Digital art has emerged as a powerful medium for meaning making in contemporary culture and it is situated at the intersection of technology, creativity, and communication. This paper explores the communicative dimensions of digital art from the perspective of visual rhetoric and aesthetic, and examining how symbols, images, and interactive forms operate as persuasive and expressive tools in the digital sphere. The theoretical framework of this study draws upon aesthetic philosophy, semiotics, and rhetorical theory. The study analyses how digital artworks (from digital paintings and interactive installations to memes, non-fungible tokens, and Artificial Intelligence (AI)-generated visuals) construct and disseminate cultural narratives. The paper argues that digital art not only embodies aesthetic value but also functions as a rhetorical act that shapes perceptions, identities, and public discourse. By interrogating the role of interactivity, multimodality, and technological mediation, the research highlights how digital art transcends traditional boundaries of visual communication, and engaging audiences in participatory and immersive experiences. This inquiry situates digital art as a vital communicative practice that negotiates between creativity, socio-cultural meaning, and technology; and underscores its significance in the evolving landscape of visual culture and media studies.
Based on the graphic novel Dalí's Mustache and Other Colors, published by Polirom in 2020, the article Dalí's Mustache between Color, Word, Image, Non-Fungible Token, and... Sound proposes a reevaluation of the concept of musicological research from a contemporary interdisciplinary perspective, as an authentic act of culture. The 16 paintings imagined by visual artist Felix Aftene, perfectly suited to the equally impressive literary chapters written by Lucian Dan Teodorovici, follow a path marked by metamorphosis, with stops that generate new meanings and senses (video artist Andrei Cozlac, Blockchain consultant Gabi Dumitru), with the final destination being the concert stage in the orchestral suite composed by the young musician Paul Pintilie and premiered at the Classix Festival in 2023 on the stage of the “Vasile Alecsandri” National Theater in Iași, performed by the National Youth Orchestra of Moldova and the “Sonos Alumni” Chamber Orchestra of the Iași University of Arts. The article is conceived along parallel lines/arts, but continuously linked by a common thread: Dalí's moustache, a surrealist universe in which the conventional-unconventional dualism fits perfectly.
This paper introduces The Visual Ledger, a diagnostic analysis of European art history between 1849 and 1991 that treats painting as an archival instrument registering the progressive evacuation of ontological weight from the human figure. Using a diagnostic history methodology, the article argues that painters detected and documented shifts in how presence, consequence, and embodiment are organised decades before these transformations consolidated institutionally. Beginning with the material density of Realism in Courbet and Repin, the analysis traces a directional transformation through Impressionism’s optical dissolution, Pointillism’s cognitive fragmentation, Art Nouveau’s decorative masking, Malevich’s honest void, and Pop Art’s operationalisation of abstraction as governance. The AIDS crisis functions as a late twentieth-century visibility stress test, exposing the limits of surface-based legibility when confronted with suffering resistant to procedural categorisation. The paper demonstrates that visual archives independently converge with literary and administrative records, showing that populations currently collapsing under procedural abstraction are experiencing the settlement of a transformation painters registered when evacuation began. This contribution is conceptual and diagnostic rather than empirical. It forms one component of the broader Equilibrium Ledger framework, which examines how institutions generate and distribute cognitive costs, and how procedural abstraction renders embodied complexity administratively legible while humanly inaccessible.
This bachelor's thesis aims to interpret Damien Hirst's 2021 project "The Currency" in which 10,000 paintings were created, which were then converted into into NFTs (non- fungible tokens). When selling the works, it was the customer's crucial decision whether to buy the original or NFT version of the work, with the unselected variant being destroyed. The bachelor thesis will show that with this project Hirst has opened up the question of material-media essence and transformation of artwork, which can be researched as a problem of the theory of remediation, disappearance and aura, as developed by contemporary media science and philosophy, as well as the theory of reproduction in its relation to the original, as opened up by Walter Benjamin and developed with regard to his thinking by other authors of the 20th and 21st centuries. The bachelor's thesis, in addition to an introduction to the NFT issue, interprets its theoretical implications as a problem of the medium, its disappearance, and an issue of aura within art theory and history. Key words: Damien Hirst, The Currency, NFT, Remediation, Disappearing, Aura
This study examines the hitherto unexplained phenomenon of seemingly random and unpredictable fluctuations in the contemporary art market’s valuation of artworks, which has only been exacerbated by the recent rapid rise (and subsequent fast fall) of the value of non-fungible tokens (NFTs). This study aims to provide a novel explanation for this phenomenon by drawing on an interdisciplinary aesthetic framework at the intersection of semiotics, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and critical theory. In addition, this research explores the interplay between the discursive, psychological, and social dimensions that contribute to art valuation, revealing the intricate web of factors that shape our perception and understanding of NFT art and its market dynamics.
Dijitalleşme süreci, her disiplinde kendi teknolojik dönüşümünü oluşturmaktadır. Sanatın dönüşüm sürecinde birtakım problemler ortaya çıkmış ve bu süreçte ortaya çıkan “Taklidi Mümkün Olmayan Jeton” Non-Fungible-Token (NFT) sanat alanında; eserlerin dijital olarak sertifikalanması, eser sahipliğini sunması ve satış sürecinin takibi vb. birçok ihtiyaca çözüm niteliği olarak görülmektedir. Nitekim NFT teknolojisi, sanattan bağımsız kullanımından kaynaklı, insanlarda kavram çatışmasına, sanatçılarda fikir ayrılıklarına sebep olurken aynı zamanda direnç unsurları oluşturmuştur. Teknolojik determinizm bakış açısıyla ele alınan bu çalışma, NFT teknolojisi özelinde aura ve direnç unsurlarını çözümlemektedir. Çalışma grubu, NFT tabanlı eser üreten sanatçılarla sınırlandırılmıştır. Sanatçılarının direnç ve auraya yönelik tutumlarına ilişkin veriler, çevrimiçi anket çalışması aracılığıyla toplanmış olup istatistiki analiz programıyla analiz edilmiştir. Veriler, araştırma grubuna uygulanan yarı-yapılandırılmış derinlemesine görüşmeler ile desteklenmiştir. Çalışmada nicel ve nitel araştırma yönteminin birlikte kullanıldığı karma araştırma yöntemi seçilmiştir. Karma yöntemin sınıflandırılması “Açıklayıcı”, düzeyi “Tamamen”, zaman yönelimi “Sıralı”, vurgu yaklaşımı “Eşit statüde” belirlenmiştir. Soruların kuramsal temeli Walter Benjamin’in “Sanatın Aurası” kavramından oluşturulurken çalışmada “NFT teknolojisiyle inşa edilen dijital sanatın aurası, sanatı toplumdan uzaklaştırmaktadır” hipotezi araştırılmıştır. Analizler sonucunda, sanatçılar tarafından NFT tabanlı eserlerde aura oluşumunun ve karşılaşılan direnç unsurlarından dolayı NFT teknolojisinden uzaklaşmama eğiliminin desteklendiği saptanmıştır. Çalışmada sanatın dönüşüm sürecinde ihtiyaca çözüm olarak görülen bir aracın, sanatı dönüştürüp dönüştürmediği, direnç ve sanatçı ilişkisi, gelecek ön görüleri tespit edilmiş olup “Siber Aura” kavramı ortaya atılmıştır. Veriler, sanatın teknolojik yeniliklerde aynı veya benzer sorunlar yaşamamasına, sanatçıların dijitalleşme sürecindeki sanata bakış açılarına dikkat çekme ve yeni kavramların literatüre eklenmesi amacı taşımaktadır.
This paper investigates non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, and examines their place within art historical canon. Crypto-art and crypto-collectibles have flooded digital markets, offering unique art. Recently, Beeple’s Everydays—The First 5000 Days, the first digital artwork fitted with a non-fungible token offered by the major auction house Christie’s, sold for $69,346,250 on March 11, 2021. It is the third most expensive artwork sold by a living artist, following Jeff Koon’s sculpture Rabbit (1986) and David Hockney’s painting Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972). While Jeff Koons and David Hockney are the artists, whose theoretical perspectives are well known and have a secured place in an art historical canon, Beeple’s work and works of other digital NFT artists have not been fully investigated to be positioned in relation to art history, seemingly existing in a theoretical vacuum. The absence of artistic statements that usually accompany artworks contributes to this effect. Is it possible to think of the 21st century NFT-backed digital artists as the avant-gardes, who, like their 20th -century predecessors, confronted and condemned the art historical tradition? Using the case study of Beeple’s Everydays, this paper proposes an answer to the puzzling question of how a mosaic of everyday sketches produced by “pooping something out in 45 minutes,” using Beeple’s own words, was claimed to be “the next chapter in art history.” Using historical and textual analyses, this essay provides a critical response to the recent digital artworld trends driven by the decentralized networks and currencies existing in fully digital ecosystems.
What do Immanuel Kant and Pablo Picasso have in common? What sounds like the beginning of a bad academic joke was a serious question for the Russian philosopher-theologian Sergii Bulgakov (1871-1944). For the affinities between the twentieth-century artist and the eighteenth-century philosopher were, for him, substantial. Indeed, readers of Bulgakov’s The Tragedy of Philosophy—recently published in translation by Angelico Press—might consider the description of Kant as a ‘cubist’ and of his philosophy as a ‘cubism’, one of the book’s more outlandish and perplexing claims. Nor is it a claim that Bulgakov makes only once. In Tragedy, Kant’s epistemology is described as ‘subjective-cubistic’,11 Sergii Bulgakov, Tragedy of Philosophy, trans. Stephen Churchyard (New York: Angelico Press, 2020), 32, note 10. in response to Kant’s conviction that the unity of perceptions does not arise from objects themselves, but is instead imparted by the understanding to experience.22 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 134. Later in the same work, Bulgakov simply inserts the exclamation ‘cubism!’ into a citation from Kant’s own text on the unifying role of the understanding. These are the only two instances in Tragedy where Kant’s alleged cubism is asserted. They are marginal and gnomic assertions, and give an indication of the perplexities that await the intrepid reader. But they nonetheless gesture toward the abiding concern of this work. For Kant’s ‘cubism’ has to do with his approach to unity, and particularly his view of the understanding as imparting unity to experience, rather than the unity of things being received by the understanding from the perceived objects themselves. Bulgakov has more to say on Kant’s ‘cubism’ elsewhere. The characterisation of Kant as a cubist pre-dates the extended discussion of the latter’s philosophy in Tragedy by a few years, first appearing in a 1914 article on the works of Pablo Picasso, published under the title ‘The Corpse of Beauty’.33 ‘Trup krasoty’ [The Corpse of Beauty], in Sergii Bulgakov, Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh, vol. 2, ed. I. B. Rodnianskaia (Moscow: Nauka, 1993), 527-45. Here Bulgakov claims that the parallel between Kant and Picasso has been noted elsewhere, and he is likely referring to another 1914 article on Picasso, this time by Nikolai Berdiaev.44 Rodnianskaia is the source of this connection. Cf. her notes in Sochineniia, vol. 2, 719. As for Bulgakov, what is at stake for Berdiaev in defining a ‘cubist’ philosophy is its approach to unity, and particularly the unity that both Bulgakov and Berdiaev claim for the world independently of reason. Berdiaev understands a cubist philosophy as one which sunders the unity of the world: ‘cubism is possible in philosophy also. Thus the critical genealogy ends in its latter stages with the slicing up and scattering of being’.55 Nikolai Berdiaev, ‘Pikasso’, first published in Sofiia 3 (1914). Available at http://www.picasso-pablo.ru/library/berdyaev-picasso.html (in Russian). (Accessed 28 September 2020). Bulgakov will describe cubism in similar—albeit more graphic—terms, as a decomposition of organic, living unity. ‘Putrefaction, the smell of rotting flesh and of the disintegrating physical plane are perfectly palpable’ when viewing Picasso’s portraits, whilst in cubism as a whole ‘everything, even living things become matter, become composite, and Bulgakov, The artist and the philosopher in of the living unity of things and in of the of the a to the of a and a of the of into an of But is one more is to the in the of Picasso, the artist is in with the by the artist an with the artist in a particularly with the of the world the artist is to that of the flesh which is the of the What Bulgakov to is that artist and are by a of the the unity of For the of the the of to the and the artist the that is in matter, the of in its this that is what it is to is but Sergii Bulgakov, The trans. 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This article deals with the representation of visual elucidation in film. Starting with the analysis of Matthieu Bareyre’s On ne sait jamais ce qu’on filme(2016), we investigate the construction of the cinematic image as proof. Although a key asset in the development of modern surveillance rhetoric, the evidentiary quality of the visual image stems from a century-long history. Louis Feuillade’s early accidental surveillance film Erreur tragique (1913) and Chris Marker’s post-apocalyptic classic La jetee help us to discern the specific procedures of this history. Visual elucidation often resembles an interrogation procedure: images, as witnesses, are submitted to intensive, repetitive questioning. In this paper, we describe the mimetic repetition that is at stake in elucidation sequences: both the image and its observer have to stutter in order to generate an image of the truth.
We approach this paper with a shared investment in historical and contemporary representations of trans and gender non-conforming people, and our individual research in the archives of early US Gender Clinics. Together, we consider what is at stake—or what might be possible—when we connect legacies of photography used as diagnostic tools in gender clinics with snapshots of early, community-based gatherings, and the presence of trans people in contemporary art. From the archives of Robert J. Stoller and photos of Casa Susanna, to the collaborative photography of Zackary Drucker and Amos Mac, and the biometric data art-theory experiments of Zach Blas, we engage a series of image-based projects, which animate underlying questions and socio-political debates about the politics of visuality, and visibility’s impact on trans and gender non-conforming people. Moreover, we argue that rhetorical strategies of proof—from conditions verified in clinics to shared existence through photography—are tethered to, and thus trapped by, the logics and discipline of legibility and re-institutionalization.
I am grateful to Scott Walden and Dominic McIver Lopes for their comments on “What's So New about the ‘New’ Theory of Photography?” Their responses come from opposite ends of the spectrum in recent philosophy of photography, and I shall reply to them in turn. Scott Walden, as will be apparent from his response, is what I call an “orthodox” theorist of photography, albeit a non‐skeptical one; so it is no surprise that he remains unconvinced by much of what I say new theory has to offer. What types Walden as an orthodox theorist is his commitment to a certain view of how photographs come into being, together with the further view (not thematized here) that our second‐order beliefs about how such images come into being impact our first‐order beliefs about what we are seeing, when what we are seeing is a photograph (Walden 2005, 263, 272). For orthodox theorists, “resolute” or otherwise, this is what explains photographs’ epistemic advantage over handmade images.1 Walden himself refers to these second‐order beliefs as knowledge, but that implies the beliefs in question are both justified and true, whereas I take them to be (at best) justified, but nonetheless false. What types Walden as a “non‐skeptical” orthodox theorist is that he thinks these facts are consistent with photography being art. And I agree, although it is not clear from what he says here that Walden recognizes this. The reason is straightforward: one can, as Walden suggests, turn automaticity into an artistic virtue rather than a vice. Indeed, many art practices (and not only photographic ones) have done so: witness the fascination with the aleatory, mechanical or automatic, in avant‐garde art since dadaism and surrealism as a strategy intended to undercut an overblown conception of the artist as a self‐present agent fully in control of all his or her artistic acts. Indeed, this cast of mind is one of the reasons a certain kind of artist turns to photography in the first place—so as to mine its automatism for the aleatory and anomic effects thereby made possible. An obvious example is the valorization of the uninflected or deadpan photographic document by various conceptual and proto‐conceptual artists from Edward Ruscha and Bernd and Hilla Becher onward. I doubt, however, that these are the kinds of photography that Walden has in mind, so consider a case much closer to the issues addressed in my article. In “The Aesthetics of Photographic Transparency,” Lopes argued that the affordance of clear or revelatory seeing are two kinds of aesthetic interest we can take in a scene as it appears through a photograph that we cannot always take in the same scene seen directly (2003, 445).2 The former arises from photography's capacity to isolate aspects of a scene difficult to focus on in day‐to‐day life, the latter from the ways in which photographic framing and the like can defamiliarize an everyday scene. Lopes associates both with a broadly “documentary aesthetic,” and both are consistent with orthodoxy being true. Modernist images by Lázló Moholy‐Nagy, Henri Cartier‐Bresson, and André Kertész exploiting a combination of dramatic framing, unusual points of view, and collapsed or truncated depth of field are good examples of the latter. Not only do such images exploit photography's automaticity for artistic gain, they implicitly leverage the folk theory underpinning orthodoxy to generate their aesthetic payoff. For it is only if one assumes a certain understanding of photography in one's audience that one will be able to trade on his or her delight in the fact that—since this is a photograph—it really must be possible for the world to look like this. So there is little dispute between us about this.3 The substantive issue between us concerns whether the underlying beliefs that Walden subscribes to concerning how photographs come into being are true. Here, or so it initially seems, we do disagree: I think the latter are false and that they are false because they rely on an impoverished understanding of how photographs come into being. More specifically, they are false as a general account of how photographs as a kind of image come into being, even though they may be true of how many photographs in genres that are important to us (such as vernacular, documentary, or press photographs) do come into being. The fact that the underlying folk theory takes what is true of the latter to be true of the whole is what renders it inadequate as a general understanding of photographic aetiology. Seen in this light, orthodoxy in philosophy of photography, from André Bazin through to Kendall Walton, consists of a gradual philosophical refinement of these underlying intuitions, intuitions that can traced all the way back to photography's pioneers.4 If new theorists are right, Walden and the folk implicitly endorse the same mistaken theory about this. To my surprise, Walden seems willing to grant this claim. Thus, he writes, while parodying new theory's focus on the “photographic event” as a necessary, but not sufficient, condition of photographs as images available to visual appreciation: Such candidate items of knowledge might not be incorrect. After all, such things as automotive and telephonic events regularly take place. But merely highlighting properties instantiated by technologies being studied is not sufficient to foster understanding of those technologies. Instead, such understanding requires the highlighting of instantiated properties that either help users to interact with those technologies or designers to augment or improve those interactions. The properties highlighted by the new theorists in relation to photography are as inert in these respects as the ones imagined highlighted in relation to cars and telephones. (Walden 2019, 309; emphasis added) Either Walden thinks the fact that existing folk theory (which new theorists take to be the basis of orthodoxy in the philosophy of photography) is wrong does not matter, or he thinks that if it does matter it only matters to the wrong people. If I have this right, I do not know what to make of it: if philosophers are not in the business of correcting false beliefs, what business are they in? Walden seems willing to grant that the beliefs in question are wrong, only to respond not in terms of philosophical debates, but in terms of engineers (those who have a detailed technical understanding of how a given technology works) or practitioners (those who only need to know how to use the technology in question). But besides being an odd demand to make of philosophers—why should what philosophers do be of service to either camera engineers or camera operators?—this smacks of moving the goalposts. For the debate at issue concerns not how to help engineers or snappers, but what competing camps of philosophers believe is sufficient for a photograph to come into being. And this matters—which is to say that it matters philosophically—because if we get this wrong it pushes much of what photographers do in harnessing photographic technologies for artistic ends beyond the domain of photography proper. That should worry both theorists of photography and philosophers of art alike. In a certain mood, I am inclined to agree with Walden that calling what follows from taking such considerations seriously a “new theory” or “paradigm shift” may be guilty of over‐egging the pudding. For it can seem that recalling our attention to the fact that photography requires harnessing the capacity of light to mark sensitive surfaces, yet cannot be reduced to natural causality (because additional imaging processes are required to make the results available to visual appreciation) is little more than a reminder of what we (should) already know. But it bears noting just how widespread the relevant and, if new theory is right, mistaken assumptions are. They arguably recur at several points in Walden's response, notably when querying the need for new theory as a response to Roger Scruton's skepticism. Take the (terrifying!) painting by Norman Rockwell resembling one of Walker Evans's 1936 photographs of starving Alabama sharecroppers that Walden asks us to imagine. This is an intuition pump that presumes the truth of orthodoxy: that it succeeds is to be expected if the latter really is just a formalization of the intuitions underwriting folk theory of photography. But given that new theorists dispute that painting represents a bona fide, noncontentious contrast class to photography, this cannot be assumed without begging the question. It is worth pausing to consider why new theory arises from responding to Scruton in particular. Scruton's skepticism crystallizes a powerful pattern of thought that permeates even nonskeptical, everyday thinking about photography. Just how standard is easily overlooked, but a continuous line can in fact be traced from Scruton back to the nineteenth century. Take the debate between Robert Demachy and Frederick Evans over the competing merits of the painterly gum bichromate process versus the straight print or the tussle between Henry Peach Robinson and Peter Henry Emerson over the respective merits of pictorialism and naturalism. At stake in both is whether straight (unaltered, noncombinatory) prints from straight negatives permit sufficient judgment and control to be art. Essentially the same divide was apparent, within two decades of photography's invention, in the competing responses of Elizabeth Eastlake and Oliver Wendell Holmes to photography's treatment of detail. Where the former chastised photography for its mindless lack of selectivity, attributable to the absence of human mediation and transformation, the latter celebrated the beauty that results from according equal attention to the marginal and seemingly unimportant.5 The fault line throughout such debates is whether “pure” photography—photography in which the formation of the image bypasses the mental states of the artist—could be art, or whether photographers must choose between sacrificing photographic purity in order to make art, or give up their pretensions to making art as a cost of maintaining their photographic purity. Taking this longer view, there is little in Scruton, or many of his critics, that is not already present in Eastlake and Holmes circa 1857–1859. Scruton merely reheats the skeptical side of the debate, and he can do so because the intuitions on which the debate turns remain common. Lopes recognizes this, and The Four Arts of Photography sets out to demonstrate the falsity of every premise in what he calls the “skeptical argument.” My own view (2018a, chapters 2 and 3)—and this is where I depart from Lopes—is that this focus is mistaken and may represent the new theory's Achilles’ heel to date. Mistaken, that is, not in the sense of being wrong so much as being misdirected. My own view is that new theorists ought to take Walton rather than Scruton as their stalking horse and for two reasons: not only is Walton's conception of photography immeasurably richer than Scruton's, it also speaks to both its epistemic and its aesthetic capacities. This is what makes Walton a representative of “non‐skeptical” orthodoxy on my taxonomy: his theory accounts for the epistemic privilege dear to orthodox thinkers, but it does so in a way that does not rule out its artistic significance. For Walton, as is routinely overlooked in the rush to contest the counterintuitiveness of the transparency thesis, photographs are not simply transparent; they are also pictures. That they are enables them to function as spurs to the kinds of imaginative capacities and projects in which Walton grounds the significance of pictures in general, thereby securing their aesthetic significance. While, unlike pictures in general, the fact that photographs are also transparent allows them to function as a significant means of learning about the world, thereby securing their epistemic significance. Because it accommodates both, I have argued that it is Walton's theory rather than Scruton's that new theorists should be cutting their teeth on. Be that as it may, new theory does, as a matter of historical fact, emerge from taking up Scruton's challenge that photography cannot be representational in his Walden is to question Scruton's of artistic and I think he might much For the can be made more broadly than the conceptual art. is art not only but also and, the aesthetic That is, there is art that a understanding of art in the service of and or the is also a of artistic practices the that we but that do not so function in their being one obvious there is not only conceptual art, but a of and practices that to their to rather than there is Scruton's yet conception of what it is to take an in a of art. It is much more to as out a than as the and of a Indeed, that it is, is one reason about the of to art as a of human made for routinely of this underlying one Walden representational art of the kind Scruton has in mind cannot be in order to focus on the many kinds of art on kinds of aesthetic that can, Scruton is to his For this is a response that Scruton's while Walden and I may agree that the can use automaticity in the service of her art without that are representational in Scruton's we as to the significance of this Walden is that this does not matter are to make art they this response Scruton to the condition that Walden new theory must in order to that responses to Scruton but which it to automaticity in Scruton's of is the only that is Walden with For Scruton, this is true by photographs are as being transparent to their rather than their because they have a relation to those I Walden may agree with this, but I Walden may it And this is why the considerations Walden new theory seem to the The philosophical debate concerns what a theory of photography. I that either designers of or or their users are given to over photography's This is a philosophical and it only arises given a certain conception of photography's This is what new theorists are taking issue and to my mind it is Walden may believe I think because I the question of to according to new we should the images on the of either or his in But I this, Walden, not as a of new theory's but as a challenge to its lack of to as to how we should photographs photographs are to in photographic This should it turn out (and it that many photographs are the of more than Walden thinks this is not to matter If that be between that being I the of Walden's we do and respond to certain photographs of ones and we are than to the way we about many That there is a to like with like in such so it is worth what is the of or and one out on this need not so as about automaticity to the It need only that the way in which the photographs to which are routinely on on come into being, by their without obvious or from the way in which handmade images come into being. Indeed, this may even be for the kinds of reasons that Walden has attention to And such a in this may be in beliefs that are yet nonetheless when My response to Lopes is in because there is between Lopes and I are in these debates, even if I have issue with the of his own of the new theory reply consists in of a more for new theory intended to demonstrate its over its of the I has to more he does so by making clear of the underlying assumptions his own to these The latter are Lopes in The Four Arts of photography the challenge to the orthodox assumptions underpinning the because only photography is with orthodoxy being true. What Lopes calls photography a of practices that the processes and of photography and, in so takes issue with by up to photograph is an image that by This is way of the or natural that is are of photographic art, but these are with the latter being only photography orthodoxy is a way of this it is to is not on its But natural on its is a condition of being a cannot be a This response is because the premise assumes the truth of orthodoxy when its truth is what is in question. It is nonetheless because it to widespread intuitions about the of photography. 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Thierry Lenain’s Art Forgery: The History of a Modern Obsession is, to my knowledge, the first book-length investigation into philosophical issues of art forgery since Denis Dutton’s 1983 edited volume, The Forger’s Art. And Lenain’s text, it must be said, presents in fascinating detail, not only historical accounts of forgery and its cousins—from ancient Rome up to the dubiously celebrated twentieth-century forgers—but also the history of religious relic veneration, which he argues forms the historical basis to today’s obsession over art authenticity. In his text, Lenain argues for three central points: (1) that art forgery, as we know it, did not exist as a practice in the ancient world; (2) that art forgery instead evolves out of medieval relic fetishism; and (3) that the perfect fake decentres the conceptual notion at the heart of contemporary art connoisseurship—the ‘trace paradigm’. Lenain’s first chapter sets up the conceptual groundwork for what follows. Today, when a work is discovered to be a forgery, it is usually hidden away from view, or else destroyed outright. Art forgery is typically seen as a blight on the art historical landscape—a disease, Lenain suggests, that threatens the very notion of art. Art history and connoisseurship, he argues, have for quite some time rested upon what he calls the trace paradigm, the view that any artwork displays traces of its historical origin. In particular, the trace paradigm holds that the style in which a work is created invariably embodies its creator’s personality. Art forgery is something of an artistic changeling, then, devoid of value of its own and meant to usurp the place of real art. Once discovered, the forgery is seen for what it is: a monstrous doppelgänger. A true work of art forgery, Lenain suggests, imitates the appearance of an artwork with a different origin in order to steal its place in the system of art, and is susceptible to harming someone’s interests. Forgery, as such, plays a unique role in the artworld, a role not played by benign copies, harmless pastiches, or mere replicas. Lenain further distinguishes true forgeries from what he calls ‘artistic mystifications’, which, while identical in method with forgeries and intended initially to deceive, are also intended from the start to be ultimately revealed by their makers, and so not harmful. On this understanding, Lenain sets out in his second chapter to dissolve the pervasive notion that the practice of art forgery ‘is as old as mankind itself’—that it stretches back as far as the Roman Empire or earlier—what Lenain calls the ‘always-been’ fallacy. Certainly, the Roman period had no shortage of art copies and replicas, but, contrary to the claims of other scholars, Lenain argues that textual evidence from the period does not support a practice of art forgery as we understand it today. One such text often referred to by scholars comes from Phaedrus’ Aesopic Fables: As certain artists do in our day, who obtain a much greater price for their productions if they inscribe the name of Praxiteles on their scraped marbles, Myron on their polished silver and Zeuxis on their panels … Carping envy more readily favours works of false antiquity than those of the present day. (65) Though many have taken this and similar passages as clear evidence of a practice of Roman art forgery, sculptures bearing the signatures of artists other than their makers, Lenain suggests, were not deceptive copies but rather overt homages, their values enhanced by association with their more prestigious forerunners through a sort of ‘symbolic enhancement’. Perhaps Lenain’s scepticism appears hyperbolic as he knocks down case after case by suggesting entirely unknown cultural practices rather than accepting them as precursors to contemporary art forgery, but this much appears sound: even if there was an occasional artisan or merchant who lied about the origin of a work for the sake of jacking up the price, without a practice of art collection, there would have been little reason for a practice of art forgery, and so any such individual act would not have had the cultural relevance that it has today. Instead, Lenain argues, the historical origins of today’s ‘religion’ of art connoisseurship are to be found in medieval relic fetishism, and its reasonable concerns over authenticity. Relics were, after all, literal pieces of saints, or of objects closely associated with them, and were believed to embody the very powers of those individuals. So whether a claimed relic was authentic was of critical importance, and great lengths were taken not only to authenticate, but also to protect, preserve, and showcase these relics. Lenain’s hypothesis is, admittedly, a fascinating suggestion, and he outlines the complex and intriguing history of religious relics in equally fascinating detail. But when he turns to making the connection with art forgery, the implacable incredulity which he brought to bear on purported forgery in the ancient world seems to have been shelved. Looking to texts by Pietro Summonte, Marcantonio Michiel, and Giorgio Vasari, Lenain argues in his third chapter that there began in the late medieval period a veneration of artists as divine and their works as analogous to religious relics. And, just as relics could be duplicated through a sort of divine osmosis without any dampening of their religious powers, so too, Lenain suggests, were artistic duplicates seen as equivalent to their originals. However, where Lenain was willing to accept nothing short of absolute proof of forgery in the ancient world, here he takes a lack of contradictory evidence as proof of his hypothesis. For example, Lenain recounts Summonte’s anecdotes of the painter Colantonio, who produced amazing copies of existing Flemish paintings. Summonte’s short account contains no discussion of the means by which Colantonio managed to create his indistinguishable duplicates, and no moral condemnation of his acts. As such, Lenain contends: [t]he fact that Summonte’s discourse offers nothing of that sort indicates that nothing was really at stake in the anecdote except the demonstration of Colantonio’s glorious mastery and the artistic nobility of perfect copying. (175) The lack of moral condemnation, Lenain contends, can be explained by a belief that the copy was taken as authentically equivalent to the original, just as a religious relic could mystically produce authentic copies of itself. Those painters in the Renaissance and early modern period who were capable of producing amazing duplicates were not condemned, Lenain notes, but venerated. And, Lenain suggests, although Vasari and others did not hold to the trace paradigm, this did not prevent artworks as coming to be seen as authorial ‘relics’. Against this backdrop, Lenain returns in his final chapter to the trace paradigm in contemporary connoisseurship, and works to show how the paradigm is at odds with the ‘perfect fake’ (or, as Lenain prefers, the ‘perfect stylistic duplicate’). The possibility of a perfect fake has long been denounced by art historians and philosophers alike. Historians have suggested that any forgery carries with it traces of its historical origins, and that while these are not always apparent at the time of creation, they begin to stand out as time passes to the point when we wonder how these fakes could ever have passed as originals (the exemplar here being Han van Meegeren’s atrocious and yet largely effective Vermeer forgeries). Nelson Goodman suggests that knowing one of two visually indistinguishable paintings is a fake constitutes an aesthetic difference between the works, a view echoed by Mark Sagoff, Jerrold Levinson, and others. Working against these notions, Eric Hebborn, the twentieth-century forger of works of antiquity, contended that he adopted the very styles of past artists by adopting their idiosyncratic ‘languages’ and worked directly on this basis, rather than attempting to copy any existing work. Another contemporary forger, Tom Keating, professed to having channelled long-dead artists, whose spirits would literally guide his hands. Both Hebborn and Keating in their own ways were claiming to have made originals, not fakes. Forgery, the forgers suggest, comes down to a matter of labelling only. But, of course, this labelling is critical, and by labelling their works as works of others, forgers explode the link between the surface of the work and the work’s origin. Lenain writes: The perfect fake destroys the absolute significance of the trace paradigm both in scientific and experiential terms – not only as far as particular objects are concerned but also with respect to artworks in general, fake or not. Even though that paradigm is still functional in a majority of cases, it will never be possible to consider it as absolutely applicable in any single case: since some artworks have been subjected to perfect stylistic simulation, no artwork can be regarded as the absolute (that is, bi-univocal) manifestation of its origin. (273) Now, it is worth noting that Lenain has not provided us with any criteria for being a ‘perfect fake’, but it is clear that he does not have in mind what, say, Goodman does: something in all ways aesthetically indistinguishable from the original. Rather, it seems, Lenain is thinking of a perfect fake as a perfectly convincing one, or (in the case of a copy of an existing work) one visually indiscernible from the original, and this is, at least in principle, a much less difficult pill to swallow. The artworld has certainly been hoodwinked before, and it would be arrogant to assume there are not at this moment dozens of forgeries hanging in the world’s most respected museums. Now, I am sympathetic to the view that the perfect fake is a real possibility—a possibility, I suspect, largely unaccomplished only because of our current technological limitations—but I question whether the typical connoisseur, historian, or philosopher today buys into the Romantic notion that an artist’s style embodies his personality in the way that the trace paradigm says it does. Rather, I would suggest, the Romantic model at the core of the paradigm has been steadily dwindling since the late nineteenth century, and Lenain admits as much. So it seems that Lenain is suggesting that the existence of the perfect fake (which itself is questionable) destroys the significance of a conceptual framework that few adhere to. In his conclusion, Lenain ultimately suggests that the practice of forgery cannot comfortably be positioned either within or outside of the artworld: a fake—perfect or not—is not a normal artwork, but plays something of a perverse cultural role, and to submit the fake to ordinary aesthetic analysis is to ignore its role as a fake. An interpretation of a forgery, Lenain contends, must not focus centrally on its surface features, but on its cultural role—and this, he notes, is not all that different from how we interpret much contemporary art. While contemporary artists have toyed with our notions of authorship and originality, Lenain notes, this is not the forger’s concern. Unlike contemporary art, the forgery can function as such only as long as the identity of its maker remains hidden—so long as it remains authorless. On this basis, Lenain suggests, ‘[i]f we decide that fakes are artworks, it means that we have to accept the idea of an authorless artwork’ (316). But the cultural nature of such fakes makes it essentially impossible to interpret them as artworks while at the same time recognizing their nature as forgeries. The clash arises from competing conceptions: any interpretation of art requires a concept of authorship, but recognition of forgeries as forgeries requires conceiving of them as authorless. Nevertheless, despite their non-art status, art forgeries are fully relevant to both the history and theory of art. Philosophically speaking, this discussion makes up the most intriguing part of the entire book, and deserves much more discussion than I can devote to it here. For those with a philosophic interest in the nature of forgery and authenticity in art, Lenain’s book would be worth picking up for the final fourteen pages alone. This is not to suggest that the preceding pages are not worth reading, however. Indeed, while Lenain’s underlying philosophical methodology is at times deeply flawed and uneven, his historical accounts are laid out in such rich, engrossing detail that one is willing to look past the framework Lenain has constructed for the sake of some compelling stories, absorbingly told.
>The translator into Hungarian of several of my writings on art theory recently sent me a catalog of the work of a young artist from her country, Ágnes Eperjesi.1 The translator—Eszter Babarczy—is a gifted critic in her own right, and I cannot do better than quote from her letter, which explains why she felt I would be especially interested in Eperjesi's art. She thought your ideas about transfiguration and the commonplace applied to her work, and she took inspiration from your essays. Hers is a remarkable and long journey from experimental photography to an absolutely unique venture of collecting wrappings of household products, and taking the humble sign language of ordinary household chores, and recreating them as objects of beauty and irony. The products, like dishwashers and vacuum cleaners—or underwear—were in all likelihood intended for export to countries anywhere in the world, which implies that they will fit into forms of life that must be much the same the world over. So the images must themselves belong to the sign language of globalism, necessarily universal in that they have to be legible to consumers who cannot be counted on to have a common language. The signs show what the consumers need to know about the products they have purchased—which side of a pair of underpants is front and which side is back, for example. In many, though not, all cases, they are pictograms or even isotypes—an acronym for “International System of Typographic Picture Education”—signs of a kind initially invented in 1936 by the Logical Positivist, Otto Neurath, who may have been influenced by Wittgenstein's so‐called picture theory of language. Neurath anticipated globalism in saying: “The visual method becomes the basis for a common cultural life and a common cultural relationship.”2 Just consider their international use in giving traffic directions to drivers who may or may not be able to read the language of the country in which they are traveling, or in guiding us through foreign airports. Isotypes are among the rare practical and positive contributions made by modern philosophy to the common life of humankind. When these pictograms are recycled—or transfigured—into works of art, their implied universality is elevated to a portrait of the society in which the products are to be used. I would not altogether follow Babarszy in calling Eperjesi's works beautiful and, in truth, I am somewhat at a loss to describe them aesthetically. But I can appreciate that in transfiguring the isotype into an artwork, an interesting reversal of Walter Benjamin's famous distinction has taken place: the art of mechanical reproduction has acquired, through transfiguration, an aura, and in virtue of that the images may acquire an aesthetic interest they heretofore lacked. At least, as art, we look at them as critics, and notice their aesthetic qualities, such as they are. Just knowing that an object is intended as a piece of fine art may trigger the sense that it must be beautiful. Or better, we use this standard term of aesthetic commendation in connection with them that we would hardly use in characterizing the pictograms on which they are based. The term ‘beautiful’ may simply be a compliment paid to art as art, without really being descriptive of the art at all. The goal of trans‐cultural communication may mean that features that imply ethnic differences will be erased—the persons are depicted neither as white nor black nor red nor yellow—leaving figures that are abstractly human, which in a way look quite “modern.” But is “looks modern” an aesthetic characterization or a stylistic one? Modernist design strove for a kind of simplification through its distaste for ornament, and this led to stylization in modernist pictography. This does not explain why the isotypical pictograms are stylized as they are, which comes, rather, from globalist imperatives—so “looks modern” is façon de parler. But in any case, the pictogram has undergone some sort of aesthetic transformation in the course of its artistic transfiguration, however we finally describe it. Eperjesi's aesthetic enhancement of workaday images is as distinctive as Andy Warhol's transformations of Polaroids into portraits. As to Eszter Bararcszy's description of the work as “ironic,” that is true—but it is due more to Eperjesi's titles—or perhaps they are captions—than to the images themselves: the covers of The New Yorker Magazine have titles, the cartoons have captions. Either way, the titles/captions express thoughts that the images alone do not. Eperjesi has often selected her images with the intention of using them to convey how women in contemporary Hungary regard themselves, and how they think about the housework for which the product designated by the image is intended to be used—usually by women as a matter of course. One of her images shows a man, a woman, and a child on bicycles. It is difficult to determine what product it stands for, though I would guess that it belongs to what we might think of as the secret life of women. The image could show a woman living a full active life, thanks to the product in question. Whatever its rhetorical aim, Eperjesi captions it this way: “My new boyfriend gets along fine with my daughter. I hope it's not just a show for now” (Figure 1). This is interesting because the woman is evidently a single mother, looking for a new relationship. The irony derives from the implication that while women in contemporary society have been greatly liberated, they remain in a disadvantageous position in relationship to men, as much so in Hungary as in America or western Europe. They are the ones left to do the housework, and to hope that men are not just out to exploit them sexually. Ágenes Eperjesi. The irony goes well beyond the power of isotypes. The three figures could, after all, just represent a family. Interestingly, most of the women are in Western clothing, which has become fairly isotypical: I imagine that the isotype on the door of women's' toilets, shown with a short flaring skirt, would be recognized in airports everywhere in the world, even by women who wear burkhas. In any case, the titles/captions have to be translated, as the artist has done, from Hungarian into the language of the country in which they are to be shown—English, for example, in the catalog I saw. English itself is not, for all it ubiquity, isotypical. Even if it were universally used, as Latin once was, there would be a distinction between pictures and words, which means that while isotypes may validate the picture theory of language, they do so in ways having nothing to do with natural languages as spoken or written. The semantics of sentences in a natural language differ from the semantic of a sentence used pictorially, as in a quotation. But even quotations have to be translated. Tempting as it is to dwell on the artistic semantics of Eperjesi's pictures, my immediate purpose in using her work has to do with its extreme contemporaneity, and to the way it illustrates the pluralistic structure that has increasingly come to define the production of contemporary art, especially since the 1960s when artists first began to explore the possibility of using vernacular imagery. I have already touched on the question of their indeterminate aesthetic qualities, but I want ultimately to discuss this with reference to the problems that artistic pluralism has raised for aesthetic theory, and especially for Kantian aesthetic theory, which more or less dominated discussion until the decade when pluralism became a driving force in art. I understand “Kantian” to mean the view that artistic excellence is one with aesthetic excellence, which is understood to be a matter of pleasure and value distinct from the pleasure of sensual gratification, and internally connected with an ideal of disinterested contemplation. It concerns what the classical aestheticians designated “taste,” and the main features of the theory are laid out in the section of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment titled “The Analytic of Taste,” which served as the great empowering text for aesthetic theory in modern times, especially, at least in America, in the critical thought and practice of Clement Greenberg. Immanuel Kant's initial interest was in natural beauty, which it was easy enough to relate to the visual arts, understood—the decorative arts apart, which were appraised in terms of “free beauty”—either as accurate representations of natural beauty, or else as beautified representations of natural objects that in reality fell short of beauty. For what would be the point of making pictures of aesthetically repellent or deficient motifs? Greenberg had no such interest, as far as I can tell, and his chief focus was on abstract painting, which could be treated in terms of “free” beauty. This had the advantage for him that he could treat even representationalist art as if abstract, and hence subject to formalist analysis. That is to say, he appreciated painting in terms of what we might call the aesthetics of medium, since painterly excellence is determined by what pertains to properties essential to that medium, namely, in Greenberg's view, relationships between flat forms, irrespective of what the forms may signify. Aesthetic value is what these forms convey to visual perception, in which all concepts are put out of play. Kant of the pleasure taken in an object of any For the alone with he or she may put for the in The of the artist was to from painting not the The was the production of beauty for The of Greenberg's modernist aesthetics on so‐called art in the was is is how pluralism have at all when the had all the power and in the at least so far as contemporary visual art was But for that an I am to the aesthetic began to way in the and became just when Greenberg his most in his The implied by in in the catalog for the at the of was to the between art and would have spoken of the between art and reality so far as were In artistic that the of giving to art out of of had become the it was was not when in the but the kind of aesthetic by the making for what one may think of as a pluralism of aesthetic for a aesthetic that is the of the kind of aesthetic excellence Kant and Greenberg took for It is the aesthetics of and as in he the and in which the work applied as it was used by to an object of use in connection with which and are in or as by what once as is the aesthetic of by and there is question that a for it can be and even by and to young with themselves through a of Kant's main was to what one might call a pluralism of by which I mean the common and somewhat view that beauty is in the of the and that differences in are to differences in Kant to show that beauty is and to be the same for all. This was a kind of aesthetic view that so‐called were simply aesthetically in their was the for the of Western in what to be Greenberg was that his critical practice was by Kant's Critique of Aesthetic which he often the on art. In truth, the of might have in the the remarkable of Greenberg's critical could be taken to have a of on Kant's abstract which a from a of painting hardly in his own of Kant's to Greenberg's which to aesthetic that in the New there was Kant's that of beauty are and that they are universally that they are in no sense Greenberg of beauty. interest was in what he in art, which that his could not be to the aesthetics of which would of course have been of interest to In Greenberg that in art can be neither nor by or alone in this the so to of Greenberg's view is that is what is Greenberg Kant for how it was to be or in of aesthetic not think one had to know of the kind that art concerns itself with in to be or about art. he that had the possibility of of art that we or art has nothing to do with once that though he about art, he would be able to out the or three in a They need not be by the by which themselves such but that was because they were by that had to do with aesthetic as he understood was to say, in front of a piece of art, beyond an But that in no sense that one was as Greenberg's in philosophy would have having come to the view that aesthetic is That it was, on the is by Greenberg's way of his and them when the work to be was in front of the as if a the had to to by way of was what aesthetic Greenberg's was through his in artistic in at a when there was on the of to abstract art as This would have art on the New at the New and at the New the to on abstract art, because they have not taken the to of it. enough to be able to the from the in abstract art, no one has the to be on this were who to with Greenberg on could I have been using for Greenberg was the New to in the that made The of his of had about it the of a It him as well as great power in the Greenberg and, more Kant was in their to that there is a of aesthetic qualities, that to be recognized when of language touched on the of aesthetics at about the same that Greenberg dominated critical in I have in an of much it is to be we could for a while about the beautiful and to the and the this in his in his for as this out the that we to use the of ordinary language some interesting were made by such as who to that aesthetic were not It would have been interesting to out if this was the for aesthetic as a for if not, what if there are. not in Greenberg's was But aesthetics took a in the decade to the philosophy of art, I am to say, with my “The which was by and to a by the work of and especially of the became the of art, and that has more or less been the for the philosophy of art was interesting was how a aesthetics in that as as the aesthetic in artistic production and in the increasingly art world, in the and but in and finally everywhere that art was to the The artists that were and the and the in work aesthetics was of since the of art had to with the and the in which aesthetic were at there was a question of aesthetics had really to do with art at all. This was a that from the it had that aesthetic pleasure was what art was all I was fairly about the of aesthetics for art. In my main work in the philosophy of art, The of the I with what I thought of as for a of art is about and hence and that an its which is what art I this by calling works of art In my The of I more or less that aesthetics is than had been and if there were not a namely, that to be a work of art, has to have some aesthetic not beauty, say, not I the that art need have any aesthetic at all. I a distinction between and beauty, and, by between and when stands for any aesthetic that may is what I by beauty. The beauty of an is when it to the I several of this from contemporary art, for the and in In a I thought a was the use that made of beauty in painting the of as beautiful in which like a from the The beauty of was like the beauty of and the of the painting was that for the who must the of this by their the beauty is not in a work of art it which means that it in Kant's “free and In my was to from the aesthetic of and an aesthetics of It is at this point that one might that the distinction the of aesthetic to which and the ordinary language aestheticians in the us consider once In is a had just the that the work was When first the of in it was a for was so and and made so much he was to It was simply a world from my it was like a that In a from that on was the of a made of and from a Kantian to an as when he applied as his for the that they have the of aesthetic that they neither pleasure nor to the They were from the of of they were aesthetic from the that was to in the when aesthetic became an aesthetic to the of the and itself a matter of the way had been for one might say, an aesthetic of of the kind out of which Ágnes Eperjesi her art. It is not easy to describe this but it is easy enough to and it is due to the of itself due to the of making the images easy to read and to understand everywhere in the to a an recognized aesthetic in the images of the that Andy used in his first in in the of on They were the kind of that were on in for and like of the It is the aesthetics of by the need to the that would to the product But that aesthetic gets to be to the works made of as the aesthetics of images gets to be to the work Ágnes Eperjesi on of work show their and from this is not the of The of this is that the to the question of aesthetics into the of pluralism is and It is if we are of the aesthetic of and disinterested contemplation. It is if we are of the way in which aesthetic qualities, of them to as by Kant and are to the of works of art as In the of pluralism has to the of aesthetic far far than aesthetics was able to I would say, that of these aesthetic is as as Kant beauty is in the of the but in the way in which sense are in the of the just as they are. in in the he but this in no sense it from as and and all qualities, not in but in the The is the same with beauty and virtue and This however no more from the reality of the than from that of the were to in the would or be less or is a in the and of to all these the objects of art and and to have the on life and taken the matter to this I must some to view on works of art a in a section of the the of the that he his of The Kant of is not the Kant of Kantian which is on the of I it to to show how my are to his in this section of his the of which shows how Kant was the in that the of was from that alone was not the when it to of products of which we that they at least in as beautiful art, they are without we nothing to in them on the of he means of the and this he goes on to say, no than the of It is of Kant that he will a kind of in to for a when the one might say, is really is as it an that has been in the way it was used by it to what is to is is that he has that is to sense and we a through the than a or a or a Kant as an one of the which we are to that Kant is as a sort of the when in the its does that often one by The in the of ones life and without through the image of a beautiful This is a quite commonplace use of and has nothing to do with as Kant to it “The is one through as in irony or in that the in this Kant's is about the course of a as a way of about the course of a It is a beautiful which need have nothing to do with the beauty of the The just after from the visual is as an in its and as a as a with The power of is made through the that is not than can be a being of must have The image us more than is all alone the of power that an to the to itself a of representations that more thought than can be in a determined by It is in regard to the of that Kant of and of as from the of and as in reference to the of the This was much in the in the when he his In for example, a of for the of of which he was at the must have to the of an namely, that there are no in It in from this that we cannot the practice of painting on the of or on any of text with a to the of the to in full without and to use means for them from the that shows them the way to this or that of text a from the that his work to the of his work, but it a about art. art a and is not that can be ideas have nothing much to do with the aesthetics of and they are what is from Greenberg's who of in his of in art. In a which has to natural and beauty, has to do with art, which in was in the in of what were felt to be of classical beauty. is of that in his one these are hardly of ideal beauty. the of but I to for this work, in the de he for a to and is taken to be the of there is no using painting for of a to and to be in any Greenberg would have this as having nothing essential to do with art at all. was a term of critical in Greenberg's and in formalist own view is that the relationship of aesthetics to art was and The of pluralism has nothing in this But the theory of art as the of it how aesthetic can to the of the work that This I am is what when he at the of his on why artistic beauty is to natural beauty. It is because natural beauty is Kant could have since for him natural beauty is a of and us the sense that the world is not to for has a kind of as the has recently in his natural beauty, as in the of the was an to this kind of But its in works is to their beauty as art. One can that without for a that itself is in the of and The works of Andy I of convey they have as aesthetic what belongs to through their They convey the of the and the that for a will be and that and will finally come Ágnes Eperjesi in the in which products are are of the society in which products are used. They are or better, as her a picture of what like a in her may in be the of a of a woman with a in a while gets into my I can of my (Figure even image of a woman with a is into a of and a on for the of Ágenes Eperjesi.
This paper explores the epistemic and ethical questions posed by cinematic representations of blindness. How do experiences of the blind challenge and extend the notion of visuality? At stake is an understanding of blindness not simply as a negation of vision but as a fundamentally different mode of being—an understanding that puts pressure on, and decenters, standard paradigms of perception, cognition and human subjectivity. Drawing on the Australian film Proof (1992), I argue for a politics of representation that acknowledges and accommodates the irreducible difference that constitutes the experience of blindness.