3. How to judge contemporary art
The controversies around the value of contemporary art always revolve around aesthetic criteria. Each artistic practice obeys more or less explicit rules from which it is possible to evaluate the excellence of the artworks. The problem that arises from the considerable variation in artistic practices in contemporary art is that there are too many criteria […]
4. Appreciation scales of contemporary art
One day in February, after visiting the Jeff Koons exhibition at the Pompidou Center in Paris, I was sitting in a small creperie nearby and looked out the window. “Art is everywhere! », I suddenly exclaimed while observing the Stravinsky fountain and its eccentric sculptures, the Saint-Merri Church known for its contemporary art exhibitions, and […]
5. The aesthetic rationalization of contemporary art
To speak of aesthetic rationality is not simply to pronounce a verdict that a work of art is good or bad. What constitutes the real aesthetic judgment is the process of explaining valid reasons to justify the artistic qualities of a work attributed to it. In contemporary art, each language game of an artistic practice […]
6. Chance in the Paintings of Francis Bacon
I don’t draw. I start doing all kinds of stains. I am waiting for what I call “the chance ”: the stain from which the painting will start. The stain is the chance. But if we care about the chance, if we believe that we understand the chance, we will still do illustration, because the […]
7. The ontology of the ready-made: Duchamp’s Bottle Rack
The ontology of the ready-made always has a controversial meaning compared to that of traditional art. The Mona Lisa da Vinci, for example, is a work that is based on the process of creation, virtuosity or know-how of the artist. We do not question its status, its actuality, the moment at which this work exists. […]
8. The Aesthetics of Immersion: Blind Light by Antony Gormley
Some works of contemporary art sometimes give us disturbing, strange, immersive emotions, without offering any object to see or feel. These are devices that disorient and decondition the viewer’s habits. Among them we can notice the installation Blind Light by Antony Gormley (2007), which leads our perception to new sensory discoveries (1). By excluding the […]
9. Conclusion
By reexamining Michaud’s notion of the pluralism of artistic practices and values, I have attempted to reconstruct the aesthetic rationality that manifests itself through specific arguments about the qualities of works of art. It is about the analysis and the union of language games in the Wittgensteinian sense that allows us to account for our […]
Galileo on Secondary Qualities of the Matter
Is heat a quality of the matter which we feel when it is heated or it is in a sensation of a body? In The Assayer, Galileo starts with the proposition “Motion is the cause of heat”. So, he wants to undermine a commonly held conception that heat is a quality which resides in the […]
Bacon’s Idols of the Mind
Sir Francis Bacon (1561–1626) was a successful English lawyer, politician, scientist, orator and philosopher. His works were enormously influential during a scientific revolution, in which Bacon proposed a great reformation of all process of knowledge. He popularized a scientific knowledge, often called the Baconian method, based only upon inductive and careful observation of events in […]
Heidegger on Meaning of Life
According to Heidegger, the question of metaphysics and being has been lost, since we can know nothing about metaphysical entities. So, Heidegger proposes to elaborate on a metaphysical question that would not posit anything as being. Science is concerned with beings, but not nothing. Avoiding the presence of entities, Heidegger construes the following question “What […]