The first book-length study of this influential artist's work, focusing on the participatory role of the human subject rather than the art object. Michael Asher doesn't make typical installations. Instead, he extracts his art from the institutions in which it is shown, culling it from collections, histories, or museums' own walls. Since the late 1960s, Asher has been creating situations that have not only taught us about the conditions and contexts of contemporary art, but have worked to define it. In Situation Aesthetics, Kirsi Peltomäki examines Asher's practice by analyzing the social situations that the artist constructs in his work for viewers, participants, and institutional representatives (including gallery directors, curators, and other museum staff members). Drawing on art criticism, the reports of viewers and participants in Asher's projects, and the artist's own archives, Peltomäki offers a comprehensive account of Asher's work over the past four decades. Because of the intensely site-specific nature of this work, as well as the artist's refusal to reconstruct past works or mount retrospectives, many of the projects Peltomäki discusses are described here for the first time. By emphasizing the social and psychological sites of art rather than the production of autonomous art objects, Peltomäki argues, Asher constructs experientially complex situations that profoundly affect those who encounter them, bringing about both personal and institutional transformation.

This book proposes that aesthetics begin not with concepts of being or semblance, but with a concept of appearing. Seel examines the existential and cultural meaning of aesthetic experience. In doing so, he brings aesthetics and philosophy of art together again, which in continental as well as analytical thinking have been more and more separated in the recent decades.

The application of the theory and practice of art to computer science: how aesthetics and art can play a role in computing disciplines.

Beauty fulfils human existence. As it registers in our aesthetic experience, beauty enhances nature’s enchantment around us and our inward experience lifting our soul toward moral elevation. This collection of art-explorations seeks the elemental ties of the Human Condition. It endeavors to explain the relation of beauty and human existence, and explores the various aspects of beauty.

Annotation This book asks serious aesthetic and cultural questions about art and teaching. In this context the authors explore the power of art to shape both our emotions and our intellect. With these ideas in mind the authors explore a course the team taught on « High and Low Art: Good and Bad Taste. As the course began the « Sensation controversy at the Brooklyn Museum broke out. The authors trace both how the controversy shaped their course and its implications for the larger concerns with art, culture, and education in the twenty-first century.