Beyond Art: What Art Is and Might Become If Freed from Cultural Elitism

by Roger L. Taylor

THIS SIGNIFICANT PHILOSOPHICAL discussion of key problems ranges over established avant-garde and primitive art, folk art and the products of popular culture.
It attempts to reveal the human dimension basic to all these experiences. Rather than arguing that a catholic interest in this range results from more things being art than is recognised officially, Roger Taylor maintains that it is what art shares with life beyond art that makes it important.
An integral part of human life, art cannot be defined in any way which restricts it to a special field. Still less can it be correctly seen as created by or for a cultured elite. Criticising various familiar theories of art (including the Marxist account) BEYOND ART offers a positive alternative by reference to entertainments and life-styles usually thought to have nothing to do with art.
Carefully applying his notion of the 'as if' to various art forms, Roger Taylor makes sense of a particularly obscure branch of philosophical enquiry. He offers a vision of the liberating potential of art, not by construing it as truth, or a mirror of the real, but as a life-enhancing exploration of the unreal. Yet unreality does not imply irrationality: this stimulating defence of art-like activities presents them as necessary for the fulfilment of important human needs.

This Kindle edition of BEYOND ART revises the 1981 print edition (Harvester Press and Barnes & Noble). BEYOND ART sits between Roger Taylor's ART AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE and his INVISIBLE CELLS AND VANISHING MASSES (both now available as Kindle books). Roger Taylor sees these books as three of four steps towards a better theory of consciousness (the fourth step to be taken in 2015). BEYOND ART is the step that maps the essential logic of the 'as if' and make-believe.

CONTENTS
Introductory Remarks; Imagining and the Empiricist-Creation Theory; Creativity and 'As Ifness'; Drama and the 'As If'; Poetry and the 'As If'; Literature in General and the 'As If'; The Status of Propositions within Fictions; The 'As If' in Visual Art; The 'As If' in Dancing and Music; Attacking Correspondence as a Defence of Art and Determining the Criteria of Convincingness; The Nature of the Attraction of the 'As If'; The 'As If', the Real and the Defence of Art Reconsidered; Speculations Concerning the 'As If' as a Total Form of Life; Concluding Remarks.

183 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1981

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Roger Taylor is the author of Art, an Enemy of the People, Beyond Art and Invisible Cells and Vanishing Masses. He is a Marxist philosopher whose subjects include the As If, Rethinking Marxism and the Philosophy of Escape. He has played an influential role in the deconstruction of Art and Culture. For over 20 years he taught philosophy at Sussex University, UK. A variety of his contributions have been published in many books and journals. Roger Taylor is the terrestrial form of the avatar Rumpledsilkskin and Invisible Cells and Vanishing Masses is their most ambitious undertaking, made available May Day 2013. It develops a Theory of Virtual Revolution and a Theory of Make-Believe.