- For instance, see Hal Foster, Ed., The Anti-aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Port Townsend, Washington: Bay Press, 1983).
- ‘Exhibition value—the condition of the secularized modernist work as fully emancipated from cult value and myth—has been replaced by spectacle value, a condition in which media control in everyday life is mimetically internalized and aggressively extended into those visual practices that had previously been defined as either exempt from or oppositional to mass-cultural regimes, and that now relapse into the most intense solicitation of mythical experience.’ Benjamin Buchloh, in ‘Groans of Venice: Harald Szeeman's Venice Biennale’, Artforum 40, no. 1, September 2001: 154ff.
- Critics voicing these views include Hal Foster and Benjamin Buchloh.
- Richard Shusterman, ‘Entertainment: A Question for Aesthetics’, British Journal of Aesthetics 43, no. 3, July 2003: 290.
- For example, Hannah Arendt, ‘The Crisis of Culture’, in Between Past and Future (London: Viking, 1961); Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London: Routledge, 1984); Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); and Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1986).
- Richard Shusterman, ‘Entertainment: A Question for Aesthetics’, 291. As Shusterman argues, this position owes a great deal to foundational ideas in Platonic thought over art versus truth.
- For a summary of the argument of beauty being disdained in twentieth-century art, see Arthur C. Danto, The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art (Chicago: Open Court, 2003).
- This critical tradition suspicious of seduction is particularly evident among key art theorists associated with the journal October. One example might be Hal Foster's argument that ‘the catastrophe of minimalism’ after Dan Flavin is the move away from specific object to illusionism that seduces viewers to forget where they are. Hal Foster, ‘Dan Flavin and the Catastrophe of Minimalism’, in Dan Flavin: New Light, ed. Jeffrey S. Weiss and Briony Fer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 133ff.
- ‘The suspension of all hierarchical precedence during carnival time was of particular significance. Rank was especially evident during official feasts; everyone was expected to appear in the full regalia of his calling… and to take the place corresponding to his position. It was a consecration of inequality. On the contrary, all were considered equal during carnival.’ Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), 10.
- Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken, 1969).
- Stephen Bates and Anthony Ferri, ‘What's Entertainment?: Notes towards a Definition’, Studies in Popular Culture 33, no. 1, Fall 2010: 1–20.
- Ibid.
- Richard Shusterman, ‘Entertainment: A Question for Aesthetics’, 293.
- Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (Paris: Editions Gerard Lebovici, 1988), www.notbored.org/commentaires.html.
- Claire Bishop, introduction to ‘Rethinking Spectacle’ forum, Tate Modern, London, 31 March 2007, http://channel.tate.org.uk/media/38061678001#media:/media/38061678001/24869330001&context:/channel/most-popular.
- Claire Bishop, ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, October 110, Fall 2004: 51–79; Claire Bishop, Ed., Participation (London and Cambridge, MA: Whitechapel and MIT Press, 2006).
- Later republished as Jacques Rancière, ‘The Emancipated Spectator’, Artforum, March 2007: 271–80.
- Claire Bishop, ‘Rethinking Spectacle’.
- For example, by aesthetics philosophers Paul Crowther, Noel Carroll, Ivan Gaskell, Arthur C. Danto, and Elaine Scarry, and art critics Dave Hickey and Peter Schjeldahl.
- Mark Godfrey in ‘Rethinking Spectacle’.
- Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (London and New York: Continuum, 2006), 63, original emphasis.
- AES began in 1987. When Fridkes joined in 1995, they became AES+F.
- See, for example, Slavoj Žižek, ‘Why Are Laibach and NSK not Fascists?’, in IRWINRETROPRINCIP: 1983–2003/ ed. Inke Arns (Frankfurt: Revolver, 2003), 49–50.
- Boris Groys has also theorised the aesthetics of spectacle in these terms, arguing that ‘a world of total design is a world of total suspicion’. See Boris Groys, Going Public, ed. Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, and Anton Vidokle (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010).
- Ian Parker, ‘Žižek: Ambivalence and Oscillation’, Psychology in Society 30, 2004: 23–34.
- ‘AES+F: The Desecration of the Image of a Child’, Biennale of Sydney 2004: On Reason and Emotion (Sydney: Biennale of Sydney, 2004), 30.
- Ekaterina Degot, ‘Not Strangled Yet (Vulnerability of the Image)’, Nordic Art Review 3, no. 6, 2001: 71.
- Kerry Downes, ‘Baroque’, Dictionary of Art, vol. 3, ed. Jane Turner (New York: Grove, 1996), 261–9.
- See Kelly A. Wacker, Baroque Tendencies in Contemporary Art (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2007), and Angela Ndalianis, Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005). In her foreword to Wacker's book, Ndalianis writes, ‘it's been in the last few decades that a neo-baroque logic has taken deeper root across diverse areas of the arts, continuing restlessly to move on to new metamorphic states and contexts while being nurtured by a culture that's attracted to the visual and sensorial seductiveness that's integral to baroque form. A baroque mentality has again become crystallized on a grand scale within the context of contemporary culture.’ Baroque Tendencies in Contemporary Art, 2.
- Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 7–10.
Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art
Volume 11, 2011 - Issue 1: Art and Entertainment