Description
Janet Wolff advances a "postcritical" aesthetics grounded in shared values that are negotiated in the context of community. She relates this approach to contemporary debates about a committed politics similarly founded on the abandonment of certainty. Neither universalist nor relativist, the "aesthetics of uncertainty" provides a discourse on beauty that contemporary critics can engage with and offers a basis for judgment that is committed to assigning value to works of art.
About the Author
Janet Wolff is professor emerita in the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures at the University of Manchester. She is the author of The Social Production of Art; Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art; Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture; Resident Alien: Feminist Cultural Criticism; and AngloModern: Painting and Modernity in Britain and the United States.
Reviews
A salutary reminder of a fact often sensed but rarely articulated: the uncertain, the indirect, and the oblique are especially at home in our contemporary context of artistic creation and interpretation, and we would do well to investigate them for what they are in and of themselves, rather than seeing them merely as obstacles to be gotten beyond in pursuit of something more perceptually stable and, we too easily think, epistemologically worthy. -- Garry L. Hagberg CAA Reviews
Book Information
ISBN 9780231140966
Author Janet Wolff
Format Hardback
Page Count 200
Imprint Columbia University Press
Publisher Columbia University Press