Ivan Gaskell

Salim Kemal

This volume brings together essays from distinguished scholars in a variety of disciplines - philosophy, history, literary studies, art history - to explore various ways in which aesthetics, politics and the arts interact with one another. Politics is an elastic concept, covering an oceanic breadth of mechanisms for conducting relations between empowered groups, and these essays offer a range of perspectives, including nations, classes, and gendered subjects, which examine the imbrication of politics with arts. Together they demonstrate the need to counteract the reductionist view of the relationship between politics and the arts which prevails in different ways in both philosophy and critical theory, and suggest that the irreducibility of the aesthetic must prompt us to reconceive the political as it relates to human cultural activity.

Politics and Aesthetics in the Arts

Sarah Anne Carter

Most historians rely principally on written sources. Yet there are other traces of the past available to historians: the material things that people have chosen, made, and used. This book examines how material culture can enhance historians' understanding of the past, both worldwide and across time. The successful use of material culture in history depends on treating material things of many kinds not as illustrations, but as primary evidence. Each kind of material thing-and there are many-requires the application of interpretive skills appropriate to it. These skills overlap with those acquired by scholars in disciplines that may abut history but are often relatively unfamiliar to historians, including anthropology, archaeology, and art history. Creative historians can adapt and apply the same skills they honed while studying more traditional text-based documents even as they borrow methods from these fields. They can think through familiar historical problems in new ways. They can also deploy material culture to discover the pasts of constituencies who have left few or no traces in written records. The authors of this volume contribute case studies arranged thematically in six sections that respectively address the relationship of history and material culture to cognition, technology, the symbolic, social distinction, and memory. They range across time and space, from Paleolithic to Punk.

The Oxford Handbook of History and Material Culture

Explanation and Value in the Arts offers penetrating studies by art historians, literary theorists, and philosophers, of issues central to explaining works of literature and painting. The first chapters look at the sources of interest in the fine arts and point to the intimate relation between aesthetic and other values. The next contributions develop the interaction between value and explanation in the study of the arts, including considerations of the nature of creativity and the principles for the explanations of works. A final section takes up questions of the role of ideology and the determining role of power.

Explanation and Value in the Arts

Daniel W. Conway

This collection of essays examines Nietzsche's aesthetic account of the origins and ends of philosophy.

Nietzsche, Philosophy and the Arts

The first volume in the series Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and the Arts offers a range of responses by distinguished philosophers and art historians to some crucial issues generated by the relationship between the art object and language in art history. Each of the chapters in this volume is a searching response to theoretical and practical questions in terms accessible to readers of all human science disciplines. The editors, one a philosopher and one an art historian, provide an introductory chapter which outlines the themes of the volume and explicates the terms in which they are discussed. The contributors open new avenues of enquiry involving concepts of 'presence', 'projective properties', visual conventions and syntax, and the appropriateness of figurative language in accounting for visual art. The issues they discuss will challenge the boundaries to thought that some contemporary theorising sustains.

The Language of Art History

Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts offers probing studies of the complex structure of aesthetic responses to nature. Each chapter refines and expands the terms of discussion, and together they enrich the debate with insights from art history, literary criticism, geography and philosophy. To explore the interrelation between our conceptions of nature, beauty and art, the contributors consider the social construction of nature, the determination of our appreciation by artistic media, and the duality of nature's determining in gardening. Showing that natural beauty is impregnated with concepts derived from the arts and from particular accounts of nature, the volume occasions questions of the distinction and relation between art and nature generally, and culminates in a set of philosophical studies of the role of scientific understanding, engagement and emotion in the aesthetic appreciation of nature.

Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Sara Schechner

Samantha van Gerbig

"In a world obsessed with the virtual, tangible things are once again making history. Tangible Things invites readers to look closely at the things around them, arguing that almost any material thing, when examined closely, can be a link between present and past."--Provided by publisher.

Making History Through Objects

Tangible Things

Professor of Cultural History and of Museum Studies Ivan Gaskell

Sammlung Thyssen-Bornemisza

A collection of the paintings and grisailles of the Dutch marine artists

The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection

Seventeenth-Century Dutch and Flemish Painting

In a world obsessed with the virtual, tangible things are once again making history. Tangible Things invites readers to look closely at the things around them, ordinary things like the food on their plate and extraordinary things like the transit of planets across the sky. It argues that almost any material thing, when examined closely, can be a link between present and past. The authors of this book pulled an astonishing array of materials out of storage--from a pencil manufactured by Henry David Thoreau to a bracelet made from iridescent beetles--in a wide range of Harvard University collections to mount an innovative exhibition alongside a new general education course. The exhibition challenged the rigid distinctions between history, anthropology, science, and the arts. It showed that object-centered inquiry inevitably leads to a questioning of categories within and beyond history. Tangible Things is both an introduction to the range and scope of Harvard's remarkable collections and an invitation to reassess collections of all sorts, including those that reside in the bottom drawers or attics of people's houses. It interrogates the nineteenth-century categories that still divide art museums from science museums and historical collections from anthropological displays and that assume history is made only from written documents. Although it builds on a larger discussion among specialists, it makes its arguments through case studies, hoping to simultaneously entertain and inspire. The twenty case studies take us from the Galapagos Islands to India and from a third-century Egyptian papyrus fragment to a board game based on the twentieth-century comic strip "Dagwood and Blondie." A companion website catalogs the more than two hundred objects in the original exhibition and suggests ways in which the principles outlined in the book might change the way people understand the tangible things that surround them.

Making History through Objects

Associate Professor of Philosophy Salim Kemal

Kemal Salim

An interdisciplinary study of explanation and the construction of value regarding works of literature and painting.

This book is an exploration of how art—specifically paintings in the European manner—can be mobilized to make knowledge claims about the past. No type of human-made tangible thing makes more complex and bewildering demands in this respect than paintings. Ivan Gaskell argues that the search for pictorial meaning in paintings yields limited results and should be replaced by attempts to define the point of such things, which is cumulative and ever subject to change. He shows that while it is not possible to define what art is—other than being an open kind—it is possible to define what a painting is, as a species of drawing, regardless of whether that painting is an artwork or not at any given time. The book demonstrates that things can be artworks on some occasions but not necessarily on others, though it is easier for a thing to acquire artwork status than to lose it. That is, the movement of a thing into and out of the artworld is not symmetrical. All such considerations are properly matters not of ontology—what is and what is not an artwork—but of use; that is, how a thing might or might not function as an artwork under any given circumstances. These considerations necessarily affect the approach to paintings that at any given time might be able to function as an artwork or might not be able to function as such. Only by taking these factors into account can anyone make viable knowledge about the past. This lively discussion ranges over innumerable examples of paintings, from Rembrandt to Rothko, as well as plenty of far less familiar material from contemporary Catholic devotional works to the Chinese avant garde. Its aim is to enhance philosophical acuity in respect of the analysis of paintings, and to increase their amenability to philosophically satisfying historical use. Paintings and the Past is a must-read for all advanced students and scholars concerned with philosophy of art, aesthetics, historical method, and art history.

Philosophy, History, Art

Paintings and the Past

These essays investigate the complex and developing interaction between performance and authenticity in the arts.

Ivan Gaskell

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