blackburn,3 that supervenience amounts to a ban on "mixed" aesthetic worlds, worlds in which some objects with identical base properties have F while others do not. Supervenience has been thought by many writers to be importantly related to the logic of aesthetic justification, since it both explains why certain properties of works are cited in defense of one's aesthetic ascriptions and also seems to lend metaphysical respectability to aesthetic properties, much in the way that mental or moral properties seem less occult if tied by supervenience to physical properties of various sorts. The third thesis is one that experience indicates is difficult to deny. Among the many and variously caused types of aesthetic disagreements, there are some at least which cannot be explained by citing a lack of attention, care, knowledge, sensitivity, openness, or taste on the part of at least one of the disputants. Some disagreements are fully informed but just as fully irresolvable, as when two expert critics disagree whether a given painting is playful or merely trite, daring in its color treatments or just gaudy, serious or only self-absorbed, and so forth. Often such disputes arise because there is not complete agreement between the disputants over values, or more subtly, because they "weight" mutually recognized values somewhat differently. In short, their tastes, even if reasonably congruent, are not identical. I am confident that I am not alone in finding these claims plausible, and I also confess to rea-

Kierkegaard on Tragedy

Aristotle says in the Poetics that tragedy is teleological, that it appeals to singularity at its optimum, yet is not different from it (1448a 17, 1460b34). Tragedy is oriented toward the future, not toward the past (1451 a36-1451 b 12). Still, tragedy is unable to shed that past (1453a8). Action in tragedy always takes place within a context, not in a void. Insofar as tragedy is oriented toward its telos, it speaks of possibility, but that emerges within a horizon, within a given circumstance that is unchangeable but by no means unambiguous. Tragedy suffers from a condition of thrownness that at the same time is its possibility, or, as the author of Concept of Anxiety would have it, its of possibility (SV 6, 136; CA 42). condition of thrownness and changes the mood (Stemning) of tragedy. It is this mood that has been captured in an essay awkwardly titled The Ancient Tragical Motif as Reflected in the Modern found together with other aesthetic essays in the first volume of Either/Or, edited by one Victor Eremita, supposedly a Kierkegaardian pseudonym. In this essay, it is suggested that the teleological nature of tragedy is its ultimate purpose (SV 2,132; EOI 143). If this is true, tragedy makes more than aesthetic claims; its intent is to do more than entertain. Indeed, it would appear, tragedy also posits an ethic, at least indirectly. This (concealed) conditional of tragedy (SV 2, 13031; EOI 140-41) suits Kierkegaard's purposes well. In the present article, I question Kierkegaard's use of tragedy as an indirect communication, a communication that attempts to conceal itself in aesthetic language but is disclosed in its thematic approach for the particular circumstances of Either/Or may have contributed to conceal the excesses of the essay on tragedy. I To even begin to understand the essay on tragedy in Either/Or, not to mention Either/Or as a whole, it is necessary to withdraw to some distance where other Kierkegaardian works can be brought to bear on the interpretive task. From such a distance, the ironic form of the work is revealed. That this work should embody the ironic form is not surprising. It is Kierkegaard's first publication after his dissertation on Concept of Irony with Constant Reference to Socrates. Now Kierkegaard wants to experiment with this communicative device, to put it to work, so to speak, in order to unconceal that other side of irony that only hesitatingly allows itself to be revealed-and, as we shall see, how much is revealed is entirely dependent upon how the text is read. first thing Kierkegaard does is to invent a most ironic way to present this new work-not write it, but present it--a circumstance, we shall argue, that affects the reading of the essay on tragedy. name of the editor of Either/Or, Victor Eremita, supposedly a pseudonym,3 literally means solitary victor. While there is neither a victor nor victory in either volume of Either/Or, the first volume especially underscores the problematic of the isolation of the modern individual, and in that sense the editor of the work has become part of it. This individuality is consumed by forgetting and therefore unknowingly suffers the loss of background, the loss of an inherent sense of belonging. other, who is radically other, has been concealed in her own isolation. Ethically there is no immediate relation between subject and subject. When I have understood another subject, its actuality is for me a possibility, and this thought [tcnkt] actuality is related qua just as my own thinking of something I have not yet done is related to my doing it. (SV 10, 26; CUP 285) first volume of Either/Or is a phenomenology of modern (aesthetic) existence that spans every level, from cool abstraction, where only the quantitative is considered weighty, to the madness of excessive reflective concretization. This phenomenology scathingly portrays the futility and obsessive nature of a preoccupation with self-pleasing, indirectly communicating that such an existence is inauthentic but unaware of its inauthenticity. …

The Persistence of Repeated Errors

A review of the past four annual plastic surgery claims review panels shows a disappointing persistence of the same complaints. It is always the hope of any risk manager that the distilled wisdom gained from past mistakes, intensely relevant to the daily practice of plastic surgeons and transmitted in an intelligible fashion, will have some effect on future behavior. Regrettably, in the case of aesthetic surgery claims, it has not. Despite numerous efforts to stimulate awareness among our colleagues, we are still plagued with persistently poor documentation and preoperative photographs, inadequate informed consents, and insufficient patient selection criteria. Following are some examples of what gives medical malpractice risk management people acute heartburn. Despite repeated warnings, a continual flow of totally avoidable claims directly linked to smoking still occurs. In at least three recent cases involving wide tissue undermining procedures, such as face lift and breast surgery, the patients were heavy smokers. As a result, they suffered sloughs or sloppy healing, causing poor scars. If a patient is a heavy smoker (a pack or more per day), the surgeon should consider declining or postponing surgery or should carefully document that the patient was warned of possible complications if he or she continued to smoke. If the surgery is to proceed after a “no smoking” period, we advise at least a 1-month postponement and a separate statement signed by the patient stating that he or she has not smoked for that period. One such case involved a 35-year-old patient who saw her aesthetic surgeon for breast reduction surgery. Her breast size at that time was 40EE, and this caused pain across her back and up her neck. The surgeon, who had advised the patient to stop smoking 1 month before surgery, performed a bilateral breast reduction without incident. Ten days later the …

Class Attitudes and Ambiguous Aesthetic Claims

Class Attitudes and Ambiguous Aesthetic Claims