Philosophers on Art from Kant to the Postmodernists: A Critical Reader

by Christopher Kul-Want (Editor)

Here, for the first time, Christopher Kul-Want brings together twenty-five texts on art written by twenty philosophers. Covering the Enlightenment to postmodernism, these essays draw on Continental philosophy and aesthetics, the Marxist intellectual tradition, and psychoanalytic theory, and each is accompanied by an overview and interpretation.

The volume features Martin Heidegger on Van Gogh's shoes and the meaning of the Greek temple; Georges Bataille on Salvador Dalí's The Lugubrious Game ; Theodor W. Adorno on capitalism and collage; Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes on the uncanny nature of photography; Sigmund Freud on Leonardo Da Vinci and his interpreters; Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva on the paintings of Holbein; Freud's postmodern critic, Gilles Deleuze on the visceral paintings of Francis Bacon; and Giorgio Agamben on the twin traditions of the Duchampian ready-made and Pop Art. Kul-Want elucidates these texts with essays on aesthetics, from Hegel and Nietzsche to Badiou and Rancière, demonstrating how philosophy adopted a new orientation toward aesthetic experience and subjectivity in the wake of Kant's powerful legacy.

Genres: Philosophy, Art

376 pages, Paperback

First published May 14, 2010

Reviews

[Kamakana · Rating 4 out of 5]

300114: great resource for many signal works on the arts, from various philosophers, each with brief intros. often translated, a few women, there is a very good cross-section of theories. also interesting methods for each essay, makes me want to read more of certain authors, particularly contemporary thinkers like Nancy, Badiou, though it is not until near the end that someone comes up with an overarching, unified, theory of types of ways to think of art- didactic, romantic, classical- that I wish they had put at the start, but this is on a historical pattern, and maybe it is necessary to have read all those chapters to understand chapters 18, 19, 20...