On Some Novel Encounters with Fine Arts. Where to Search for Aesthetics and Where Aesthetics May Have Something to (Re)search

Author(s): Zoltán Somhegyi / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2020

In this paper, I examine some of the various ways, spaces, and situations in which one can currently encounter aesthetic content and have an aesthetic experience. By focusing on examples coming from the world of fine arts, my survey will tackle a double question: I will try to investigate where to search for aesthetics and where aesthetics may have something to (re)search. Considering the novel forms of art presentation that are related to the spread of alternative exhibition spaces, I will examine the emergence of new audiences, the rising power of the art market and art commerce, and their dubious influence on the creation of new standards and canons of art.

Fictional Objects within the Theory of Mental Files: Problems and Prospects

Author(s): Zoltán Vecsey / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2020

A recent version of the mental file framework argues that the antirealist theory of fictional objects can be reconciled with the claim that fictional utterances involving character names express propositions that are true in the real world. This hybrid view rests on the following three claims: (i) character names lack referents but express a mode of presentation, (ii) fictional utterances introduce oblique contexts where character names refer to their modes of presentation, and (iii) modes of presentation are mental files. In this critical paper, I will argue that the proposed view runs into a number of theory-internal problems. These problems arise partly from the unclarities inherent in the notion of mental file, and partly from a mistaken semantics for character names. I will also argue that adherents of fictional realism can make use of the notion of mental file without encountering similar difficulties.

Everyday Heritage and Place-Making

Author(s): Lisa Giombini / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2020

In this paper, I combine sources from environmental psychology with insights from the everyday aesthetics literature to explore the concept of ‘everyday heritage’, formerly introduced by Saruhan Mosler (2019). Highlighting the potential of heritage in its everyday context shows that symbolic, aesthetic, and broadly conceived affective factors may be as important as architectural, historical, and artistic issues when it comes to conceiving of heritage value. Indeed, there seems to be more to a heritage site than its official inscription on the UNESCO register. A place is included as part of our heritage primarily because it matters to us. People live in, form relationships with, and derive existential and affective meanings from it. Above and beyond its official significance, a heritage site is thus a living dimension that plays a vital role in the everyday life and social practices of people, who transform it into a place of human significance.

Everyday Heritage and Aesthetics: A Reply to Giombini

Author(s): Adrián Kvokačka / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2020

In this short paper, I examine the notion of everyday heritage as developed by Lisa Giombini in her article Everyday Heritage and Place-Making. While I argue that the article’s main contribution is to combine the literature on place-making with current debates in everyday aesthetics, I also highlight some of the issues that I think should be addressed to further refine the notion of ‘everyday heritage’ and make it more resistant to criticism.

The Significance of Banal Things: A Reply to Makky

Author(s): Tufan Acil / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2020

This short paper comments on Lukáš Makky’s article What Makes Things Banal. The argument is divided into two sections. The first section reconstructs Makky’s understanding of banality, which he develops based on aesthetic theories by Wolfgang Welsch and Walter Benjamin. The second and more critical section examines the validity of the arguments Makky uses for his definition of banality. Although this commentary attaches great value to Makky’s insightful analysis of the term banality and agrees with identifying it as a historical and processual concept, drawing on writings by M. Heidegger and J. Derrida it eventually proposes a different understanding of the relationship between the arts and banal things and underlines the importance of banality for the creation and perception of the arts.

A Semmi helytartói. Dosztojevszkij üzenete a mának

Author(s): György Csepeli / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 05/2021

Essay on Dostoevsky’s significance in the context of contemporary nihilism.

Book Review. Bojana Matejić, Rozalind Kraus, Beograd: Orion Art, 2018, 164 pp., ISBN 978-86-6389-071-8

Author(s): Ana Vukadinović-Ćemalović / Language(s): English Issue: 22/2020

Enter the Event: How is Immanent Participation?

Author(s): Ana Ramos / Language(s): English Issue: 23/2020

This paper starts with the premise that the body is the primal media: a “body-worlding”. This event folds the world into its becoming-self, and unfolds a qualitative vibration. This is the dance of affect: being affected and affecting in return. Our daily lives are made of affective states. The concepts affective immersion and incorporeal materiality are here articulated in order to think affect embodiment, and embodiment itself, as body-worlding. It creates the conditions to rethink media, interactivity, and participatory art. Affective immersion occurs every time we are totally immersed in a situation’s unfolding dynamic relation: we become the unfolding relationality. The paper argues for a materiality real but abstract that has been called “incorporeal”. This is the affective territory where affective immersion happens. Deleuze and Guattari would call this territory a “plane of immanence”.

How to do things in the Plasticene: Ontopolitics of plastics in Arendt, Barthes, and Massumi

Author(s): Andrija N. Filipović / Language(s): English Issue: 23/2020

In this paper, I develop three models for understanding plastic in the Plasticene epoch through readings of Arendt, Barthes, and Massumi. In the Ardentian model, plastic is made intransitive. It is withdrawn so far into the background of human experience as that which enables social and individual life of humans that it becomes the unthinkable. It can be argued that it is pushed to the background and made intransitive because of a certain image of the human and cyclical image of nature. The second model is Barthesian, and in it plastic becomes a signifying matter understood through a semiotic model. Plastic and products of plastic become signifiers in the ideological work of discourse. In the Massumian model, plastic is affective; it is a relational body in the process of becoming, simultaneously intensive and multiple in its eventfulness.

Wilding Consciousness: Towards a speculatively Tentacular Thinking-With

Author(s): Andrew Goodman / Language(s): English Issue: 23/2020

For Donna Haraway, a tentacular life is relational and sticky, a moving-creating-living-with that is at heart sympoietic and entangled. Wilding, as a speculative pragmatic and tentacular practice, involves thinking about the world in ecological terms – that is, neither a world of objects or one of fixed and separated subjects with a distanced perspective of the world. Instead, wilding involves a tactic of embracing an entangled and multi-storied approach to thinking. In this article the question of the possibility of ecological rather than individualized consciousness is speculated upon through the tentacular. Drawing on William James’ impersonal conception of consciousness and contemporary biology’s insights into the relationality of life and thinking, this paper asks: what would a sympoietic concept of consciousness mean? How would this shift the valuing of intelligences towards activism and allow us to learn from those, human and nonhuman, traditionally denied intellectual value?

Book Review: Maja Fowkes, The Green Bloc: Neo-avant-garde Art and Ecology under Socialism, Budapest: Central European University Press, 2015, viii + 299 pp., ISBN 9789633860687

Author(s): Andrija N. Filipović / Language(s): English Issue: 23/2020

Uwagi o pięknie

Author(s): Susan Sontag / Language(s): Polish Issue: 792/2021

Aesthetics in Hungary: Traditions and Perspectives

Author(s): Piroska Balogh,Botond Csuka / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2021

The paper is meant to introduce a symposium on aesthetics in Hungary today. Through a brief survey of the Hungarian aesthetic tradition, which goes back to the eclectic “university aesthetics” of the late 18th century and produced a number of prominent figures such as Georg Lukács and his disciples in the “Budapest School” in the 20th century, the paper seeks to point out some key characteristics of this tradition and to reflect on the intellectual landscape of contemporary aesthetics in Hungary, diversified by many fields of study, methods and subdisciplines.

Kafka and Buber

Author(s): András Czeglédi / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2021

“I also talked to Buber yesterday; as a person he is lively and simple and remarkable, and seems to have nothing to do with the lukewarm things he has written” – wrote Franz Kafka to his fiancée Felice Bauer in the early 1913. What is the meaning of this harsh, yet respectful portraiture of Buber? Was it a casual ironic remark – or was it rather the way Kafka really thought of Martin Buber? And to what extent was Kafka important for Buber? How can we understand the collaboration between the writer and philosopher? Close reading, contextualization and Begegnungsereignis (encounter as fundamental event).

Giorgio Agamben on Aesthetics and Criticism

Author(s): Veronika Darida / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2021

Focusing on Giorgio Agamben’s early writings (The Man without Content, Stanzas, Infancy and History) this paper investigates the peculiar status of aesthetics that is disclosed by these texts, highlighting particularly the shift that emerges therein from aesthetic to ethical concerns. Agamben’s idea of a ‘destruction of aesthetics’ will bring attention to the question of the destination of aesthetics. The claim that only ruins can outline the original structure of works of art, providing a possible basis for creative criticism, will also be examined in the conclusion.

Essay on the Concept of Art and Reality

Author(s): Zoltán Gyenge / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2021

Art shows something of reality as a whole, a reality that exists above or below the directly perceptible world. There is a first reality, or empirical reality, which can be mapped and captured through sense perception and is characterized by immediacy; and then there is a second or imagined reality that unfolds beyond direct empirical and experiential observation. While the animal intellect is attracted to the surface, to mere appearances, the human intellect is drawn to what lies beyond the surface. The ability to imagine is a condition of human intellect, being characterized, in Schopenhauer’s terms, by a power of “seeing in things not what nature has actually formed but what she endeavored to form, yet did not bring about” (Schopenhauer, 1969, pp. 186-187). For Schopenhauer, this capacity can be fully engaged not by the “ordinary man, that manufactured article of nature” (ibid., p. 187), but by the man of genius. In contrast, John Ruskin holds that the power of art consists precisely in allowing us to regain what can be called the innocence of the eye, in other words, a kind of childlike perception which remains blind to the meaning of perceived things. (Ruskin, 2006, p. 42) This paper seeks a possible answer to the question of how art ties us to reality.

Nový učebný text v prešovskej edícii Compendium Aestheticae

Author(s): Slávka Kopčáková / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 1/2021

Makky, Lukáš: Osudy umenia v 20. a 21. storočí. Kapitoly zestetiky. Vysokoškolský učebný text. Opera Philosophica.Prešov: Filozofická fakulta PU v Prešove. 2021. 190 s. ISBN978-80-555-2670-6.

Book Review: Miško Šuvaković, 3E. Estetika, epistemologija, etika spekulativnih i De Re medija (“3E. Aesthetics, Epistemology, and Ethics of Speculative and De Re Media”, Belgrade: Faculty of Media and Communication, Singidunum University, 2020, ISBN

Author(s): Nataša Š. Lah / Language(s): English Issue: 24/2021

Book Review: David A. Rubin, Intersex Matters: Biomedical Embodiment, Gender Regulation, and Transnational Activism, Albany: State University of New York Press (SUNY), 2017, 224 pp., ISBN 978-1-4384-6755-9

Author(s): Andrija N. Filipović / Language(s): English Issue: 24/2021

Book Review: Dan Healey, Russian Homophobia from Stalin to Sochi, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017, 310 pp., ISBN 978-1-350-00077-

Author(s): Andrija N. Filipović / Language(s): English Issue: 24/2021