Aesthetic Matters Research Articles

Fundamental Flaws in the Appearance of Bridges

Many papers on bridge aesthetics design focus almost exclusively on the importance of certain visual qualities (i.e., harmony, unity, balance) as necessary distinguishing characteristics of beautiful bridges. Although each of these papers has considerable merit, their required brevity and limited focus provide only a superficial view of an effective bridge design process. Also, for the elucidation of aesthetic subject matter for bridge design novices, these papers appear to be inappropriate for several other reasons. First, they imply that a vague abstraction such as “beautiful” is a legitimate goal for a design effort. Second, the emphasis on a structure’s primary visual qualities mistakenly presumes that the complete silhouette of a highway bridge will generally be seen and evaluated by distant observers. Finally, these papers generally fail to mention fundamental flaws due to design, construction, and maintenance neglect and carelessness that can spoil the appearance of a bridge, even one that has been well designed in most other respects. These issues are discussed, and it is suggested that, instead of attempting to achieve beautiful bridges by a preoccupation with abstract visual qualities, a highway bridge designer’s attention should be devoted first and primarily to the avoidance or prevention of well-defined and easily recognizable bridge aesthetic flaws, many of which are described and discussed here. Thereafter, designers’ attention can be devoted to the adjustment of a bridge’s structural characteristics and visible aspects to satisfy both functional requirements and cost limitations and to simultaneously improve a structure’s visual qualities to the extent that some observers may be provoked to exclaim “beautiful” when they first view a designer’s work.

Pliant and Compliant: Colonial Indian Art and Postcolonial Cinema

Walter Benjamin's signature hypothesis of 'dialectics at a standstill' rehearsed in his 'Theoretics of Knowledge, Theories of Progress' permits visual images to be elasticized from a then condition in history and culture to a now site of contemporary reality in order to be critiqued in their entirety. Putting this hypothesis to the test, Rajan juxtaposes two late eighteenth-century works of art by East India Company Painters with two late twentieth-century films by Mira Nair and Deepa Mehta to trace trajectories of orientalized desire and unspeakable pleasure as relayed along a woman's body. In all four instances, the central image of woman continues to be an insistent signifier that embodies social values, cultural prejudices and artistic ideals, which, in turn, provide critical, valuable insights into constructions of gendered, aestheticized and sexualized femininity. The image of woman , thus dialectically read, reveals that it is not simply the male colonizer who is always already the oppressor, as is the common assumption, but rather that woman as an abject signifier can be merchandised even by enlightened, postcolonial women. Such a ravaged image of woman remains, therefore, a fixed trope in the hands of male and female artists, traversing coloniality and postcoloniality, and crossing over from art to cinema, with little chance of emancipation. One strategy to grant woman full agency requires the contemporary, feminist viewer to take responsibility and couple aesthetics with an ethical tenor. According to Benjamin, ethics thus defined is a matter of personalized aesthetics. This means that each one of us is entrusted with the responsibility of demanding accountability in the creation of visual culture such that images that demean femininity, disembody female subjectivity, objectify female pleasure and delegitimize desire be judged inappropriate, as incorrect or unappealing visual images and as unavailable for appropriation.

The Age of porno-History

The discourse on the body is not exactly new, but it has gained a kind of ascendancy in matters of aesthetics, especially where university art history and criticism are concerned. Hence the visible changes in methods and formulations. After much water under the bridge, the question of art is paradoxically back in statu nascendi, insofar as its principle is being extended without faltering to new approaches and objects. When he explored the idea of the “artification” of experience in 1978, Ala...

The Meanings of Culture

The Meanings of Culture

Acknowledging the Beautiful

Things German, as we all know, have long been plagued by problems of identity. Writing about the changing Berlin cityscape in a recent issue of The New Yorker, Jane Kramer, as others before her, has added the new capital to the list, citing as one of its most profound dilemmas the fact that Berliners cannot really decide what they want their city to be. At the turn of the century, I suggest that a parallel dilemma is facing those of us involved in the study of German literature, language, and culture in the USA: even as we recognize that our disciplinary practices have diverged rather dramatically from those of Germanistik as practiced in Germany, any consensus on a disciplinary identity seems at present out of reach.' Kramer's article is testimony to her belief that Berlin has a chance to be if its citizens can only ascertain what that something is.2 If our profession exhibits similar identity problems, variously wrought by demographics, geographics, and historical contingencies, I would like to think that we also have some of the same opportunities. In that spirit I suggest here one direction in which the profession might move, whether in tandem with millennial forces for change-or not. Within the past three decades the academic study of German literature in the USA has been transformed, as scholars have made a convincing case for imaginative literature as an enterprise that is inlaid in culture and thus partakes of or contributes to numerous other disciplines. Further, Germanists have helped to develop new fields of research that have demanded innovative methodologies, many of which-such as feminist studies, postcolonial studies, and Holocaust studieshave become linked to German cultural studies in its widest definition, and have made the complexities of individual and collective identities an integral part of literary studies. Although these developments have often been embraced for pragmatic reasons, such as the hope of increased enrollments, they have also pushed our discipline in exciting directions, bringing us productive new ways to engage with our world. Important as this work has been, it has tended to avoid questions of aesthetics. The reasons for this avoidance are complicated, linked to history and to political alignments in the field;3 but regardless of the soundness of many of those reasons, the result has been that we have not articulated clearly enough, in my opinion, the singularity of literature, the distinctness of an imaginative text.4 We have paid much attention to thematic content, to subject matter, to the ideological entanglements of literary works. But we have been less successful, as a group, in making either to our administrators and students or to the social world outside the academy a persuasive case for the importance of literature and literary study per se. To be sure, literature does intermingle with other disciplines such as psychology, anthropology, history, and sociology-the disciplines that have been involved in the most productive interdisciplinary critical initiatives-but it cannot be subsumed by any of them. It is unique. By complicating issues and exposing ambiguities, it helps us think more broadly, more creatively, and in modes not fostered by other disciplines. But any attempt to attend to that uniqueness must at some point bring us into the realm of aesthetics, with its interrogation of value in literature and of the criteria by which imaginative texts might be judged -areas that many of us have come assiduously to avoid. Aesthetic matters have been submerged in analyses of the grotesque, for example, or of the ugly, but in many areas of our profession it is as though there existed a quarantine on the discussion of beauty, regardless of whether it is understood as aesthetic pleasure or as a form of cognition. Even the joy of succumbing to a beautifully written text has become, in Angelika Bammer's words, a guilty pleasure. 5 Although we may be convinced of its value, beauty-controversial though the concept may be, and whether manifested in image, content, or language itself-is one of the distinguishing qualities of imaginative literature that we must articulate to every new student generation. …

Of Genius and Epiphany: Schlafes Bruder, Das Parfum, and Babette's Feast

At first sight, all three works under consideration—Schlafes Bruder (1992), Das Parfum (1985), and Babette's Feast (1950)—appear to conform to "postmodern" conventions, such as a rejection of logocentrism or a playful borrowing of pre-existing literary motifs and styles. However, all three works also revive the category of "natural genius," despite the twentieth-century rejection of romantic idealism in matters of aesthetics. Moreover, these "geniuses" create "masterpieces," which invariably trigger epiphanous moments for the untrained and unsuspecting audiences to whom they are presented. This is true even for the otherwise parody- and pastiche-filled Perfume, where the phenomenon of genius and the irresistible effect of a "masterpiece" is treated seriously nonetheless. The article compares these three texts, revealing surprising correspondences in ideas, themes, and often even in the choice of words. It further ponders whether these authors have abandoned the post-Nietzschean relativization of "beauty" and "truth" by returning unreflectedly to a sentimental romanticism, or whether they suggest the transcendence of postmodernism.

Celtic knotwork. 1 [graphic technique

Celtic knotwork is a beautiful form of ornament. Creating a pleasing design is a matter of aesthetics, but the mechanics of the process fit naturally into the framework of a computer program. I describe Bain's construction method (1951), explain how to write a program to implement it, discuss some ways to improve the output, and show some results. My approach is to use the computer to develop a sketch, which then serves as the basis for a hand drawing.

"Same Train Be Back Tomorrer": Ann Petry's The Narrows and the Repetition of History

1 interviews and writings from the 1970s and 1980s, Ann Petry frequently laments the decline in the current state of life in urban ghettos, remarking that it is than it was when she wrote Street, a 1946 bestseller. The sad truth about Street is that now forty-one years later I could write that same book about Harlem or any other ghetto, she writes in a 1988 autobiographical essay (Contemporary Authors 265). 1992 she told the Washington Post something similar: where ghetto life and race relations in the United States are concerned, everything is worse than it has ever been (Streitfeld E2). Petry's writing, especially Country Place (1947) and Narrows (1953), is preoccupied with this question--is the world getting any Surely this is a universal human concern, especially as she asks this question not only of ghetto life, but also of American society and of civilization in general. But the question carries with it some obvious variations and corollaries: whom is the world getting better? and In whose terms shall we define `better'? inquiry into the possibility of moral progress in society maps out, roughly, as a variation on the momentous and familiar question that African American writers have long been asked to address: whether or not to take a stand on matters of politics and sociology. yes side --commitment to politically contentious fiction--implies the possibility of progress, remediation, and transition, while the side--an apolitical aesthetic--implies in its resistance to historicism a belief in fallen human nature, mired in repetition. So the very question of history's progress or stasis occupies the shifting middle ground between what has been labeled sociology and what has been labeled art. the years shortly following their publication, critics commended Country Place and Narrows because these novels transcended racial themes. the past two decades, critics often ignore them for what I suspect is the same reason--there is no clear message about group affiliations, either race or gender.(1) While some critics continue to think political messages preclude artistry, there has come to be considerable disagreement on aesthetic matters. Cheryl Wall charts the slightly more preponderant viewpoint of today when she points out that African American writers, in contrast to writers in the white mainstream of American fiction, are supposed to be political in their intentions (286). Petry's concern in her later novels with historical progress or its lack is perhaps evidence of the alleged non-group-specificity of her themes. Narrows, the novel to which I will devote most of my discussion, suffering is often inescapable, an equal opportunity assailant. But the hope of easing racial oppression by decrying it competes with this sense of inevitability, and one significant sign of the world's improvement would be the improvement in the status of oppressed groups. Even allowing for early praise accorded to Narrows for its universal themes, most of the scholarly work done on Petry has been devoted to her first novel, Street, an attempt at realistic depiction of Harlem life during the depression. For advocates of a Black Aesthetic that collapses the distinction between politics and art, Street offers a focused, unrelenting downward spiral that communicates an important sociological message about the hollowness of the American Dream; meanwhile, black feminist criticism is attracted to it for its image of multiple oppression, among the most successful early attempts at such images in black American women's fiction, particularly as its protagonist is a dark-skinned black (see, for example, Gloria Wade-Gayles and Barbara Christian). Street goes beyond interrogating the categories of race, class, and gender, and in fact shows that when one is a member of several oppressed groups, the condition cannot be accounted for simply by adding or multiplying. …

Notes on Lyric Poetry; Or, at the Muse's Tomb

Translating language of things into that of humans entails not only translating silence into audibility; it means translating nameless into name. - Walter Benjamin One of my close friends, also a worker in mine fields of poetic, says to me the lyric is dead. I cannot but agree, if by lyric we mean that private self-regarding effusion of language, that romantic mea culpa by which a world is nostalgically recalled, privileged and measured against what is. Likewise, I would emphatically add, poetry is dead or at least dying out of a swoon of novelty if it subscribes too closely to those collocations of contemporary thought we call theory or cultural studies, studies which invoke other nostalgias for certainty, for rightness, for order. Another way of putting this might be: lyric is dead primarily as it reinforces a masked ideology, including about myth of personal. But, as well, typical critique that lyric is subjective ought to be juxtaposed against sub-rosa reality, more difficult to enunciate in face of avant-garde tribalism (do we know of anything more tribal, more nationalistic than poetic clique?), which reminds us that poetic bandwagons are never merely matters of aesthetics, indeed, may involve many more subjective dimensions than we'd care to explicate. What can be stated concerning theory- or philosophically driven work is that it is clearly a product of statism and would-be statism, what Deleuze and Guattari point out in Towards a Minor Literature as those styles or genres or literary movements, even very small ones, [which] have only one single dream: to assume a major function in language, to offer themselves as a sort of state language, [an] official language. On grounds Deleuze and Guattari are making, lyric as judged by a post-modem mentality, can never be sufficiently political; it is not doing a man's job, lifting weight off masses, creating utopias, etc. But a case can be made that, in this century, this is precisely lyric's strength, that strictly speaking, lyric is neither a product of thought nor of intention but rather comes as a recognition of a gap or rupture in one's thought and intention. (My use of impersonal singular pronoun is meant to suggest that lyric qua lyric has no hope of ever becoming a kind of group-think.) Casting lyric against other poetic forms, one finds something that is more than merely interesting. The narrative mode, rhetorical mode and gnomic mode, even purely private or expressive mode of lyric (with its hidden ideological baggage) as well, have a kind of self-sufficiency. The reader participates by wandering around entities created by such forms. Indeed, a form is erected that in some way does not depend on a reader - as in case of story, a form which, even as it wants hearers, is ultimately enclosed and folded in on itself. Not so much interactive as presentational. The self-containment of such forms, polished-egg quality of either story or poetico-logical structure may already seem anachronistic when set against polyvalent and even fuzzy operations of mind. And old romantic lyric, especially that poetic trace of delicate impressions caught on wing, now strikes reader as orotund and even unsympathetic to contemporary awareness and consciousness. So we must admit that if we are to talk positively of a lyric moment, of a moment for lyric, we must acknowledge that while presenting itself as something gathered out of flux of existence itself, it is no more free of contingent, historical or philosophical than any other form of life or thought. And yet, function of lyric, and by implication poetry's first principle, is that it exceeds or modifies very conditions it arises from. Even in minims of speech or figure, it is always unplanned, unaccountable supplement. …

Beauties of Nature and Beauties of Art: On Kant and Hegel's Aesthetics

This paper is an attempt to sketch the general framework of Kant and Hegel's Aesthetics, which are dealt respectively in sections I and II.The first section considers Kant's stated aims in the introduction to the Critique of Judgment, his location of judgments of taste within the problematic of reflective judgment, his treatment of reflective aesthetic judgments in the analytic of the beautiful and the distinction between objective reality and subjective universal validity. The second section provides a sketch of Hegel's division of artistic beauty into symbolic, classical and romantic art in the attempt to explain how Hegel's restriction of the subject matter of aesthetics to fine art, may shed light on his critique of Kantian ‘subjectivism’.Kant's discussion of aesthetics is located within the problematic of reflective judgment in general, that is, within a discussion of the suitability of nature for cognition. Reflective judgments are first contrasted with determinant judgments and then divided into two kinds, aesthetic and teleological. The distinction between aesthetic and teleological reflection, captures the distinction between a kind of pleasure which arises from the conformity or harmony of imagination and the understanding, and a kind of pleasure which arises from the conformity or harmony of the understanding with reason. The fact that pleasure arises in reflective judgments in general, and is not an exclusive feature of aesthetic reflection, is not transparent from Kant's introduction, but is suggested by the claim that although the acknowledgment that the various empirical laws of nature are amenable to systematic categorization, no longer gives rise to pleasure, this is simply due to the fact that the repeated experience of the systematic unity of empirical laws, is no longer an occasion for surprise:It is true that we no longer notice any decided pleasure in the comprehensibility of nature, or in the unity of its divisions into genera and species, without which the empirical concepts, that afford us our knowledge of nature in its particular laws, would not be possible. Still it is certain that the pleasure appeared in due course, and only by reason of the most ordinary experience being impossible without it, has it become gradually fused with simple cognition, and no longer arrests particular attention.

Gérard de Nerval et le polythéisme gréco-romain

Chateaubriand gives French romanticism its first impetus withLe Genie du christianisme, a work that proclaims, in aesthetic and literary matters, the superiority of the Christian religion over the polytheism of the classics. It has long been believed that the romantic period coincided in France with a notable decrease of the fortune and the influence of the Greco-Roman world. This is far from certain: In 1852, Baudelaire attacks the representatives of what he calls “L'Ecole paienne” (“The Pagan School”). Gerard de Nerval, Theophile Gautier and Heinrich Heine are the authors Baudelaire is mainly aiming at. What is, in the French romantic accord, the importance of that “Ecole paienne”? What part does Greco-Roman polytheism play in Nerval's work, especially in theVoyage en Orient and inLes Chimeres? This revival of ancient paganism constituted a weapon for scepticism against the Christian religion and the Catholic church.

Does V equal L?

Does V = L? Is the Axiom of Constructibility true? Most people with an opinion would answer no. But on what grounds? Despite the near unanimity with which V = L is declared false, the literature reveals no clear consensus on what counts as evidence against the hypothesis and no detailed analysis of why the facts of the sort cited constitute evidence one way or another. Unable to produce a well-developed argument one way or the other, some observers despair, retreating to unattractive fall-back positions, e.g., that the decision on whether or not V = L is a matter of personal aesthetics. I would prefer to avoid such conclusions, if possible. If we are to believe that L is not V, as so many would urge, then there ought to be good reasons for this belief, reasons that can be stated clearly and subjected to rational evaluation. Though no complete argument has been presented, the literature does contain a number of varied argument fragments, and it is worth asking whether some of these might be developed into a persuasive case.One particularly simple approach would be to note that the existence of a measurable cardinal (MC) implies that V ≠ L,1and to argue that there is a measurable cardinal. The drawback to this approach is that its implying V ≠ L cannot then be counted as evidence in favor of MC, as it often is. Indeed, there seems to have been considerable sentiment against V = L even before the proof of its negation from MC,2and this sentiment must either be accounted for as reasonable or explained away as an aberration of some kind.

Art of the Commune: Politics and Art in Soviet Journals, 1917-20

n October 1917 the Bolshevik Party overthrew the Provisional Government of Russia, established in February, and replaced it with a Council of People's Commissars committed to destroying capitalism and the bourgeoisie and to establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat, as a prelude to the ultimate creation of a fully society. The previously exiled radical political opposition had become the ruling establishment. Issues of modern art and society were suddenly no longer hypothetical and utopian. They had to be confronted. Hence, amongst the organs of power in the new government was the Commissariat for Enlightenment (Narodnyi komissariat po prosvesheniiu-Narkompros), responsible for education and culture, with a separate Department of Fine Arts (Otdel Izobrazitelnykh Iskusstv-IZO). The profound political and social changes posed real questions for artists and their associates. What was art? What relationship should exist between art and the new state, between art and the Bolshevik party? Was avant-garde art inherently bourgeois in fact, or did it represent the emergence of an alternative and potentially revolutionary outlook? Could proletarian art itself be created only by authentic workers, or could it also be produced by artists who embraced a proletarian world view? Debates on these complex issues found expression in diverse journals published in the territory of the former Tsarist empire. The two most important publications promoting the ideological position of the Communist party and the government were obviously the newspapers Izvestiia [News], published by the Supreme Soviet, and Pravda [Truth], issued by the Central Committee of the Party. Both publicized important government measures relating to artistic questions, such as the decrees nationalizing private art collections and Lenin's Plan for Monumental Propaganda, and a handful of statements on art, particularly the importance of art for propaganda and agitation. Naturally, the amount of space devoted to artistic questions was severely limited, because the government's prime concern from 1918 to early 1921 was to consolidate the Revolution and successfully fight the Civil War. After the decree of November 9, 1917, banning the counter-revolutionary press,'. only political publications that recognized the government were permitted. These included newspapers such as Maksim Gorkii's Novaia zhizn [New life], the anarchists' Anarkhiia [Anarchy], and the Socialist Revolutionaries' Znamia truda [The banner of work], all of which concentrated on political and ideological questions. When aesthetic matters were broached, Gorkii emphasized the didactic role of art and promoted more traditional values, while artistic innovators such as Vladimir Tatlin and Kazimir Malevich were published in Anarkhiia, suggesting that there were links between the avant-garde and the short-lived anarchist movement after the Revolution. One political body whose chief role was cultural was Proletkult, or the independent proletarian cultural and educational organizations (Proletarskie kulturno-prosvetitelnye organizatsii), which were set up at the instigation of Aleksandr Bogdanov in November 1917 in Petrograd, and rapidly spread throughout Russia, attracting 400,000 members by 1920. Independent of the Party and the Government, Proletkult was specifically organized to create socialist forms of thought, feeling and daily life,2 and a culture that would reflect the values and aspirations of the proletariat. It promoted working-class education and the emergence of a proletarian intelligentsia, arranging classes for adults, organizing schools, studios, clubs, and theaters, and publishing numerous journals such as Gorn [The furnace] (Moscow, 191822), Proletarskaia kultura [Proletarian culture] (Moscow, 1918-21), and Griadushchee [The future] (Petrograd, 191821). None of these magazines was profusely illustrated, although their covers often carried images produced by members of the Proletkult or works of art of an agitational nature, some of which possessed a slightly folk-art flavor. The journals tended to present a rudimentary and essentially unified concept of illustrative art, based on Bogdanov's Marxist theory, according to which the cultural struggle was as important as the political and economic fight for the achievement of socialism:

Teaching Students to Inquire about Art Philosophically: Procedures Derived from Ordinary-Language Philosophy to Teach Principles of Concept Analysis

If philosophical inquiry is to be part of the art curriculum, methods for teaching it need to be determined and tested. This paper examines procedures derived from ordinary-language philosophy to help students learn to investigate conceptual issues in art. Two of the procedures were devised by philosophers; one other was formulated from principles of logic expounded in philosophical literature. The procedures are set out, analyzed, illustrated, and discussed relative to art education with suggestions for further research. Much has been said in the last decade about including aesthetics in the art curriculum. Less has been said about how this might work at the level of practice. When it comes to teaching aesthetics as philosophical inquiry into art, many questions remain unanswered. This paper is written to address some of these questions by examining three procedures derived from ordinary-language philosophy that may help students learn some of the principles of investigation employed by philosophers of art. Different Approaches to Teaching Aesthetics Confusion over the meaning of aesthetics has hampered the development of coherent approaches to teaching this subject. Because the use of vague, ambiguous, closely related concepts such as aesthetics, aesthetic inquiry, and philosophical inquiry into art might increase this confusion, it is important at the outset to explain how such terms will be used in the following discussion. Historically, aesthetics has been a branch of philosophy devoted to theories of beauty and art. There are roughly two approaches to teaching aesthetics in American college education (Battin, Fisher, Moore, & Silvers, 1989). These involve, respectively, the teaching of philosophical perspectives and the teaching of philosophical inquiry. The philosophical-perspectives approach to teaching aesthetics encourages students to explore answers to questions proposed by aestheticians and other thinkers in various traditions, past and present, who have achieved credibility on aesthetic matters. Aesthetic questions such as What makes an object beautiful? explore the natures of art, beauty, and the aesthetic experience. The perspectives approach presents vantage points that include aesthetic theories (e.g., Kant's aesthetics) and aesthetic principles (e.g., embodiment of the Tao as in Chinese pictorial arts). Students learn different perspectives by studying examples that best represent those viewpoints. They are then encouraged to apply those perspectives to enriched engagement with art and other aesthetic phenomena. Attention to cases inconsistent with par

Environmental aesthetic design: Identifying and achieving desired environmental effects, particularly “image” and “atmosphere”

Environmental aesthetic design is the process of determining aesthetic aspects of an environment still to be built. Aesthetic matters weigh heavily in the world of design and in the decisions of building designers, particularly architects. Yet, apart from its use within the specialized literature, the word aesthetic may mean whatever the user chooses it to mean. For the purposes of this paper an aesthetic effect of an environment is assumed to be a particular subjective quality that a designer may wish to give to, and a subjective response experienced by those who use, that environment. The paper proposes a simple procedure by which designers may establish aesthetic programmes (or briefs) for the “atmospheres” of environments and achieve their desired effects. The same procedure may be used to create a desired “image”.

An Interview with Sir Robert and Lady Sainsbury

market in 'primitive' art. All the articles are written with an admirable nineteenth-century seriousness and the reader is expected to make a fair intellectual effort to appreciate them. The quality is usually high, very rarely below average. The pleasing discordancy of views, aims and theoretical background is refreshing after the drivel of those other journals whose writers share a common viewpoint and, alas, jargon. The second virtue of Res is that the discussion of aesthetic matters is not confined to non-creative commentators and theoreticians. A number of articles consist of interviews with, or statements by, artists and composers. If these declarations and ideas seem rebarbative in terms of current anthropological theory, or incomprehensible, obscure or just odd theory, at least they serve to remind us of the limitations of our theories and understanding-and, of course, they are valuable sources on which thought must be expended. Sneaking rough reality into scholarly debate in this way is one of the most useful dirty tricks that can be played. The existence of Res is something of which we should be proud. Its comparatively small circulation is something of which the profession should be ashamed.

The Miller–Matisse Connection: A Matter of Aesthetics

The Miller–Matisse Connection: A Matter of Aesthetics

Urban aesthetics and the discovery of the urban fabric in turn‐of‐the‐century Germany

Approaches to planning that developed in the later nineteenth century in Germany (and in Europe generally) were challenged on aesthetic grounds at the end of the century by Camillo Sitte and others. By the turn of the century, practitioners of planning had embraced Sitte's views on a number of matters. Among the changes that occurred were an end to the disencumbering of monumental buildings and a greatly expanded interest in historic preservation. This was not simply a matter of aesthetics gaining more influence over planning practice, however. Sitte's desire to develop systematically the aesthetic dimension of planning was shared by earlier theorists, notably Hermann Maertens, who endorsed many of the practices Sitte rejected. Ultimately, the compatibility of the new aesthetics with more practical needs was crucial to its acceptance. The new interest in historical models reflected an understanding of urban form that enabled planners to reconcile their aesthetic goals with other needs.

N. F. S. Grundtvig: Blik på poesiens historie og Bernhard Severin Ingemann. Udg. af Flemming Lundgreen-Nielsen

N . F. S. Grundtvig: View of the History of Poetry and Bernhard Severin Ingemann. MS in the Grundtvig Archives, Fasc. 179, 1, from 1822.Edited by Flemming Lundgreen-Nielsen. Museum Tusculanum, Copenhagen 1985.Reviewed by Gustav AlbeckThis is a manuscript that deserves to have been edited and published before now. The poet’s son, Svend Grundtvig, did the preparatory work but never got his edition published. The cover of the present edition depicts W. E. Parry’s two ships in the polar darkness during his attempt to discover the North-West Passage in 1819-20. The reviewer informs us that in the manuscript Grundtvig describes the development of poetry as an unbroken chain of voyages of discovery, in which the contemporary, unsolved problem of the North-West Passage appears as a recurrent metaphor in various contexts.The editor, the excellent Grundtvig scholar, Dr. Lundgreen-Nielsen, has supplied a compact and scholarly preface and a commentary that is almost too thorough. Yet it must be admitted that the text requires both empathy and notes. It is not easy tofollow the poet’s image-filled presentation. It has previously been employed by Fr. R.nning in a little piece on Grundtvig as an aesthete (1883) and in the anthology Towards a Characterisation of N . F. S. Grundtvig (1915). Dr AlfHenriques has advanced some important reflections on this in his doctorate Shakespeare and Denmark (1941), as has Dr Helge Toldberg in his doctorate Grundtvig’s Symbolism (1950). Most recently Helge Grell has made use of some of the views expressed therein in his book The Creative Word and the Figurative Word (1980).The text is an interesting link in the development of Grundtvig’s view of the nature and mission of poetry. It does not tell us much about the poet Ingemann, even though it is evident from the manuscript that his name was the original title; comment on him fills a mere eight of the manuscript’s forty pages. In a kind of epilogue Grundtvig himself recognises that the essay assumes a knowledge of “the poetry and achievements of the strangest peoples” and the ability to “gather what they know”, an art which is far from common. But it is the hope of both editor and reviewer that it will find a varied group of readers.The introduction offers an outline of Grundtvig as an aesthete, a full and stimulating contribution to a work that is still waiting to be written. It does demand, however, “a systematic publication of the posthumous papers concerned with aesthetic matters,” and “a special Grundtvig dictionary”: two wishes that the reviewer shares with the editor. But there are other areas where Professor Albeck disagrees with, and is critical of, Dr Lundgreen-Nielsen.For example, the reviewer does not believe the essays were written with foreigners in mind. In his epilogue Grundtvig writes that here he “had strangers in mind” (nb. the Danish word fremmed means both ‘strange’ and ‘foreign’). The question is, What does he mean by ‘strangers’? Both the content and the language point to him addressing a domestic audience, but one that is distanced from him. He presupposes an acquaintance with the Danish language and history as well as a love of Denmark that could scarcely be expected of any but his compatriots. It is possible that originally he did have a foreign audience in mind, but changes his direction. Professor Albeck imagines that Grundtvig has originally thought of a Danish periodical (or possibly the Danish newspaper LatestPictures of Copenhagen, where he has found one of the essay’s main images, the North-West Passage). The title suggests that Grundtvig’s primary interest has been to introduce his poet-friend Ingemann to a wider public, but that the introduction to this has swollen out of all proportion into a strongly subjective survey of the history of poetry in the world.

Wittgenstein's Seeing -as and A Theory of Art

In this paper I will show how Wittgenstein's concept of seeing-as might serve as the foundation for a theory of art. The theory that I will develop is a sketch, and general themes will take precedence over details. I will describe a way of distinguishing between art objects and other objects, consider what makes art, art, give a Wittgensteinian 'definition' of art appreciation, examine various important sorts of reactions to artworks, and briefly wonder what life without art would be like. I presuppose some understanding of several of Wittgenstein's central concepts in the Philosophical Investigations: language-games, forms of life, and the function of learning in understanding how to use concepts. I will draw examples and ideas from both the Philosophical Investigations and the Lectures on Aesthetics. In spite of the specificity of the subject matter of the latter, I have often found Wittgenstein's remarks in the former to be more illuminating, because more suggestive, on the topics of art and aesthetics. Also, it is not clear how much weight should be attached to ideas in the Lectures on Aesthetics since Wittgenstein neither organized nor published them himself. However, it is well to note that what he apparently regarded to be the strict subject matter of aesthetics is treated there rather than in the Investigations . When Wittgenstein talks about aesthetics, he means more than just art. I will talk almost exclusively about art. Therefore, what Wittgenstein said about aesthetics will here be made appropriate to a discusssion about art. Although 'art' and 'aesthetics' are often used interchangeably, I will attempt to restrict my use of the term 'aesthetics' to instances where: the use of 'art' is ungrammatical, the topic being discussed is clearly applicable outside the domain of what I will strictly define as art, or I am quoting or referring to something specific that Wittgenstein said. How do artworks differ from other objects? 1 As physical objects which can be examined for similarities and differences with other physical objects, probably