CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2014
| Author | Asavei, Maria Alina |
|---|---|
| Title | Political-Critical Art and the Aesthetic |
| Summary | The relationship between art and politics is still a contested one. It is not yet clear how to approach this relationship, what political art is and what the relationship between art, the political and the aesthetic is. In contemporary philosophy of art, in art theory and in critical theory there are major disagreements regarding the relationship between art and politics, on the one hand, and political art and the aesthetic, on the other. This dissertation aims to clarify these very complicated issues. The argument stemmed from the need to counterbalance the recurrent critical discourse, which emphasizes the aesthetic as one of the critical-political art’s enemies.This dissertation claims that there is no dichotomy between “political art” and “aesthetic art.” The old question of whether art should be aesthetic or political is a poorly phrased question. In short, this dissertation attempts to bring into discussion a series of important points: even if contemporary political artists and their publics’ main focus is on the social and political usefulness of their art, this does not mean that aesthetic concerns should be de-emphasized. Of course, the way in which aesthetics has been traditionally defined and understood (narrowly and in terms of purity of perception, disinterested detachment, immediate pleasure and so on) is incompatible with contemporary political-critical art which requires a different type of experience. |
| Supervisor | Weberman David |
| Department | Philosophy PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2014/asavei_maria.pdf |
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