Naked Punch
Presented
ART AFTER THE END OF ART
An international conference in contemporary aesthetics in honour
of Arthur Danto
Programme
Arthur Danto – The Gap Between
Art and Life
Richard Shusterman – Ars Erotica:
Transfiguration of the Commonplace
Nicolas Vieillescazes – The Return
of the Hegelian Repressed
Jear-Pierre Cometti - Being and
Doing: Aesthetics at the Crossroads
Panel Discussion led by Steve Connor
Arists present: Benoit
Maire and Flavia Muller Medeiros
Venue: LSE Old Theatre, Houghton Street, London
WC2A 2AE
February 4th 2006,Time: 11AM - 5PM
Speakers
- Jean-Pierre Cometti: Professor
of Philosophy at the University of Aix-Marseille (France), he
has written extensively on Robert Musil, Wittgenstein, and several
aspects of aesthetics including the problem of defining art.
- Arthur Danto:
 Emeritus
Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, he arguably is
one of the most important philosophers of art of the past 50 years.
He is the author of The Transfiguration of the Commonplace
(1981), The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of art (1986),
and After the End of Art (1997). The Madonna of the Future.
Essays in a Pluralistic Artworld (2000) collected his articles
as a critic for The Nation.
-Richard Shusterman
 Dorothy
F. Schmidt Eminent Scholar Chair in the Humanities and Professor
of Philosophy at Florida Atlantic University, his work has challenged
elitist aesthetics, defending the richness of popular culture
and the cruciality of aesthetic experience. For a number of years,
he has been developing somaesthetics, a new discipline concerned
with restoring the centrality of the body. His books include Pragmatist
Aesthetics. Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (1992, 2nd ed.
2000), Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophical
Life (1997), and Surface and Depth: Dialectics of Criticism
and Culture (2002).
- Nicolas Vieillescazes: teaches at King’s College
London. A member of the Naked Punch collective, he is currently
writing a PhD dissertation on philosophical discourses on the
arts in eighteenth-century France, and is working in parallel
on a critique of Theory as discursive structure.
- Steve Connor:
Professor of Modern Literature and Theory at Birkbeck
College, University of London, and Academic Director of the London
Consortium Masters and Doctoral Programme in Humanities and
Cultural Studies.
Review of the event by Belinda Browning - published in Frieze magazine issue 98.
 With the publication of his 1964 article 'The Artworld' in the Journal of Philosophy Arthur C. Danto heralded the end of art's previously inextricable relationship with aesthetics. For a conference dedicated to the assesment of aesthetics' survival today he is not, therefore, the most likely of campaigners. Yet Danto has never been a doomsayer; his end is not a death. Indeed, since his all-important encounter with the Brillo boxes of Andy Warhol, Danto's project has been one that elaborates a theory of art effectively reborn by his declaration od independence from the bedevilment of aesthetics. For his first trip to London in over 20 year Danto, who is the Emeritus Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, took the opportunity to reconsider his Pop art point of departure and adjudge the legacy of rescinding the rule of Clement Greenberg and Kantian aesthetics.
Drawing its subjects from the title of his 1997 book Art After the End of Art, the day-long conference sought to reconsider Danto's work not 'as a closed body within/about which we would have to talk but as a starting-point and reservoir of potentialities'. Richard Shusterman, Professor of Philosophy at Florida Atlantic University, began the day with his critique of 'disinterested' aesthetics via a consideration of the erotic arts of China and India. Citing Michael Foucault as the only Western philopher to acknowledge the proximity of the sexual subject to the aesthetics of existence - even Nietzsche denied that sexual activity could be pretty - his analysis of works including the Karma Sutra demonstrated that aesthetic prudishness was a peculiar Western trait. Nicolas Vieillescazes's 'The Return of the Hegelian Repressed' tracked the recent re-emergence of Hegel back to Danto himself, while Jean-Pierre Cometti, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Aix-Marseille, attempted to define an aesthetics of 'usage' in order to break the ontology of the art object.
If, for Danto, it was the sight of red swirls on white packing boxes in an Upper West Side gallery that put 'the boundary between the art world and reality in philosophical receivership' in 1964, it was down to him to reappraise the importance of aesthetics to contemporary art today. Over 40 years later Danto remains secure in his rejection of 'universality' and 'beauty', yet he does not junk aesthetics with the force he once did. Finding a new interest in what he terms 'internal beauty' - that is, beauty that contributes to the work's meaning - the day culminated in some form of reconciliation, if not with Greenberg then perhaps with Immanuel Kant. But the chanpion of the day was Hegel; indeed for Danto if beauty is not internal, it is effectively meaningless, the beauty of Marat being integral to the politics of Jacques-Louis David's painting. Whether a Hegelian asthetics of meaning has the ability to crack the timeworn teaser of form versus content remains for Danto to demonstrate
Video of the event available soon from online store
With the support of
The London
Consortium The British Society of Aesthetics The
Forum for European Philosophy
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