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.
