Philosophers on Art from Kant to the Postmodernists

Philosophers approach art from a wholly unique perspective, and incorporating their thought into an analysis of art expands both our notion of what art can embody and our understanding of what criticism can achieve. Here, for the first time, Christopher Kul-Want brings together twenty-five primary philosophical texts on art written by twenty different philosophers. Stretching from the Enlightenment to postmodernism, these essays represent Continental philosophy and aesthetics, the Marxist intellectual tradition, and the practice of psychoanalysis, each one introduced by an overview and interpretation.In these essays Martin Heidegger discusses the meaning of the Greek temple and Van Gogh's painting of shoes; Georges Bataille elucidates Salvador Dalí's "The Lugubrious Game"; Theodor W. Adorno questions capitalism through an analysis of collage; Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes address the uncanny effects of photography; Sigmund Freud muses on Leonardo Da Vinci and his interpreters; Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva look closely at paintings by Holbein; Freud's postmodern critic, Gilles Deleuze, considers the visceral paintings of Francis Bacon; and, taking his cue from the ideas of Kant and Aristotle, Giorgio Agamben explores the twin traditions of the Duchampian ready-made and Pop Art. Kul-Want intersperses these texts with essays on aesthetics (from Hegel and Nietzsche to Badiou and Rancière) that prove philosophy has adopted an entirely new orientation toward aesthetic experience and subjectivity in the wake of Kant's powerful legacy.

Christopher Kul-Want is director of the M.A. fine art course at the Byam Shaw School of Art. Central St. Martin's College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London. His books include Introducing Kant and Introducing Aesthetics.