Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot by Michael Fried
01 Mar 1989-The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (Oxford Academic)-Vol. 47, Iss: 2, pp 200-200
About: This article is published in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.The article was published on 1989-03-01. It has received 27 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Absorption (electromagnetic radiation).
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04 Jan 2010
TL;DR: Greiman as mentioned in this paper argues that the antebellum public sphere, transformed by its empowerment, emerges as a spectacle with investments in both punishment and entertainment, and that the problems posed were less concerned with a singular and exceptional power lodged in the state than with a power over life and death that involved all Americans intimately.
Abstract: What is the hangman but a servant of law? And what is that law but an expression of public opinion? And if public opinion be brutal and thou a component part thereof, art thou not the hangman's accomplice?Writing in 1842, Lydia Maria Child articulates a crisis in the relationship of democracy to sovereign power that continues to occupy political theory today. Is sovereignty, with its reliance on singular and exceptional power, fundamentally inimical to democracy? Or might a more fully realized democracy distribute, share, and popularize sovereignty, thus blunting its exceptional character and its basic violence? In Democracy's Spectacle, Jennifer Greiman looks to an earlier moment in the history of American democracy's vexed interpretation of sovereignty to argue that such questions about the popularization of sovereign power shaped debates about political belonging and public life in the antebellum United States. In an emergent democracy that was also an expansionist slave society, Greiman argues, the problems that sovereignty posed were less concerned with a singular and exceptional power lodged in the state than with a power over life and death that involved all Americans intimately.Drawing on Alexis de Tocqueville's analysis of the sovereignty of the people in Democracy in America, along with work by Gustave de Beaumont, Lydia Maria Child, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville, Greiman tracks the crises of sovereign power as it migrates out of the state to become a constitutive feature of the public sphere. Greiman brings together literature and political theory, as well as materials on antebellum performance culture, antislavery activism, and penitentiary reform, to argue that the antebellum public sphere, transformed by its empowerment, emerges as a spectacle with investments in both punishment and entertainment.
30 citations
24 Mar 2020
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that the central principle of modern philosophy is obscured by a side-debate between two opposed camps that are united in accepting a deeper flawed premise: the notion that "thought" and "world" are the two major poles of the universe.
Abstract: Abstract This article contends that the central principle of modern philosophy is obscured by a side-debate between two opposed camps that are united in accepting a deeper flawed premise. Consider the powerful critiques of Kantian philosophy offered by Quentin Meillassoux and Bruno Latour, respectively. These two thinkers criticize Kant for opposite reasons: Meillassoux because Kant collapses thought and world into a permanent “correlate” without isolated terms, and Latour because Kant tries to purify thought and world from each other rather than realizing that they are always combined in “hybrid” form. What both critiques tacitly accept is the notion that “thought” and “world” are the two major poles of the universe. I claim that this stems from the post-Cartesian assumption that thought and world are the two basic kinds of things that exist. The name “onto-taxonomy” is introduced for this view.
21 citations
TL;DR: This paper explored the complex relationship between Le nozze di Figaro (1786) and aspects of eighteenth-century sentimental culture and found that the tension between the sentimental and the anti-sentimental is one of the driving forces behind this work.
Abstract: The article explores the complex relationship between Le nozze di Figaro (1786) and aspects of eighteenth-century sentimental culture. On the one hand, the opera parodies recognizable elements of that culture, thus joining a well-established anti-sentimental trend (an attitude largely inherited from its literary source, Beaumarchais9s comedy Le Mariage de Figaro). In other respects, however, Le nozze di Figaro can be seen to make a direct appeal to sentiment. The tension between the sentimental and the anti-sentimental is one of the driving forces behind this work, and one of the most fascinating aspects of an entire epoch in European culture.
20 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, Panofsky makes a statement that encapsulates one of the principal lines of inquiry that runs through his early art theoretical essays: it is the curse and the blessing of the systematic study of art that it demands that the objects of its study must be grasped with necessity and not merely historically.
Abstract: At the beginning of ‘Der Begriff des Kunstwollens’ (‘The Concept of Kunstwollen’), Erwin Panofsky makes a statement that encapsulates one of the principal lines of inquiry that runs through his early art theoretical essays: It is the curse and the blessing of the systematic study of art that it demands that the objects of its study must be grasped with necessity and not merely historically. A purely historical examination whether it goes first to content or to the history of form, elucidates the phenomenal work of art only by reference to other phenomena, it does not have any higher order of knowledge on which to ground itself: to trace back the particular iconographic representation, derive a particular formal combination from a typological history, ... is not to fix it in its absolute place and meaning related to an Archimedean point outside its own sphere of being, but it is to remain inside the total complex of actual interconnected appearances.
18 citations
17 citations