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Beauty has captured human interest since before Plato, but how, why, and to whom does beauty matter in today's world? Whose standard of beauty motivates African Americans to straighten their hair? What inspires beauty queens to measure up as flawless objects for the male gaze? Why does a French performance artist use cosmetic surgery to remake her face into a composite of the master painters' version of beauty? How does beauty culture perceive the disabled body? Is the constant effort to remain young and thin, often at considerable economic and emotional expense, ethically justifiable? Provocative essays by an international group of scholars discuss aesthetics in aesthetics, the arts, the to...
Emphasizing the human body in all of its forms, Beauty Unlimited expands the boundaries of what is meant by beauty both geographically and aesthetically. Peg Zeglin Brand and an international group of contributors interrogate the body and the meaning of physical beauty in this multidisciplinary volume. This striking and provocative book explores the history of bodily beautification; the physicality of socially or culturally determined choices of beautification; the interplay of gender, race, class, age, sexuality, and ethnicity within and on the body; and the aesthetic meaning of the concept of beauty in an increasingly globalized world.
Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age examines a variety of significant multidisciplinary and multicultural topics within the subject of aesthetics. Addressing the vexed relation of the arts and criticism to current political and cultural concerns, the contributors to this volume attempt to bridge the two decades-old gap between scholars and critics who hold conflicting views of the purposes of art and criticism. By exploring some of the ways in which global migration and expanding ethnic diversity are affecting cultural productions and prompting reassessment of the nature and role of aesthetic discourse, this volume provides a new evaluation of aesthetic ideas and practices within contemporary arts and letters.
What is art history? Why, how, and where did it originate, and how have its methods changed over time? The history of art has been written and rewritten since classical antiquity. Since the foundation of the modern discipline of art history in Germany in the late eighteenth century, debates about art and its histories have intensified. Historians, philosophers, psychologists, and anthropologists among others have changed our notions of what art history has been, is, and might be. This anthology is a guide to understanding art history through critical reading of the field’s most innovative and influential texts, focusing on the past two centuries. Each section focuses on a key issue: art as...
In Female Beauty in Art, a series of essays examine the presence and role of female beauty in art, history and culture, and consider the ways in which beauty can function as a discourse of female identity. As a concept, female beauty is unique in that it can contain compelling imbrications of gender ideologies, images, relations, cultural constructions and modes of interaction between persons and the institutions that define their lives. Thus, female beauty can provide proliferating methods t...
Philosophers have considered questions raised by the nature of art, of beauty, and critical appreciation since ancient times, and the discipline of aesthetics has a long tradition that stretches from Plato to the present. Aesthetics has also been the subject of a number of theoretical challenges that investigate the conceptual frameworks customarily assumed by theories of art. This collection of essays assembles classic and contemporary texts to present both the tradition of aesthetic theory and the kinds of questions and challenges that it confronts today, both from other cultural traditions and from theoretical movements such as feminism and postmodernism.
Wilshire (philosophy, Rutgers) looks behind the shift of focus from teaching to research in universities, and sees a tight-knit fraternity bound by archaic initiation, purification, and exclusionary practices. He recommends some changes. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
This fully illustrated introductory text looks at the key theories and thinkers within art from a philosophical viewpoint. Focusing on the role gender plays, the book covers the most pertinent topics within feminist aesthetics.
Philosophers have considered questions raised by the nature of art, of beauty, and critical appreciation since ancient times, and the discipline of aesthetics has a long tradition that stretches from Plato to the present.