In this volume, David Carrier and Joachim Pissarro expand on the exploration begun in their last book, Wild Art, which featured art that stands outside the margins of the art world in the way that wild animals stand apart from domestic cats and dogs. This new collaboration delves further into explaining how “wild art” came to be, the critical and cultural conditions that made its exclusion from the art world possible, and how its recognition radically transforms our understanding of contemporary art.
Harking back to Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment, Carrier and Pissarro look beyond the parameters of the formal art world and consider the vast array of art forms that are democratically available. Eschewing a high/low binary as well as any encyclopedic characterization of these unquantifiable forms of art, they focus on recovering the democratizing potential of Kant’s key insight: that all of us make aesthetic judgments and that these diverse judgments merit serious consideration. Most notably, they invoke Heinrich von Kleist’s argument that it is fully possible to have an utterly fulfilling aesthetic experience when encountering marionettes, skateboarders, or a graffiti wall, just as one might have while viewing a ballet performance or a minimalist installation in an art museum.
Written by two philosophers of art who are also active critics and members of the art world about which they write, Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics is a provocative and optimistic work. Recognizing there is no inherent distinction between “wild art” and “art world art,” this book challenges the art world to become a much larger and accepting place.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Modern Foundations of the Art World
2. The Classical Model: Dogmatism and Alternative Models of Looking
3. Dawn of Modernity
4. The Wise, the Ignorant, and the Possibility of an Art World that Transcends This Divide
5. The Antinomy of Taste and Its Solution: Variations on a Theme by Duchamp
6. The Museum Era
7. Institution of Art History
8. Art Beyond the Boundaries of the Art World
9. The Fluid Nature of Aesthetic Judgments
10. Kitsch, a Nonconcept: A Genealogy of the Indesignatable
Conclusion
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
“Carrier and Pissarro present a refreshing argument for aesthetic openness, for the benefit of considering things alien to our social and cultural indoctrination. Their provocative account of the shifting division between the Art World and Wild Art avoids resorting to cultural scandal or moral failure to propel its narrative. The authors merely point out that all cultures—others as well as ours—are exclusionary. Without claiming to rid us of our habits of exclusion, the authors aim to undermine the binary barriers to appreciating aesthetic value: good, bad; high, low; popular, elite. Theirs is a hard-headed, level-headed corrective to politicized accounts that pit one form of aesthetic practice against another.”
—Richard Shiff, author of Between Sense and De Kooning
