Composed in a series of scenes, Aisthesis–Rancière’s definitive statement on the aesthetic–takes its reader from Dresden in 1764 to New York in 1941. Along the way, we view the Belvedere Torso with Winckelmann, accompany Hegel to the museum and Mallarmé to the Folies-Bergère, attend a lecture by Emerson, visit exhibitions in Paris and New York, factories in Berlin, and film sets in Moscow and Hollywood. Rancière uses these sites and events—some famous, others forgotten—to ask what becomes art and what comes of it. He shows how a regime of artistic perception and interpretation was constituted and transformed by erasing the specificities of the different arts, as well as the borders that separated them from ordinary experience. This incisive study provides a history of artistic modernity far removed from the conventional postures of modernism.

Why do we keep returning to certain pictures? What is it we are looking for? How does our understanding of an image change over time? This investigates the nature of visual complexity, the capacity of certain images to sustain repeated attention, and how pictures respond and resist their viewers' wishes.

This volume examines the great varieties of artistic experience from first hand phenomenological descriptions. It features detailed and concrete analyses which provides readers with in-depth insights into each specific domain of artistic experience. Coverage includes phenomenological elucidation of the aesthetic attitude, the power of imagination, and the logic of sensibility. The essays also detail concrete phenomenological analyses of aesthetic experiences in poetry, painting, photography, drama, architecture, and urban aesthetics. The book contains essays from "Logos and Aisthesis: Phenomenology and the Arts," an international conference held at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. It brings together a team of top scholars from both the East and the West and offers readers a global perspective on this interesting topic. These innovative, yet accessible, essays, will benefit students and researchers in philosophy, aesthetics, the arts, and the humanities. They will also be of interest to specialists in phenomenology.

Aesthetics originated in the mid-eighteenth century as a branch of the theory of cognition; it was then - from Kant on - limited to the arts, the beautiful, and the sublime; eventually - starting in the last decade of the twentieth century - aesthetics has been rediscovered in its full dimension as a theory of sensate cognition. This volume contains the contributions to the 33rd Wisconsin Workshop. The articles cover the revaluation of the history of aesthetics, neurobiological aspects of the processing of aisthesis, and multiple aspects of the most recent very lively debates about the realm, scope, and pertinence of aesthetics.

A timely book that identifies the practice of '(syn)aesthetics' in artistic style and audience response, which helps to articulate the power of experiential practice in the arts. This exciting new approach includes interviews with leading practitioners in of theatre, dance, site-specific work, live art and technological performance practice.

The second edition of the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics is an unparalleled reference resource that surveys the full breadth of critical thought on art, culture, and nature, from classical philosophy to contemporary critical theory. The four-volume first edition, published in 1998, effected a revival of aesthetics that created a receptive context for the contemporary importance of the field. Spanning six volumes and 815 articles, the new edition of the Encyclopedia has been updated and expanded to reflect the rapidly evolving character of the discipline. Renowned contributors from diverse fields provide analyses of the major artists, movements, and theories that continue to inform scholarly research on aesthetics. The updated Encyclopedia of Aesthetics contains 250 new entries that incorporate innovative fields of inquiry, such as animal aesthetics and diaspora criticism, as well as significant new developments in art, including digital media and street art. Additionally, the second edition offers enhanced coverage of non-Western cultural areas and related issues, such as post-colonialism, globalization, and primitivism. In so doing, it extends the scope of critical aesthetics, seeking to create a more open environment for aesthetics in academia, culture, and art. With bibliographic references and images, the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics is an essential work that is of use to artists, scholars, students, and all others interested in art-from painting and sculpture to literature, music, theater, film, and more.

Only yesterday aesthetics stood accused of concealing cultural games of social distinction. Now it is considered a parasitic discourse from which artistic practices must be freed. But aesthetics is not a discourse. It is an historical regime of the identification of art. This regime is paradoxical, because it founds the autonomy of art only at the price of suppressing the boundaries separating its practices and its objects from those of everyday life and of making free aesthetic play into the promise of a new revolution. Aesthetics is not a politics by accident but in essence. But this politics operates in the unresolved tension between two opposed forms of politics: the first consists in transforming art into forms of collective life, the second in preserving from all forms of militant or commercial compromise the autonomy that makes it a promise of emancipation. This constitutive tension sheds light on the paradoxes and transformations of critical art. It also makes it possible to understand why today's calls to free art from aesthetics are misguided and lead to a smothering of both aesthetics and politics in ethics.