In follow-up to a previous post that produced the interim conclusion that art is unsurmountably historical: the circularity we get upon trying to understand when someone is an artist is best accommodated (or rephrased) by conceiving of art as a practice. It is a practice in the sense of being co-constituted by peculiar attitudes which…

…Phenomenology is martial art for philosophers… Imagine this: you are the only person in the world who moves in slow motion. You have no clue about this (of course you don’t), but everyone else can see it happening. So imagine a world where people see one person moving in slow motion, and that one person…

…Could he be tried for staging a corpse?… What we see on the photographs of Joel-Peter Witkin is, for instance, a corpse, beheaded, sitting on a chair, in “Man without a Head”, 1993; a head that is apparently lying on a plate, in “Head of a Dead Man”, Mexico 1990. Several questions are bound to…

Intuitionism in aesthetics is the view that the art work an audience is confronted with is merely a medium for the real work, in the mind of the artist: his intuition. A famous spokesman for this view is Bendetto Croce. The view is also associated with expressivism (Collingwood, Tolstoy), which holds that the work expresses…

A good music video is one where the imagery prompts suitably to aspects of the music, and where the music prompts suitably to aspects of the imagery. As a genre, or art form, the music video’s critical value is in this reciprocal prompting. The music does not have to be the best, the imagery doesn’t…

A funny thing happens. Researching for a paper on immoral art, time and again I google for Santiago Sierra, who I think provides great samples of this new art form. The funny thing is, though, that whenever a page is found discussing any of his works, links are included which have all but evaporated from…

I simply love Currie’s assumption that the real precedes the represented, but object to his use of it. In Image and Mind, he argues that fictional entities because they are non-existent cannot be represented photographically. “A fiction does not have the kinds of properties—shape, size, colour—that could be represented pictorially.” (p. 12). I have called…

Perhaps, Claude Lanzmann, in his review of Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, assumes that representations of the Holocaust of necessity become iconic images, assuming, also, that some images shouldn’t be allowed to: photos and films of real events shouldn’t (but why?), nor should pictures of stereotypical Jews (most of these stereotypes stem from Nazi propaganda films), or…

We bespraken gisteren de analyse van Ted Cohen van Kant’s uitleg van het smaakoordeel. Cohen claimt dat als we een film, Psycho bij voorbeeld, mooi vinden dat er dan twee concepten in het geding zijn: In het smaakoordeel “Psycho is mooi.” wordt een predikaat (“is mooi”) toegeschreven aan een subject (“Psycho“). Cohen’s these over het…

One of the assets of Claude lanzmann’s film Shoah is this that it presents moral witnesses in places that are sure to stir their memories. Lanzmann did not invite them over to the studio for an interview, nor did he visit them in their own homes. The relevant places are either historical sites (the camps;…