Aesthetics

Contrast the glittering palette used to decorate rickshaws on the streets of Mumbai, the phlegmatic angst of Nordic noir, the taut ovoids of Kwakwaka'wakw carving, or the kawaii invasion of parts of Tokyo. The diversity of the aesthetic ecosystem...

'Place in garden, lawn, to beautify landscape.' When Don Featherstone's plastic pink flamingos were first advertised in the 1957 Sears catalogue, these were the instructions. The flamingos are placed on the cover of this book for another reason: to...

We imagine that art and money are old enemies, but this myth actually reproduces a violent system of global capitalism and prevents us from imagining and building alternatives. From the chaos unleashed by the 'imaginary' money in financial markets to...

This is the first full study in English of the German historicist tradition. Frederick C. Beiser surveys the major German thinkers on history from the middle of the eighteenth century until the early twentieth century, providing an introduction to each...

The aesthetics of nature has over the last few decades become an intense focus of philosophical reflection, as it has been ever more widely recognised that it is not a mere appendage to the aesthetics of art. Just as nature offers aesthetic experiences...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781621385301Author Pavel FlorenskyFormat PaperbackPage Count 108Imprint Angelico Press/SemantronPublisher Angelico Press/SemantronWeight(grams)...

Designed for readers with no or little prior knowledge of the subject, this concise anthology brings together key texts in aesthetics and the philosophy of art. Designed for readers with no or little prior knowledge of the subject.Presents two...

This collection covers a wide range of topics, from a moving study of Bizet's Carmen to an entertainingly caustic exploration of the hierarchies of the auditorium. Especially significant is Adorno's "dialectical portrait" of Stravinsky, in which Adorno...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. To hyphenate or not to hyphenate has been a central point of controversy since before the imprinting of the first Gutenberg Bible. And yet, the...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780060933852Author Virginia PostrelFormat PaperbackPage Count 237Imprint CollinsPublisher HarperCollins Publishers Inc

How looking beautiful has become a moral imperative in today's worldThe demand to be beautiful is increasingly important in today's visual and virtual culture. Rightly or wrongly, being perfect has become an ethical ideal to live by, and according to...

In this key text in the history of art and aesthetics, Karl Rosenkranz shows ugliness to be the negation of beauty without being reducible to evil, materiality, or other negative terms used it's conventional condemnation. This insistence on the...

Improvisation is usually either lionized as an ecstatic experience of being in the moment or disparaged as the thoughtless recycling of cliches. Eschewing both of these orthodoxies, "The Philosophy of Improvisation" ranges across the arts - from music to...

On the New looks at the economies of exchange and valuation that drive modern culture's key sites: the intellectual marketplace and the archive. As ideas move from one context to another, newness is created. This continuous shifting of the line that...

Located in the West London suburb from which it takes its name, Ealing Studios is one of the best loved and best known institutions of British cinema. Ealing represents a particular kind of institutional practice a community of filmmakers who collaborate...

In The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic, Mario Perniola puts forth the radical argument that we are shifting away from organic sexuality, based on desire and pleasure, and moving towards a more neutral inorganic and artificial sexuality, a sexuality always...

Modernism is usually thought of as a shock wave of innovations hitting art, architecture, music, cinema and literature - the work of Picasso, Joyce, Schoenberg, movements like Futurism and Dada, the architecture of Le Corbusier, T.S. Eliot's The...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781735983219Author Dwight FurrowFormat PaperbackPage Count 360Imprint Probe Head PublicationsPublisher Probe Head PublicationsWeight(grams)...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. A cylinder of baked graphite and clay in a wood case, the pencil creates as it is being destroyed. To love a pencil is to use it, to sharpen it,...

Michel Serres first book in his 'foundations trilogy' is all about beginnings. The beginning of Rome but also about the beginning of society, knowledge and culture. Rome is an examination of the very foundations upon which contemporary society has been...

Written in exile from Germany, this potent study of Europe's most controversial composer explodes the frontiers of musical and cultural analysis. Measuring key elements of Wagner's oeuvre with patent musical dexterity, Adorno sheds light on a...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780394703695Author Friedrich NietzscheFormat PaperbackPage Count 240Imprint Random House USA IncPublisher Random House USA IncWeight(grams)...

Working Aesthetics is about the relationship between art and work under contemporary capitalism. Whilst labour used to be regarded as an unattractive subject for art, the proximity of work to everyday life has subsequently narrowed the gap between work...

This book explains and contextualises the key concepts in Jean Luc Nancy's entire body of work. Jean Luc Nancy (1940), Professor of Political Philosophy and Media Aesthetics at the European Graduate School, is an influential French philosopher, most...

Art and Value focuses on the questions of history, methods, and nature of art theories, and on the value and evaluation of art. It serves as a valuable primer to aesthetics, as well as a summary and extension of Dickie's contribution to the field.About...

This second edition features a new 48-page Afterword--1980 updating Professor Beardsley's classic work.Book InformationISBN 9780915145089Author Monroe C. BeardsleyFormat PaperbackPage Count 678Imprint Hackett Publishing Co, IncPublisher Hackett...

The twenty-first century has witnessed a pervasive militarization of aesthetics with Western military institutions co-opting the creative worldmaking of art and merging it with the destructive forces of warfare. In Martial Aesthetics, Anders...

Artmachines presents, constructs and transforms the thought of Deleuze and Guattari, excavating a new philosophy of individuation and creative production from their work. The essays range over literature, art, cinema, philosophy, psychoanalysis and...

The Surviving Image, originally published in French in 2002, is the result of Georges Didi-Huberman's extensive research into the life and work of foundational art historian Aby Warburg. Warburg envisioned an art history that engaged with anthropology,...

The Art of Gerhard Richter: Hermeneutics, Images, Meaning presents the first philosophical investigation of, arguably, one of the most popular and important painters working today, Gerhard Richter. From monochrome painting and photo realism to conceptual...

Philosophy of music has flourished in the last thirty years, with great advances made in the understanding of the nature of music and its aesthetics. Peter Kivy has been at the centre of this flourishing, and now offers his personal introduction to...

When scientists describe their results or insights as 'beautiful', are they using the term differently from when they use it of a landscape, music or another person? Science and the Truthfulness of Beauty re-examines the way in which seeing beauty in the...

Visual art has a ubiquitous political cast today. But which politics? Daniel Herwitz seeks clarity on the various things meant by politics, and how we can evaluate their presumptions or aspirations in contemporary art. Drawing on the work of William...

Why do gardens matter so much and mean so much to people? That is the intriguing question to which David Cooper seeks an answer in this book. Given the enthusiasm for gardens in human civilization ancient and modern, Eastern and Western, it is surprising...

What is a promise? What are the consequences of the act of promising? In this bold yet subtle meditation, the author contemplates the seductive promise of speech and the seductive promise of love. Imagining an encounter between Moliere's Don Juan and J...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781999979348Author Radical Philosophy CollectiveFormat PaperbackPage Count 108Imprint Radical PhilosophyPublisher Radical PhilosophyWeight(grams)...

This ground-breaking new work offers a spirited and severe critique of the turn to an anti-aesthetic in theoretical writing and asserts that it has now become an intellectual necessity to rethink the aesthetic and remake aesthetic discourse.About the...

Reading Architecture with Freud and Lacan: Shadowing the Public Realm methodically outlines key concepts in psychoanalytic discourse by reading them against key modern and post-modern architects. It begins with what is, arguably, the central concept for...

"Dissanayake argues that art was central to human evolutionary adaptation and that the aesthetic faculty is a basic psychological component of every human being. In her view, art is intimately linked to the origins of religious practices and to...

Refuting the assumption that art is a representational practice, this book engages with the work of Heidegger, Deleuze and Guattari, C.S. Pierce and Judith Butler. It argues for a performative relationship between art and artist. Drawing on themes as...