Through an exploration of both practice and theory, this book investigates the relationship between listening and the theatrical encounter in the context of Western theatre and performance.
Rudolf Steiner understood that the history of art is a field in which the evolution of consciousness is symptomatically and transparently revealed. This informal sequence of thirteen lectures was given during the darkest hours of World War I. It was a moment when the negative consequences of what he called the age of the consciousness soul, which ......
Sassan Behnam-Bakhtiar focuses on the importance of being connected with the eternal self, particularly in our modern world where, he believes, people lose themselves more and more every day. The artist trusts that by being one with the eternal self, any individual can start to experience an evolved state of existence and become truly whole. One ......
Examining Henri Bergson's work, philosophy, and the body, this volume explores the history and philosophy of comedy, film, psychoanalysis and the comic performance of the future, creating a theoretical and practice-based framework for the field.
Paul Thom argues that opera is a set of practices framed by the concepts of work, interpretation, performance, and art. His argument is that operatic works have the potential to be art, but so do operatic productions, independently of their value as interpretations of the works they stage.
A spirited memoir by artist Aviva Rahmani, offering a relatable narrative to discuss trigger point theory and the importance of eco-art activism. Divining Chaos is an intimate personal memoir of unparalleled transparency into the moments in Rahmani's life that shaped her as an artist and activist. Detailing the history that led her to two ......
Sculptural Encounter in the Age of Aesthetic Theory
Explores tensions in aesthetics and art theory between antique figural sculpture experienced in the round and its translation into two-dimensional representations. Examines the work and thought of Goethe, Winckelmann, Hegel, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, and others.
Beyond Words argues that some works of fiction and poetry are especially, perhaps even best, suited to expanding our awareness and understanding into the nature of things otherwise unsayable and unconceived. Such literary works do philosophy, showing us something that a theoretical-scientific or philosophical-discourse cannot literally say.
Spirit Consonance in Chinese Landscape Painting and Some Kantian Echoes
This book discusses qiyun aesthetics in Chinese painting formulated by leading sixth to fourteenth-century intellectual elite. In light of Kant's account of artistic genius, it considers the role of the mind in creating a painting replete with qiyun, thereby both demystifying qiyun aesthetics and illuminating some limitations in Kant's aesthetics.
Making a radical departure from the conventional wisdom on art and beauty, this book presents the thesis that things of beauty are not only unrelated to art but often responsible for pornography.
In this first ever book-length study of aesthetic expertise, Ole Martin Skilleas outlines the nature and purpose of aesthetic expertise, with particular emphasis on the direction of attention, and examines how aesthetic expertise manifests across diverse roles within aesthetic practices. He discusses the foundations of aesthetic trust via the ......
Is art a form of communication? If so, what does art express or represent? How should we interpret the meaning of works created by more than one artist? Is art an adaptation, via natural selection? In what ways is art similar to-and different from-language? Art as Communication: Aesthetics, Evolution, and Signaling employs information theory, the ......
This collection considers Lubitsch, the famous author of Weimar and classical Hollywood cinema, as a role model for our times. From this ethical position Lubitsch's cinema is regarded as a conceptual tool to unlock the serious issues of contemporary politics, culture, philosophy, philosophy of art and theatre. It is not only the socio-political or ......
What is jazz? How does it differ from other kinds of music? To what extent is it an important subject for thinking about aesthetic questions? Philosophy of Jazz is among the first book-length philosophical discussions devoted to jazz. Daniel Martin Feige explores the relationship between jazz and European art music, arguing that in jazz central ......
Volume one of Soren Kierkegaard's Either/Or explores the crisis of the modern secular void-with its attendant doubt, ennui, and alienation-from the first-person perspective of an aesthete who, lacking any epistemic or moral foundations, grows increasingly obsessed with what he calls "the interesting." In a close explication of the history of that ......
In Opera as Art: Philosophical Sketches, Paul Thom argues for opera as an art, standing alongside other artforms that employ visual and sonic media to embody the great themes of human life. Thom contends that in great operatic art, the narrative and expressive content collaborate with the work's aesthetic qualities towards achieving this aim. This ......