the beat to keep

Alone amongst strangers was an ideal she’d always aspired to. Composed in that uniquely guileless phase of active teenage accumulation, her mode of identity making was ‘Paris’, ‘cafe society’, ‘Jean-Paul and Simone’ writ large. A rigorous, self-crafted diet of French literature and philosophy was intermittently broken by afternoons spent pawing spreads of mid-century Parisian photographs – the cigarettes, the ineffectual tables, an impossible insouciance that belied the posed black and whites. Her mind darts to these conjured mental images; the imagined Paris of her teenage years was now tinged only with nostalgia for that lost propensity to pretence. She sees how this had largely been unconscious study for that other primary preoccupation – whole days whiled away in a public place, most often a coffee shop or bar, where her identity could be practiced, propped up and delineated with cigarettes, coffee, and thoughts urged onto the pages of a moleskine notebook – carnet quadrillé, bien sûr. 

Somewhere between that anxious self-composition and the present moment, she’d let go of the keen impulse to construct the stage sets she believed necessary for a beautiful and vivid life. Yet, here she sat, still in a cafe, the only place she could work, think, be – still compelled to be alone amongst strangers. Ten years on she found the scene set around her was a muted version of that ideal. A bustle of people, not a cafe in a lost-European half truth, but another place and time, here and now. 

The people less elegantly composed and arranged; no coffee-table book potential here. Held up to scrutiny like this, the disparagement of her younger self-labelled it parochial, berated her for a lack of imagination, how had she found a life too small, too inelegant. There was no-one here to whom her being felt outwardly turned. That turning had once been felt in pinpricks of electric awareness – she had been addicted to that experience. Her tireless dedication to identity composition was matched only in her persistence carving out precariously imagined shared space with another – any other – whose notice her burgeoning sense of self craved. Always some beguiling projection thrown on an unaware stranger whose never-proffered attention seemed the only palpable means to cast a contrast to actualise herself. But this was a contrast that always eluded her. 

Not here. In this muted place a quiet vitality superseded that externally-oriented need. Instead, the impasse of languages, accents, concerns not her own concurrently soothed and buoyed her, propelled and ignited a semblance of interior life. Now she wrote, settled into herself. Diligent teenage study had been amassed only to give way to the quieter routine of her twenties. She still craved filmic existence, wanted her whole life to be elegantly composed, yet, now, vitality was noted only in the moments she returned to herself after a particularly entranced period of focussed writing, reading, study. She oscillated between grief for that teenage self of ambitious imagination and vast longing, and, at other moments, seized an enraptured contentment in the small, measured and routine life that she’d honed. 

Seeks to answer the question “What is contemporary aesthetics?” by outlining some of the issues and impossibilities of answering this question.

What is meant by “contemporary”? Even if this can be defined, how do you content with different ideas of contemporaneity in different fields (so, as it relates to the scope of aesthetics)

Question has to deal with time, space and content

“Every age understands itself as a transition: consolidating what is best, against disruptive pressures; absorbing new conceptions, to liberate us from what confines our entrenched habits of thought; doubting the viability of legitimating either commitment, previously endorsed or now admired”  – Margolis

“one of the marks of our present age, which is typically characterised as postmodern, is a skepticism toward any claims about philosophical systems or historical grand narratives”

Periods have been formed by focusing on political empires and dynasties (Hellenistic, Hapsburg, etc.), normative attributes (primative, festival, etc.) chronology (the seventeenth century, between the wars, etc.), audience types (bourgeois, aristocratic, etc.), performance modes (noh, baroque), institutions, famous playwrights etc.

How many phenomena that existed during that time frame actually represented the supposedly dominant currents of that period, which things are related to what kinds of periods and which out-live them?

Our ideas and beliefs about the past and the future clearly affect our ideas about the present

–– And the present our ideas about past/future

“unlike other periods, the contemporary era is still here; we are living it. Furthermore, the fact that we think that there are periods that have ended indicates that we think that we are living a contemporary period that, in turn, will end sooner or later and become history”

“if one thinks that modern and postmodern (or romantic, baroque) are not contemporary phenomena but something that belong to the past, one must have an idea about why this is so. Something substantial must have changed so thatt present phenomena must be understood in a new and different way”

In an increasingly globalised world, is everything contemporary? isn’t it too fragmented?

“the word aesthetics should be used in the plural, not in the singular: there are different aesthetics in different places as there are different aesthetics in different periods”

“not everything that is currently produced is equally distinctive for the discussion of contemporaneity, but many publications and lectures simply continue the tradition in the form that was developed much earlier. Yet, exactly the bulk of most of the publications, in any field, comprises the most typical cases of any given period. Not everything can be new, innovative and epoch-making… is history to be described through what was usual, typical, and everyday-like or through breaks, changes and exceptional events and individuals”

What is epoch-making is often only known and understood afterwards, when we know its repercussions and consequences.

“it is always a result of various kinds of processes, conflicts, intellectual fashions, political events, economic currents, and power struggles. Who, from where, and doing what will be included? What kinds of things does a map or even an entire atlas cover? Institutions, publication channels, individual scholars, events, women, men, different languages, schools of thought? There can never be a complete picture of this because the whole is simply too complex for anyone to comprehend in detail.

All of them have their place in the contemporary situation, and we should be sensitive to all these levels in the same manner that we need to be sensitive to various time layers.

what about with digital/data?  “data do not have locality at all and it is somethings mind-boggling to try to figure out where and how things in the internet actually exist” –– are they also outside of the temporal?

We can make use of a tripartite scheme: spatial, temporal, content

spatial: global, local, culture-dependent

temporal: very old, middle-aged, current/recent

content: explicit, semi-explicit, implicit (e.g. how self-referential or knowing this idea of aesthetics is)

This gives us a metaphorical means of mapping ideas of contemporary aesthetics three dimensionally.

Many great thinkers have worked effectively at the margins Is there an advantage to working in this way? If so, what? How can a more conscious relationship with academic margins be developed?

There is an unpredictability and freshness to be found at the margins, a certain departure from the need to critique, looking out of the echo chamber. E.g. thinkers and writers like Sontag who were never in the establishment, were always located at the margins.

Barthes never defended a Ph.D and Bataille worked as a librarian. Many of them established their own art journals, like Acéphale and Tel Quel, so as to control their work and be free to write in a non academic manner. This applies to later waves, like deconstructionism, too. Jaques Derrida (who, like Wittgenstein, received a Ph.D. at a very late stage of his career) and some other thinkers now levelled as postmodernists, like the philosophising psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek, are sometimes playfully referred to as “rogues” because of their dismissal of academic rules. It is important to note that Žižek actually publishes widely, for example, in art journals, Guardian, or E-Flux than in academic journals. Many contributors to aesthetic theory have also chosen ways of writing that label them more as essayists than scholars. Umberto Eco is very much a mixed figure here, as he has published many really legitimate and dry academic texts, and yet his biggest scholarly impact is, undeniably from his essays and columns. His main works in aesthetics, The Open Work and Apocalittici e integrati are not mentioned as frequently as his newspaper writings, be it in cafe discussions on philosophy or references in academic articles.

margins are often cross-disciplinary.

the institution… gets stuck in paradigms and it can be really hard to break away from them from the inside.

– this relates to ideas on what is contemporary as expressed in Contemporary Aesthetics: Perspectives on Time, Space, and Content

evolutions can only be understood and defined through contrast and shifts in perspective. So, the institution perhaps lacks the contrast to allow this playful evolution to happen.

There is also something important about discussing these institutionalised ideas with those at the margins – a means to evolve, refine, rigorously test based on how these ideas work “in real life” or “in situ”. e.g. The idea of the Postmodern appeared as the result of a commission ordered by the Canadian province of Quebec.

In is inspiring work On Creativity, David Bohm discusses the anti-survivalist side of art, religion and scientific thinking by claiming that pioneering work in these special fields of human culture is often done with an uncompromising attitude where one risks one’s own survival.

my notes + ideas

The spheres of leisure, fun, free time, travel, and tourism give rise to artification, as well. Photography as a "middle-brow art" studied by Pierre Bourdieu and associates arose from pursuits such as these. To some degree this is also true of art brut and self-taught art. Considering "tribal art" and "primitive art" as works of art in their own right has meant rejecting the perceptive framework that Western collectors of curios and travel souvenirs had long imposed.

Béatrice Fraenkel, who interviewed the highly skilled printers of the Imprimerie Nationale in Paris in 1997 before it was dismantled, showed that limitations in both technique and the division of labor put insuperable obstacles to the artification of traditional type-setting.

Four types of artification

Durable: art as we know it today. art forms which have achieved artificated status over a long period of time. is related to the idea of who and what the artist is, how the artist has achieve the status of artist. “During the Enlightenment, artists of these core disciplines went through a process of consecration, and during the Romantic period, these arts were redefined as vocational and grounded in a requirement of artistic individuality. In the Western world, their status as art now goes unquestioned throughout society.”

Partial: seems to take place in some ways but not in others, some technical or other unfavourable conditions. this is the case in architecture which, for example, has the constraints of individualisation of labour, something which is viewed as technical

Ongoing: things which are seen as in process e.g. art brut, outsider art, readymades

Processes of Artification

Artification is a process of processes, with ten constituent processes:

Displacement: Extracting or displacing a production from its initial context is a prerequisite for artification. This happened when jazz was first transcribed in musical notation, when film broke away from its initial site at fairs, when graffiti was photographed and published in books, and when breakdancers left the street for the stage.

Renaming: Terminological change e.g. the case of painting in France, the word imagiers (image makers) that designated craftsmen was progressively replaced by that of artistes during the eighteenth century.

Recategorisation: This example also highlights the institutional change seen in the shift from the guilds to the Royal Academy and changes in classification, such as the shift from the mechanical to the liberal arts and changes in the hierarchy of pictorial genres. Under the Academy system, the king bestowed pensions on a very small elite of painters; now, the institutionalization of government grants provides for endowments. These support systems enhance the perception of an ontological difference between art and those activities deemed unworthy of such official monetary support. In France today, government support favours the artification of circus, magic, and breakdancing.

Institutional and organisational change: see above

Patronage: see above

Legal consolidation: Legal consolidation is another important step. French painters confirmed their new status in the courts in the seventeenth century and writers and composers were granted intellectual property of their work in the nineteenth century. In the United States, legal decisions that culminated with the end of censorship restrictions in the 1960s furthered the artification of cinema.

Redefinition of time

Individualisation of labour: Another significant process is the individualization of labor. As painting moved from the master’s workshop to the painter’s studio, it underwent a continuing process of individualization; by the nineteenth century, activity that was once collective progressively became solitary. When breakdancing first appeared on stage in France, most choreography was collective; today individual auteurs choreograph hip-hop ballets.

Dissemination