Description:
This volume brings philosophers, art historians, intellectual historians, and literary scholars together to argue for the philosophical significance of Michael Fried’s art history and criticism. It demonstrates that Fried’s work on modernism, artistic intention, the ontology of art, theatricality, and anti-theatricality can throw new light on problems in and beyond philosophical aesthetics. Featuring an essay by Fried and articles from world-leading scholars, this collection engages with philosophical themes from Fried’s texts, and clarifies the relevance to his work of philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, Morris Weitz, Elizabeth Anscombe, Arthur Danto, George Dickie, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schiller, G. W. F. Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Denis Diderot, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Roland Barthes, Jacques Rancière, and Søren Kierkegaard. As it makes a case for the importance of Fried for philosophy, this volume contributes to current debates in analytic and continental aesthetics, philosophy of action, philosophy of history, political philosophy, modernism studies, literary studies, and art theory.
Description:
The discovery of finitude, after all, is a discovery of something that must have been true of human concepts from the start. Philosopher has a way of accounting for the mutual imbrication of classification and evaluation, which Fried argues is crucial to the modernist condition. Stephen Davies's remarks come in the context of a critique of "The Role of Theory in Aesthetics," a classic article by Morris Weitz from 1956, which influentially argued that "art" should be understood as a family resemblance concept in Wittgenstein's sense. Consider Weitz's worry that aestheticians who deploy definitions of art are smuggling subjective judgments of value into ostensibly objective accounts. Despite his claims about their supreme value, consider how bizarre aesthetic theories must actually look to Weitz. Despite their obvious differences, Dickie's account and that of Weitz both rely on a blunt distinction between classification and evaluation.