Category Archives: Uncategorized

Week 1: https://vimeo.com/787236813/985b1dd28e

For the past few months I have been helping develop Antarctic Futures – an exhibition, public seminar series and program of children’s learning workshops. The event is a collaboration between artists and scientists that aims to mobilise public reflection about … Continue reading →

What if we were to approach Kant’s theory of the beautiful empirically rather than philosophically? What if we were to consider his concrete examples rather than his categorical distinctions and logic? This would enable us to recognise the beautiful as … Continue reading →

Squid Game is a Netflix Korean television series about a perverse organisation that runs deadly versions of kids games. The participants are financially struggling Koreans who sign their rights away to the organisation in the faint hope of winning the … Continue reading →

Many years ago when I was around 15 year old and trying to make a head start with my HSC art studies, I found myself sitting beneath a North Queensland house reading Erle Loran’s Cezanne’s Composition (1943). It may have … Continue reading →

Aesthetics with a capital ‘A’ refers to a slightly marginal field of philosophy – one that has seen better days, but that prattles along regardless and may even be making some kind of return. It sits forlornly alongside the major … Continue reading →

At one level aesthetics is all about a specific, but ill-defined, mode of experience. Yet this necessarily involves something else as well – the recognition within the complex contours of beauty, sublimity, etc. that we are subject to an aesthetic … Continue reading →

Stated very simply, is aesthetics a ‘thing’? Is aesthetics a distinct category of experience (as Kant envisions), or is it only ever a means of addressing contradictions at the level of lived experience? If the latter, this entails thinking of … Continue reading →

Dark Eden, The Sixth International Conference on Transdisciplinary Imaging at the Intersection Between Art, Science and Culture6 – 8 November 2020 Draft of my paper, ‘Imagining a Dead Hare‘. If we are to discover effective means of imagining a new … Continue reading →

PCI 2020 Symposium, 5-10 OctoberPerformance in the Time of Halting and Transformation This paper represents a very preliminary effort to consider some of the implications of linking performance and curation. My particular interest is in conceiving the relationship between art … Continue reading →

These are some rough reflections on aspects of middle management filtered through the lens of current university crises. What crises? Let’s see: COVID-19 and the sudden shift to remote delivery, loss of international income and associated job losses; confusion in … Continue reading →

Mimesis is perhaps the best known of the traditional aesthetic principles. Of course it is never precisely, or simply, an aesthetic principle. This is not only because aesthetics itself is a more recent invention. It is also because mimesis represents … Continue reading →

At one level I am tempted to describe aesthetics as a form of value. Very briefly, aesthetics provides an alternative to systems of value that reduce, consume and dispense with the world. It projects a non-exploitative relation to things that … Continue reading →

My motto from posting this song: ‘If at first you seriously suck then try, try again till you don’t seriously suck so much.’ 91 listens, not a single like. Must persevere! Fear and spending all we have/On nothing very much … Continue reading →

Aesthetics must enable a revaluation of the world. But how is this possible? Especially if aesthetics is conceived narrowly as a form of pleasure? We must either re-conceive aesthetics or abandon it for something else – some other notion that … Continue reading →

Schiller’s aesthetic theory is closely concerned with the issue of time. What is the time of aesthetic experience? When does it happen? When is it needed? Like Plato, Schiller adopts a broadly pedagogical perspective. He is concerned with how aesthetics … Continue reading →

Ugliness would not be the simple opposite of beauty for Kant. Both the beautiful and the ugly share a subjective basis in an internal reflective sensation (an experience of pleasure or displeasure). The aesthetic moment is one of suspension. There … Continue reading →

Kant employs the term ‘aesthetic’ first in his Critique of Pure Reason as a means of clarifying the general conditions of experience. He develops the notion of a ‘transcendental aesthetic’ to indicate an a priori dimension of experience. There is … Continue reading →

Kant very often appears as a conservative figure, a philosopher who works at multiple levels to reconcile differences – between dogmatism and skepticism, for instance, and between dimensions of thought, morality and beauty. Yet there is potential to interpret this … Continue reading →

Ranciere employs two different notions of the aesthetic: the first represents a restricted conception linked to the self-definition of contemporary art (‘the aesthetic regime of art’); while the second indicates a more general conception linked to notions of sense and … Continue reading →

What is the relationship between aesthetics and knowledge? In ordinary use, the term ‘aesthetics’ relates to theories of beauty and art. It is a field of intellectual enquiry that examines non-strictly intellectual aspects of judgement and activity. In this sense, … Continue reading →

Aesthetics refers to a dimension of inexplicable value. Aesthetics involves the non-propositional communication of truth. This truth has a holistic character – looking forward (as hope) and back (for strands of vivid memory and counter-memory). Aesthetics has no proper space … Continue reading →

A is for art. A is for aesthetics (because aesthetics is much larger than art – if art is conceived in miniature as contemporary art). A is also for Adorno, for he deserves a mention and I am fundamentally shaped … Continue reading →

I can recall that my first response to art was quite simply blank. As a child my parents took me regularly to major galleries. They’d walk around very slowly, far too slowly for me, and ask what I thought of … Continue reading →