Sunday, November 14, 2021

From: "Wallace Stevens, Heidegger, and the 'Virile Hölderlin'”

The 20th of March 2020 was the 250th anniversary of the Suabian poet, Friedrich Hölderlin (20 March 1770, Lauffen am Neckar, to 7 June 1843, Tübingen). In the world of arts and letters, anniversaries such as these are highly contested affairs: important festivals are organized to which only the “right” personages are invited to speak.

The ‘pandemic,’ quite ongoing, changed all that. 

But, in truth, even without a crisis change there would have been. The cast of those who might have been considered the right personages always changes, suggesting that possibilities shift and that margins have been “pushed,” borders extending to new and younger experts. 

To be sure, one can also come up short as this may be one way to read complaints about lost value, as Adorno and Horkheimer muse with respect to the commodity character of art (and festivals are designed to exemplify the character of “art as a consumer good”) in their Dialectic of Enlightenment reflections on Beethoven “improvising ‘Rage for a Lost Penny’.”  

Another kind of loss, not unrelated, is repeated in Heidegger’s “On the Way to Language,” which Heidegger retrains, over and over again, from Stefan George’s 1919 poem, The Word

Where word breaks off, no thing may be.

In a game of naughts, the silence imposed on alternate voices, those are the ignored, the disregarded, the unnoted, vies with all the other silences in the emptiness of vanity, incomprehension, inattention. 



Monday, November 23, 2020

What is the Contemporary?

Agamben, “What is the Contemporary?” in What is an Apparatus?

Dahlstrom, “The Religion of Art


Supplementary:

Babich, “The Question of the Contemporary in Agamben, Nancy, Danto” in de Assis and Schwab (eds.): Futures of the Contemporary

Fried “How Modernism Works

Osborne, “Working the Contemporary” in de Assis and Schwab (eds.): Futures of the Contemporary

Giorgio Agamben: Resistance in Art. 2014




Monday, November 16, 2020

Art and the Ineffable

Reading

Virilio, “A Pitiless Art

Lloyd, “The Aesthetic Regime of Representation

Rhode, “Appearance as a Feminist Issue” 

Recommended: 

Burrows & O’Sullivan, “‘The Chymical Wedding’’’ 

Chanter, “Feminist Art

Kennick, “Art and the Ineffable” 

Land, “Circuitries” 

Yancy, “White Embodied Gazing

“The Aesthetic Today” Jacques Rancière in Conversation with Mark Foster Gage

Monday, November 9, 2020

But — What Is Art?

Reading: 

Danto, What Art Is

Recommended: 

Beech, “Art Labor and Abstraction” in Art and Labor

see: an Interview with David Beech: Art and Value

Haber, “You Call that Art!”  

Babich, Wang Guangyi: On Contemporary Pop Art Covers, Remix and Political Theology” 

Wang Guangyi
de la Fuente, “Frames, Handles and Landscapes” 

Elliott, “Other Minds and Unknown Women” 

Gould, “Present Tense: Working With Stanley Cavell

Arthur C. Danto, Farewell to Lao-Tzu, 1963. . 

See too: Tiziana Andina, Arthur Danto Philosopher of Pop
and, on Wang Guangyi, the contributions to:
 Tiziana Andina and Erica Onnis, The Philosophy and Art of Wang Guangyi




Tuesday, November 3, 2020

Thursday, October 29, 2020