Basis Of Aesthetics Research Articles

Acoustical modeling of Russell Johnson’s Singapore projects.

The University of Florida Acoustics Lab had the pleasure of working with Russell Johnson and others at Artec in acoustical modeling of several halls, most notably, the Singapore concert and opera rooms. It was truly a pleasure to meet with the talented multidisciplinary staff that Russell put together at Artec to address the development of what can arguably be called the Concert Hall of the 21st Century: a traditional concert room that is amazingly adaptable through reverberation chambers, moving canopies, and adjustable absorption to a wide range of venues and a wide range of architectural styles. The inherently architectural and aesthetic basis Russell used to develop his style inspired a generation of architectural and acoustics students who worked on these projects with us.

Fashion as Art; is Fashion Art?

The question whether fashion can be regarded as a form of art begs the question of what kinds of things can legitimately be thus regarded.<brp>In the first section, some of the most recent contributions to dealing with this issue are critically analyzed. The conclusion that emerges is that—like art—clothes can provide the subject of historical research. The second section deals with the aesthetics of clothes. If sartorial fashion can be a form of art then we need an aesthetics of fashion. Whilst it would be difficult to contest the artistic quality of clothes throughout the centuries, fashion—like architecture—fulfills primarily a functional dimension. Some of the key concepts pertaining to classical aesthetics, such as taste in the writings of Edmund Burke, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, and Immanuel Kant with special reference to Kant's less well-known writings on anthropology under which he classified fashion, are discussed. Some of the more recent contributions such as Curt J. Ducasse's brilliant 1944 article “The Art of Personal Beauty” are also discussed in this section. Finally, Karen Hanson in her article “Dressing Up, Dressing Down: The Philosophic Fear of Fashion” addresses this important issue, arguing that—like dance perhaps—fashion has systematically been disregarded by philosophers as a worthy subject of research. Like so many articles in Fashion Theory, this article is an attempt to redress this balance by seeking new ways of providing a serious theoretical and aesthetic basis for the study of sartorial fashion.

Islamic Aesthetics: An Alternative Way to Knowledge

One important difference between Islamic and Western aesthetics is that, in the former, there has been little if any critical discourse on art and beauty until very recently. Yet, from the eighth to the thirteenth centuries, a vast literature related to the arts, from architecture to poetry and music, existed in Islamic countries. This literature was initially stimulated by the translations of classical texts, such as those of Plato, Aristotle, and Euclid. These translations were soon followed by Arabic texts that developed ideas of theory and practice, which have become classical references in the Islamic artworld. Guilru Necipoglu's The Topkapi Scroll, an important modern source on the aesthetic basis of arts and crafts in the medieval Is-

Language Evolution (review)

Reviewed by: Language evolution ed. by Morten H. Christiansen and Simon Kirby Stephen R. Anderson Language evolution. Ed. by Morten H. Christiansen and Simon Kirby. (Studies in the evolution of language.) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. xviii, 395. ISBN 0199244839. $165 (Hb). A great many discussions of the evolution of human language enjoy pointing out the celebrated clause in the 1866 constitution of the Société de linguistique de Paris (SLP) to the effect that ‘[l]a Société n’admet aucune communication concernant … l’origine du langage’.1 This is usually presented simply as a quaint eccentricity on the part of those silly French, but there is more to it than that. In fact, the sentence in question goes on to prohibit with equal force any discussion of ‘la création d’une langue universelle’2 such as Esperanto or Volapük, and we may well ask what these two topics have in common. Unfortunately, the original discussion by the charter members of the SLP is not preserved.3 It is not hard, though, to see a commonality in the fact that both topics conduce to discussion that tends to proceed on the basis of aesthetics and personal opinion alone, unconstrained by the inconvenience of external facts; and the SLP proposed to devote its attention to the science of language. Whether we judge that the French were all that silly after all depends on the extent to which we feel we can conduct discussions about the evolution of language on a genuinely scientific basis. We certainly know a great deal more in a great many relevant areas than in 1866: biological [End Page 894] anthropology, neurophysiology, animal communication and cognition, and linguistics itself, including sign language studies, to name only a few. The topic has been enthusiastically taken up by a great many card-carrying scientists, and books about it (such as this one) are reviewed in Science (and by a linguist, no less: Carstairs-McCarthy 2004). One might presume, then, that the onus has shifted to those who would mock the discussion of language origins as the mere spinning of ‘just-so’ stories. The editors of this collection certainly believe this is the case, and their goal here is to provide ‘the foundation for courses on the evolution of language’ (vii) by establishing the basis of the subject in the science of a number of neighboring disciplines. To some extent, they surely succeed. It is fair to ask, however (with Frederick Newmeyer and Derek Bickerton in this collection), whether the resulting discussion is equally well grounded in the science of language itself. Surely a prerequisite for any treatment of the evolution of human language is an understanding of just what has evolved and from what origins (if any). We know, that is, that in the absence of severe pathology, every normal human acquires and uses language naturally, along a path that at least resembles other aspects of maturation (Anderson & Lightfoot 2002). By contrast, no nonhuman animal can be brought to control more than the most elementary aspects of such a system, even with extensive training (Anderson 2004). It seems apparent that some combination of factors that are part of our species-specific biology underlies this difference. The task, then, is to determine what those factors are, what antecedents (if any) they may have had in species ancestral to our own, and how evolutionary pressures have shaped these antecedents so as to yield the ‘language organ’ with which we are endowed. Anyone who thinks that the research agenda in the study of language evolution should be clear from these considerations need only consult Hauser et al. 2002, Pinker and Jackendoff’s (2005) reply to that article, and Fitch and colleagues’ (2005) rejoinder, to be disabused of that notion. Here, as elsewhere in the literature, some confusion results from the fact that in understanding the explicanda of language evolution research, some scholars see the delineation of aspects of the language faculty that have risen completely de novo in human evolution as the central problem, while others focus equally on factors that have evolved in a distinctive way related to language, whether or not they have homologues in other species...

Venous Thromboembolism Prophylaxis

The term venous thromboembolism (VTE) has been coined to refer to the collective diseases of deep vein thrombosis (DVT) and pulmonary embolism (PE). Each year, an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 deaths are attributed to PE. Although the incidence appears to be lower in plastic surgery, with little published in the literature, it is a subject of great concern to specialty surgeons who operate on a purely elective aesthetic basis. Recently, increasing attention has been paid to the prevention of VTE in plastic surgery. This is evident in the numerous articles being published to educate physicians on this very preventable disease. This article is a part of that mission, embarking on identifying risk factors and establishing prophylaxis guidelines. At the end of this article, readers should have an understanding of the pathophysiology, incidence, and risk factors associated with VTE as well as the current prophylactic recommendations that should be considered in the aesthetic patient.

Interdisciplinary Opera Studies

I hold this truth to be self-evident: that an art form consisting of a literary text, a dramatic stage performance, and music should be studied in all its multimedia and “multimediated” dimensions (Kramer,Opera25). Today I can make this statement with confidence because the academic study of opera indeed covers all those aesthetic bases, but that has not always been the case. So long as opera fell primarily within the domain of musicology, it was studied first and foremost as music alone. The fact that the music was written for a specific dramatic text was not deemed particularly significant. The very name given to that text betrayed a belief in its secondariness: the diminutivelibretto.But things have been changing: in recent years, some musicologists have challenged the dominant positivistic historicism and formalism of their discipline; some have even looked to literary theory for inspiration, bringing new approaches to the music of opera through narratology (e.g., Abbate) or semiotics (e.g., Nattiez). But just as important for opening up the study of opera as an aesthetic and cultural form has been the attention of scholars working in other disciplines. To take but one example, Peter Rabinowitz's rhetorical narrative theory introduced new ways of thinking about opera as narrative, not only as drama and, more pointedly, not only as drama with thecomposerin the role of dramatist (Kerman). It was opera, not dance, for example, that became a focus for interdisciplinary studies; already multimediated, it attracted diverse lines of inquiry. To cite the title of David Levin's groundbreaking 1994 volume, we can now see “opera through other eyes.” (Musical theater too has been seen through other—especially literary—eyes, but that is not the focus of this piece [see, e.g., Most; Miller; Rabinowitz].)

Schubert's Sonata Forms and the Poetics of the Lyric

ABSTRACT Although recent scholarship has witnessed a welcome disavowal of the view that Schubert's formal and tonal designs in sonata form compositions bespeak the song composer's inability to master large-scale instrumental genres, it remains a commonplace to characterize Schubert's unorthodox practice as “lyrical.” Yet the historical, theoretical, and aesthetic bases of this lyricism have received little critical attention. A systematic and historically grounded approach to the notion of lyrical form in Schubert may be established by appealing to the rhetorical distinction between hypotaxis and parataxis, which pervaded late 18th-century discussions of both music and language. In particular, parataxis, a style that deliberately omits syntactical connections and relies instead on juxtaposition and parallelism, offers a suggestive technical link between Schubert's instrumental practice and the discursive techniques of contemporaneous lyric poetry. There are also aesthetic connections between idealist views of the lyric and the composer's own artistic beliefs, as confirmed by biographical documents. Schubert's approach to form was as much informed by these literary sensibilities as by the Classical compositional tradition. Like poets for whom the lyric served both as an Arcadian ideal of song and as an alternative to the prosaic realities of the present, Schubert evoked the lyric within the context of the sonata as a means of reunifying the dissociated sensibility of the Enlightenment. In so doing, he secured a place for the poetic imagination in instrumental music.

Introduction

this collection offers a variety of perspectives on culture in contemporary china. we begin and end with pieces by jing wang and deborah davis on the production and consumption of culture in general, before moving on to three specific areas: visual culture, music and poetry. jing wang's opening piece on “bourgeois bohemians” (bobos) in china revolves around the all-important question of how taste is constructed and a multiplicity of lifestyles imagined. in china as elsewhere in the world, lifestyles are first imagined and transmitted through advertising. wang describes how marketing campaigns propagate idealized lifestyles to different segments of china's self identified urban middle class; notably the bohemian and the xin xin renlei. deborah davis focuses on the consumption end of culture, suggesting that for all the real resentments and worries engendered by growing income inequality and job insecurity, urbanites in shanghai experience consumer culture and the pursuit of individual taste and comfort in the home through shopping to be positive experiences, particularly when juxtaposed against the deprivations of the past. both wang and davis show that the production and consumption of culture are complex phenomena that go beyond mere market manipulation. there is substantial agency involved, from urbanites joyfully participating in redecoration of their flats to the ways in which niche segments of the urban middle class separate into different “tribes.”the braester, denton and finnane essays focus on different aspects of the production and consumption of visual culture: film, museums and fashion. braester suggests that one cannot sharply differentiate commercial film from art film on the basis of content or aesthetics, as directors previously known for making art films move into commercials, and both share similar sensibilities.

GIUSEPPE PAGANO: A Rationalist caught between Theories and Practices of Fascist Italy

The architecture of a modern building is viewed and defined as a whole: the so-called decorative detail does not exist, only the intelligent and strictly controlled technical detail. The aesthetic basis—both social and technical at the same time—of modern architecture is reproduced in the three-dimensional composition.1

Old-growth forest: An ancient and stable sylvan equilibrium, or a relatively transitory ecosystem condition that offers people a visual and emotional feast? Answer—it depends

As a species, humans depend heavily on their visual sense, make decisions as much from their hearts as from their heads (emotion-and value-based decisions versus analytical, logic- and knowledge-based decisions), and dislike environmental and other change. Societies in early stages of development have generally revered old people for their wisdom and experience, whereas many societies at more advanced stages of development have adopted a culture of youth. Attitudes toward forests have shown a similar trend. Respect for large and old trees was a feature of some early societies, whereas societies in and after the industrial revolution became more interested in younger, faster growing trees for technical and utilitarian reasons. However, as human population growth caused the area of unmanaged forest, old forest, and forests of large trees to decline, reverence has revived for large, old trees and for old forests. This trend has not been matched by a renewed respect for scientific knowledge about forests and for wisdom about forests based on long experience. Reflecting the pervasive effects of the culture of youth, issues in forestry, including the issue of old forests, are being judged largely on an aesthetic basis, on human emotional response to snapshot visual aspects, and on a dislike for change—the Peter Pan syndrome. "Old-growth" forest, whatever it is, has been deified as a symbol of the mythical "balance of nature," a concept discredited by ecologists as a Victorian anachronism. There are important spiritual, aesthetic, wildlife, and environmental values associated with old forests, and the area of such forests is declining. There are many valid reasons (social, scientific, and environmental) for sustaining significant and representative areas of such forests. However, conservation of such forests and ensuring a future supply of the values they provide will not be achieved unless the reverential respect for such forests is matched by another meaning of respect: understanding such forests and basing our relationship with them on that understanding. This paper challenges forest managers and forest scientists to gain a significant understanding of "old growth" to provide a logical, knowledge-based, and experience-based foundation for the identification, inventory, conservation, and management of this forest ecosystem condition, and to assert this understanding as a counterbalance to the necessary, but insufficient, value-based attitude toward old forests that arises largely from visual snapshots and the emotions they arouse. Key words: old growth, biodiversity, sustainability, stability, succession, stand dynamics, respect for nature

LEGACY OF COLONIAL ARCHITECTURE IN KHULNA CITY

Khulna city was established during the British colonial period as a sub divisional center in 1842. The city is characterized by a number of colonial buildings along K.D. Gosh Road forming civil line of the government. On the other hand, artifacts of private nature are scattered within the city. These colonial artifacts have distinct aesthetic value but may not be categorised according to definite tenets of style. A City can be judged from two approaches; one is being the historical approach, other being the structural analysis. These judgments are in fact value judgments and the basis of urban aesthetics. For that reason aesthetics emerges as a tool for the investigation of the study. However the study is confined only with the visual qualities for judgment of buildings as artifacts in Khulna city in historic time frame of British Colonialism. Typological significance of urban artifacts that also determine the character of the aesthetics and have been taken care. As a case study, city aesthetics of Khulna was assessed by identifying the nature and the type ofinvolvement in their development process. From the findings, types and the quality they produce as building block of urban image divided the whole artifacts into components of urban aesthetics. The outcome of the study will help city dwellers to receive, synthesize, assimilate and classify the colonial artifacts as components of perceiving the colonial image of Khulna city. Again a significant practical value of such studies would be drawn from an area of concern to those architects, planners and policy makers whose primary problem is the design of housing for the rapidly expanding urban areas of the so called developing world. Here as elsewhere design solution must be congruent with the value system and culture of the community being housed.

Looking through the Lens of Gender: A Postmodern Critique of a Modern Housing Paradigm

The shift from a modern to postmodern paradigm has dramatically impacted the nature and content of academic inquiry and has opened new categories and methods for research. Interior design has been traditionally critiqued on the basis of aesthetics, formal qualities, function, health and safety, and social/behavioral factors. A postmodern critique expands that criteria to include analysis of how designs may be inscribed with particular ideologies and meanings and consideration of how these meanings may empower or disempower certain groups, or philosophies. In a feminist critique, that analysis considers specifically the ideology of gender. This paper will demonstrate the use of the postmodern deconstructive method of “close reading” in a feminist critique of the Case Study program, a paradigm for modern housing in postwar America. A close reading makes the assumption that the text is not neutral and attempts to discover its biases by thoroughly examining how information has been edited, framed, explained, and constructed. Through this method every aspect of the design process as it has been documented will be scrutinized as texts to examine ideas about roles for women that are constructed through this method; it will not only demonstrate how ideological issues, specifically in this case about gender, can be inscribed within our designs for built spaces, but also provide a greater awareness of our ability as designers to perpetuate, create, or eliminate stereotypes.

Simulated Aesthetics and Evolving Artworks: A Coevolutionary Approach

The application of artificial-life principles for artistic use has its origins in the early works of Sommerer and Mignonneau, Sims and Latham. Most of these works are based on simulated evolution and the determination of fitness according to aesthetics. Of particular interest is the use of evolving expressions, which were first introduced by Sims. The author documents refinements to the method of evolving expressions by Rooke, Ibrahim, Musgrave, Unemi, himself and others. He then considers the challenge of creating autonomously evolved artworks on the basis of simulated aesthetics. The author surveys what little is known about the topic of simulated aesthetics and proceeds to describe his new coevolutionary approach modeled after the interaction of hosts and parasites.

The Upright Brush: Yan Zhenqing's Calligraphy and Song Literati Politics

Arguing for the political rather than purely aesthetic basis for Yan Zhenqing's (709-785) reputation in Chinese calligraphy, the text posits that it was due to a handful of influential and well-educated men in the 11th century, who sought advancement by associating themselves with Yans' reputation.

Ecological Worldviews and Receptivity to Different Types of Arguments for Preserving Endangered Species

The ecological worldviews of 95 undergraduates were assessed via Blaikie's Ecological World View scale (1992). Positive ecological worldviews were associated with receptivity to arguments for preserving endangered species based on ethics and morality, the importance of a species to the ecosystem, and one's ability to make a difference; the type of organism that was endangered was not a factor in determining the effectiveness of a message. There was no relationship between ecological worldviews and receptivity to arguments on the basis of aesthetics or economics. Women had more positive ecological worldviews and found moral arguments to be more persuasive than did men.

Instrumentum magnum

Instrumentum Magnum refers both to an early invention of a mechanical musical instrument in 1600 and to the title of a new work for harpsichord written in 1994. The article deals with the historical linkage made between the two in terms of the instrumental evolution of the harpsichord and my aesthetic basis in writing for it, together with a description of the compositional process involved and a short analysis of the work. As a result of a workshop / discussion with Jane Chapman, the piece was realised having existed previously in sketch form for two years. It received its première on 24.4.95. in Southampton, U.K.

Fronteras estéticas de la analogía medieval. Del adorno retórico a la belleza del verbo

The reflection about analogy and simile invaded all the fields of the medieval thought. Rhetoric and Theology shared a unic terminology, but these disciplines showed different expositions concerning aesthetic basis of similitudo. Rhetoric defined all the forms of the simile like instruments for elocutio. On the contrary, the scholastic teologians, beginning with the analogy between God and his creatures, discovered in the universe the way for a reflection about the divine pulcritudo. The evident opportunity of a conciliation between these disciplines was not taken in the Middle Ages, with rare exceptions.

Meyerhold Meets Mei Lanfang: Staging the Grotesque and the Beautiful

Meyerhold Meets Mei Lanfang: Staging the Grotesque and the Beautiful Min Tian [T]he theatre itself is essentially an example of the grotesque. ... the grotesque [is] the basis of its existence. —V. E. Meyerhold1 Chinese classical song-dance drama (gewuju), like other art forms, has its own aesthetic basis. . . . Whether the character in the play is truly mad or is just feigning madness, the artist must see to it that all the movements and postures on the stage are beautiful. —Mei Lanfang2 Mei Lanfang's 1935 visit to Russia has been considered one of the most important events in the twentieth-century intercultural theater. This historical meeting between Mei and a host of renowned Russian and European theater artists brought about significant repercussions both in the West and in China. After observing Mei's performance, Vsevolod Meyerhold predicted in 1936 that after twenty-five to fifty years, "a certain union of devices of Western-European and Chinese theaters will occur," and he argued that "the glory of the future of the theater" and the Soviet "socialist realism" would be based on the techniques of the Chinese theater.3 Today with the flourish of intercultural theater, Bertolt Brecht, Meyerhold, and Sergei Eisenstein have been recognized for their "insight" into the Chinese and Asian theater traditions and their "fusion" of them in the formation of their new theater aesthetic. Elsewhere,4 I have examined Brecht's interpretation and incorporation of Mei Lanfang's art and Chinese xiqu.5 This article will be focused on Meyerhold's. Long before his experience of Mei Lanfang's performance, Meyerhold had been initiated in Chinese xiqu through reading. In 1914, talking about the actor's movement and gesture as "the most powerful means of theatrical expression," Meyerhold advised the members of his Studio to "read about the Chinese travelling companies."6 He might also have learned about the 234 Min Tian235 Chinese and Japanese theaters through Valéry Inkinzhinomov, a Mongolian expert of the Asian theater and one of the founders and best teachers of Biomechanics in Meyerhold's theater.7 As we shall see, time and again Meyerhold referred to the Chinese theater, sometimes along with the Japanese theater, in his writings , lectures and letters. But it was Mei Lanfang's tour that had the most direct and immediate impact on Russian theater, not only because Mei and his troupe brought an authentic Chinese xiqu performance to Russian audience for the first time8— attracting such notable theater artists as Stanislavsky, Eisenstein, Tretyakov, Tairov, Nemirovich-Danchenko, Gordon Craig, Piscator , and Brecht, as well as Meyerhold—but also because Mei, seen by Eisenstein as "the greatest master of form,"9 arrived at the crucial moment when alleged formalism could suffer denigration and prosecution. The Russian avant-gardists saw in the Chinese master, who was officially invited by the Ail-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries for enhancing the Soviet-Sino friendship, a potentially powerful alliance in their on-going campaign against the naturalist theater and struggle for artistic freedom. Meyerhold acutely sensed the significance of Mei's appearance. He asserted in 1935 in a speech on Mei's performance: "Now already we have clearly seen that Mei Lanfang's arrival will be terribly significant for the future destiny ofthe Soviet theater."10 Mei's performance drew unanimous acclaim from leading Russian theater artists. Their comments, especially Meyerhold's and Eisenstein's, testify to the perception of Mei's art as commensurate with the vision of the Russian avant-gardists. But it is my contention here that, in essence, Chinese xiqu as crystallized in Mei's performances does not conform to the ideas and visions of Russian avant-garde theater. The fundamental difference between them can be best summarized in terms of Meyerhold's art of the grotesque and Mei Lanfang's art of the beautiful, the former capitalizing on contrast, incongruity, contradiction, improbability , alienation, disharmony, physicality, and mechanism, and the latter stressing harmony, clarity, familiarity, spirituality, organicity, and perfection. I am not assuming any value judgement on the concept of the grotesque in a negative perspective as it was treated in its earlier history, but consider it essentially as "a basic esthetic category" as Wolfgang...

Performance of Layout Algorithms: Comprehension, not Computation

Many algorithms address the problem of rendering an abstract graph structure as a diagram in as efficient and as elegant a manner as possible. The criteria for judging the worth of these algorithms are typically the extent to which they conform to common aesthetic criteria (e.g. minimising the number of crossings, maximising symmetry), or their computational efficiency. The algorithms are not usually judged on their ability to produce diagrams that maximise humans’ performance on tasks which require their use.This paper presents an example experimental methodology for considering the relative worth of eight layout algorithms with respect to human performance, together with details of an experiment using a single graph. The results indicate that, with the exception of one algorithm, there is no statistical difference between the performance data of the algorithms when applied to this graph, indicating that they produce drawings of comparable difficulty. This result is despite the different aesthetic bases for the algorithms.

Art and Science in Education: The Common Ground

Recent work aimed at establishing a rational, objective basis for aesthetics and the arts repudiates the division between the ‘two cultures’ which is used politically to justify marginalization of the arts in education and society. Far from weakening this cultural division, however, such writing and research has reinforced it. With the aim of reversing this trend, it is argued that ‘scientism’ is a myth, that objectivity of knowledge in science is comparable but not superior to that in aesthetics and the arts, and that polarization of the ‘two cultures’ and marginalization of the arts is based on ideology, not reason. There is and always has been significant common ground between art and science, encompassing not only issues of mutual concern but also modes of enquiry, many of which are far more similar than seems commonly to be supposed. A consideration of some of the similarities and differences between art and science shows that there is no fundamental division between them: both are part of one culture, not paradigms of two. This observation leads to ideas on the possible re‐integration of art and science in education, particularly through development of observation and common curriculum content.