Comparative Aesthetics

In his doctoral dissertation (Vreme umetnosti, 1968), Dragutin Gostuški
argues that one of the most important missions for the contemporary theory of the arts to partake in is to systematically examine matters through the methodology of comparative aesthetical morphology. Later, he proposes the theory of screen as a predetermined constructed system that enables the processing and decoding of “the data
received from the real world and their interpretations through art, language and science”. In this paper, I will look into the mechanisms of Gostuški’s theory and the use of holography as an interpretative technique that he proposes, as well as the possibility and the nature of those transpositions between music and the visual arts.

In 1901, Chogyu Takayama (1871-1902), philosopher and literary critic, published a short article entitled “On the Aesthetic Life.” Takayama’s article, regarded as a manifesto of Nietzscheism by his contemporaries, triggered a great debate among a great many literary critics, including Shoyo Tsubouchi and Ogai Mori. This paper argues that Takayama’s article constituted a framework for aesthetic thought in modern Japan and marked the Japanization of Western modern aesthetics. Takayama was not interested in the modern Western idea of autonomous art; instead, he tried to work out the aesthetic in one’s way of living. What underlies Takayama’s idea of the aesthetic life is, to my mind, a traditional Japanese view of art according to which beauty is to be sought inside the world, not beyond the world. In other words, the idea of the aesthetic was decontextualized from its Western context of autonomous art and recontextualized within the traditional concept of the art of living. This is why his idea of the aesthetic life caused a profound echo and became a keynote in twentieth-century Japanese aesthetics.

This book discusses and provides an interpretation of the notion of qiyun in Chinese painting, and considers why creating a painting (especially a landscape painting) replete with qiyun is regarded as an art of genius, where genius is an innate mental talent. A central feature of my discussion is a comparison of the role of this innate mental disposition in the aesthetics of qiyun and Kant’s account of artistic genius. Through this comparison, the book addresses an important feature of the Chinese aesthetic tradition, one that evades the aesthetic universality imposed through the lens of Kant.
The book includes two parts. The first part draws upon the views of Xie He (active 500–ca. 535), the late Tang art historian Zhang Yanyuan (847), the tenth-century landscapist and theorist Jing Hao (ca. 870–ca. 930), the Northern Song art historian Guo Ruoxu (ca. 1080) and the early Yuan connoisseur Tang Hou (ca. 1255–ca. 1317), to explain and discuss qiyun and its development from a notion mainly applied to figure painting to one that also plays an important and enduring role in the aesthetic of landscape painting.
In the light of Kant’s account of genius, the second part examines a range of issues regarding the role of the mind in creating a painting replete with qiyun and the impossibility of teaching qiyun. These include why the ability to create paintings replete with qiyun is regarded as determined by an innate mental disposition endowed by tian (nature) and belonging only to a few gifted artists, how genius establishes pictorial yi (idea) under the animation of shen (spirit) in the context of qiyun-focused landscape painting, how following the rule of tian enables qiyun to be captured in artistic spontaneity, and why somatic training or practice of genius is required despite the impossibility of teaching or learning qiyun. Also discussed are why and how yipin (the untrammelled class) demonstrates the originality and exemplarity of genius, why and how a pure, untrammelled and lofty mind is cultivated as an ideal mental state for conveying qiyun, how the disinterested aesthetic pleasure of the heart in tune with forest and stream is combined with an interest in pursuing the carefree wandering of a city-recluse-artist, and how a balanced human nature is nourished and its union with tian realised through painting a work replete with qiyun. Finally, I explore how the Confucian doctrine of sincerity is involved in spiritual communion (shenhui) between artist, object, work and audience, and how aesthetic autonomy and the moral relevance of art are reconciled under the first criterion of qiyun. The comparison with Kant on these issues demystifies the uniqueness of qiyun aesthetics and also illuminates some limitations in Kant’s aesthetics.

O diálogo entre poesia, pintura, arquitectura e escultura gera em 1951 uma casa mágica no coração de Lisboa. José Ferrão, José de Almada Negreiros, António Varela, António Paiva, autores dessa obra, tecem um intenso diálogo em volta do Mito de Eros e Psique, o que faz dela um exemplar único de obra de arte total na arte moderna portuguesa.

Dall'analisi comparata tra orfismo francese e portoghese scaturisce uno stretto contatto tra letteratura e pittura con rimandi ed assonanze sorprendenti tra il circolo di Pessoa e la coppia dei Delaunay, rifugiati in Portogallo all'epoca della prima guerra mondiale.

The hidden musical iconography in
The Return of the Prodigal Son by
Rembrandt allows an unprecedented
reinterpretation of the famous masterpiece,
whose symbolic meanings are
deeply connected with the Jubilee Year
of Mercy which is ending. In particular,
the oblique gaze of the father to the
son with his sandals on the wrong
foot projects a new light on the deep
correspondence between the painting
and the Sacred Scriptures, not to forget
the flemish pictorial tradition and
his proverbs.

The essay presents the literary debate between R. Barthes and A. Camus, reflecting on the role of interpretative elements in Camus’s well-known novel, “The Plague”. The consideration of critical points of view in the debate, requires, as the author believes, to refer to theories of the novel, as presented by both Barthes and Camus in 1950’s as well as important critical remarks in the literary exchange of the era, especially considering Sartre and Jenson’s understanding of Camus’s work. Such context of the debate, clearly referring to Marxism and realism in art will allow for fuller understanding of the reasons for consequent attacks on Camus’s novel, perceived as a source of anti-historical ethics, leading to solitude rather than solidarity. On a meta-level, the debate shows, how ideologically driven theory of art may lead to serious limitations in interpretative possibilities.

This paper uses present-day philosophical aesthetic terminology to examine important aspects of Chinese calligraphic appreciation, as they are revealed in classical texts on this art. I hold that the aesthetic objects in the experience of a calligraphic work are twofold: the outer form and the inner expressive qualities. I propose that calligraphic appreciation can be understood as a process of retrieval, a term I take from Richard Wollheim. Highly pertinent to the retrieval view is a recurring topic in traditional calligraphy criticism – whether a trained calligrapher is an ideal critic. I argue that a trained calligrapher is an ideal critic, because proper calligraphic appreciation relates to the kinesthetic experience one accumulates chiefly, if not only, through calligraphic practice.

Against the Artists. Jun'ichirō Tanizaki and the Man of Art.

This essay explores the concepts of "art" (gei) and "man of art" (geinin) in Tanizaki's works. These two notions belong to an ancient Japanese aesthetic tradition. The concept of 'gei' means "realization", "skill", but also "technique" and "ability". Traditional stage performances such as 'nō', 'kyōgen', 'bunraku', 'kabuki', are typical examples of 'gei'. On the other hand the concept of 'geinin' implies three pivotal aspects: 1) a strict and harsh aesthetic education; 2) an environment suitable to develop the man of art's sensitivity; 3) a long process of emotional maturation. This perspective, according to this paper, sheds light on the peculiar Japanese aesthetic "difference" in relation to the concepts of art and artist developed - on the contrary - in Western tradition.

Keywords: Tanizaki, art, man of art, artist, Japanese aesthetics.

THe aim of this short study is to show the affinities between China aesthetic principles and an important part of Western aesthetics, which from Plato reaches the Middle Age and beyond. With the help of Chinese sources, most of which belonging to painting theory, and ranging from Vth to XIth century, some meaningful convergences will be stressed. The writer hopes in this way to contribute to the dismantling of some distortions of the Orientalism, like the still popular vulgatae about the peculiarity and the relativism of ancient Chinese thought.

This article provides a comparative analysis of the status of social and cultural forms in Europe and China. Specifically, it draws upon three main sources: the French sociologists Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, the Italian philosopher and writer Mario Perniola, and the Chinese philosopher and aesthetician Wang Jianjiang.
I begin with Boltanski’s and Chiapello’s analysis of the transformations of capitalism which took place in Europe throughout the twentieth century. By developing their claims, I show in what terms aesthetics, art and culture have faced decisive changes which still need to be further understood and explored. I then explore Perniola’s perspective on the relationship between knowledge and power in the context of contemporary European societies. In the process, it will become apparent that Europe is entangled in a melancholic and populist syndrome which affects both the academy and culture more broadly. Finally, I investigate Wang’s notion of the “Bie-modern”, underlining the international debate it has given rise to among scholars. My aim is to show how Europe and China are currently following two divergent strategies concerning the role and the value of knowledge.

The appendix lists the original Chinese texts mentioned in the book The Aesthetics of Qiyun and Genius: Spirit Consonance in Chinese Landscape Painting and Some Kantian Echoes; the translations of some texts are partially quoted or paraphrased in the book. The number in the brackets refers to page where the English translation of the original Chinese text is quoted, or the original Chinese text is mentioned.

""Western" philosophy has been typically defined through the exclusion of non-Western forms of thought as non-philosophical.
In this paper, I place the notion of what is “properly” philosophy into question by contrasting the essence/appearance paradigm governing Western metaphysics and its deconstructive critics with the more fluid, dynamic, and participatory forms of encountering and performatively enacting the world that are articulated in Chinese thinking and made apparent in Chinese painting. In this hermeneutical encounter, "Western" and "Chinese" thinking themselves are interpeted as dynamically and asymmetrically co-relational rather than as discrete, mutually indifferent or ethnocentrically nativist traditions."

זרם התיאופואטיקה המודרני הוקם בארצות הברית בשנות השישים של המאה העשרים. הדיבור הפואטי ומעשה האמנות נתפסים כאן כ"שפה שלנו אודות האמת והאלוהות": השפה התיאו-פואטית המבקשת להחליף את השיח התיאו-לוגי המסורתי. מהם יסודותיה הפילוסופיים של שפה תאולוגית זו? כיצד היא מבקשת לרתך יחדיו את 'האמת הראשיתית', האמנות, הפואטיקה של שפת השירה וחוויית הקדושה? מהי בשורתה לקיום האנושי לנוכח האלוהות? במאמר זה אבקש לשפוך אור על שאלות אלו תוך הצגתם של שני מודלים תיאופואטיים הופכיים שהתהוו בהגותם של הפילוסופים המשפיעים ביותר על מחשבת המאה העשרים: מרטין היידגר המאוחר ולודוויג ויטגנשטיין המוקדם. המאמר יראה כיצד התיאופואטיקה של היידגר נשענת על הנחת אימננטיות רדיקלית של ההוויה והקדושה, ומתוך כך היא מכוננת סוג של 'אסתטיקה של חשיפה' שבה חשיפת הווית היש, המתרחשת בשפת השירה ובמעשה האמנות, מאפשרת את הפצעת הקדושה וחזרת הנוכחות האלוהית לעולם. לעומת זאת יודגם כיצד מחזיק ויטגנשטיין בעמדה לפיה האלוהות, הדת והאתיקה עומדות ביחס טרנסצנדנטי חמור אל העולם, ומתוך כך הוא מכונן 'אסתטיקה של התבוננות מבחינת הנצח', שבה מעשה האמנות מכונן את נקודת המבט המתבוננת על העולם מבחוץ: כשלם-מוגבל וכיצירת האמנות של אלוהים.

This paper was published in: Länderbericht Japan. Die Erarbeitung der Zukunft, ed. by Raimund Wördermann und Karin Yamaguchi, Bonn 2014, pp. 405-417

In this paper I examined how the Japanese image of Bai Letian (in Japanese: Haku Rakuten) was transformed as an example to explain some aspects of Japanese aesthetics. Bai Letian’s poems were cited freely in The Tale of Genji; he was also depicted as a protagonist in Noh songs and a subject in ukiyo-e paintings. Bai Letian who was thus widely accepted in Japanese cultural history has symbolized Chinese culture itself. The Japanese in Heian period hoped that Bai Letian would come to their country and had dreams about him. In a Noh song, they also tried to expel Bai Letian, who had come all the way from China. In addition, in Edo era, they glanced flirtatiously at the Chinese poet and wanted a sweet love affair with him. These Japanese aesthetic characteristics shown in each contact with Bai Letian should be understood in accordance with Japan’s inter-cultural relationship with China. It is noteworthy that Japan’s inter-cultural self-consciousness constitutes distinctive features of Japanese culture.
Inter-cultural relationships are not supplementally added to each culture. Such a view leads to hypostatizing culture. Instead, the inter-culturality I indicate in this context means that each culture already reflects its relationships with other cultures in itself. The transformation of the Japanese image of Bai Letian explicitly shows this perspective.

L' Assunzione di Gaetano Previati del 1903 presenta diverse anomalie rispetto all’iconografia tradizionale. Analizzando i bozzetti preparatori, emerge una progressiva cancellazione degli strumenti musicali inizialmente affidati agli angeli. Il motivo di questa sottrazione è da ricercarsi nella tecnica divisionista di Previati, che aderisce ai principi sinestetici di inizio secolo e che individua nella “vibrazione” la sintesi delle arti. L’impostazione di uno degli olii preparatori, oggi al Museo dell’Ottocento di Ferrara, fa supporre che lo strumento sottratto agli angeli sia divenuto la Vergine stessa, la cui composizione frontale, unitamente con le creature celesti che la trasportano, rimanda a quella di una grande lira. Su un piano icono(teo)logico questa identificazione tra la Madonna e lo strumento perfetto suonato da Dio coincide con il concetto di kénosis. Su un piano strettamente organologico è significativo il rimando mistico-simbolico all’Agnus Dei.

Na poética finissecular que une as obras de Fragoso, Pessanha e Carneiro é possível seguir os trechos da memória e do esquecimento a partir das temáticas do efémero e da temporalidade. A imagem da água é recorrente na iconografia do músico, do poeta e do pintor.

In 1911 Alexander Scriabin performs the symphony Prometheus: the Poem of Fire, in which he applies his theories on correspondence between sound and colour. In an inter-artistic dialogue with the painter Delville, he realizes a synaesthetic ideal of the union of the arts.

Art History as a discipline arrived in India by the late eighteenth century under the aegis of colonialism. This historical fact has far-reaching philosophical implications for the way the discipline has taken shape in India even in the postcolonial era. The cultural nationalists who appropriated Art History turned that which had started as a colonial enterprise—to discover the forgotten past of the colonized and inculcate a sense of history into its subjects—into the recovery of native civilizational pride. This chapter revisits the overlooked theory of anukaraņa vāda via critical historiography, the problematic of translation and examines its contemporary relevance. It aims to recover the debates and discourse surrounding this theory found in the Abhinavabharati (circa 11th CE) through the lens of comparative aesthetics.

In this paper, I argue that the different understandings of “harmony”, which are rooted in ancient Greek and Chinese thought, can be recapitulated in the name of “dialectic harmony” and “ambiguous harmony” regarding the representation of the beautiful. The different understandings of the concept of harmony lead to at least two kinds of aesthetic value as well as ideality – harmony in conciliation and harmony in diversity. Through an explication of the original meaning and relation between the concept of harmony and beauty, we can learn more about the cosmo-metaphysical origins in Western and Eastern aesthetics, with which we may gain insights for future aesthetics discourse.

The paper attempts to address the widespread use of media images in the public sphere and its cryptic motivation towards formulating a scopic visual regime 1 , which in the contemporary Indian political scenario seeks to be fundamentally religious. The Indian "culture industry" 2 , I would argue uses the trope of religious myths to consolidate its capitalist economy in order to establish a dominant discourse, thereby overturning the Euro-centric assumptions of Walter Benjamin of the potency of popular visual culture to desacralize/profane 3. On the contrary, religion realigned with politics, subsumes technology and drives it towards a hegemony of vision. 4

Logographically written languages offer rich possibilities for the use of iconic signs and configurations to encode meaning alongside ordinary denotational textuality. Although indexical iconism has been used to clarify the micro-structure of conversational interactions and other performances, this paper looks at implicit metapragmatics within the text-artifact itself in two test beds (European concrete poetry and Tang Chinese poetry), before turning to Sumerian literary materials from the Old Babylonian period (ca. 1800–1600 BCE). The absence of theoretical treatises from this period has often led to the suggestion that there was no theory in ancient Mesopotamia, but this paper argues that Mesopotamian “theory” resides in the implicit metapragmatics of the same cuneiform signs that also generate the denotational meaning of the text.► Internally complex logograms model metapragmatic structure in various scripts. ► Modernist and Tang poetry provide good case studies with explicit theoretical texts. ► No explicit metapragmatics (viz. commentaries) in earlier Sumerian literature. ► Diagrammatic form of complex logograms acts in place of explicit metapragmatics.

The central objective of this paper is to rethink representation in art not in terms of conventional mimesis but in terms of performance. My attempt is to formulate a theory of performative mimesis to perform a number of functions : (a) to question binary logic and euro-centrism under-girding art history and performance theory (b) to construct critical tools to examine notions of visual representation in Sanskrit texts on visual arts and performance (c) to deploy the Derridean concept of new mimesis to understand traditional mimetic terminology and theory in texts such as the Citrasutra of the Vishnudharmottara Purana and the Natyasastra. (d) to explore the possibility of engaging with theoretical framework implicit in the traditional Indian texts of aesthetics and visual arts.

L'avventura sinestetica di Satie, nata in clima simbolista, attraversa come una meteora il cubismo e l'orfismo, riemergendo in una veste dada e surrealista. Sullo sfondo della Parigi della Belle Époque Satie tesse una fitta rete di legami con i poeti, i pittori, i cineasti del suo tempo.

The musical iconography in the The Rest on the Flight into Egypt by Caravaggio provides the key to understanding this enigmatic painting. The angel-musician that acts as a bifurcation between Joseph and Mary, married and consecrated, represents the merciful presence of God that is reflected in the Son incarnate. Comparing the three scores subtended to this silent music, we can suppose that the painter produced a living portrait of the characters of the oratory performed in S. Maria in Vallicella, composed by Emilio de’ Cavalieri and founded by St. Filippo Neri. The identity of the angel is probably revealed by a careful reading of ‘Discourse on the Music’ by Vincenzo Giustiniani, the patron and probable commissioner of the work. The violinist, Giovanni Battista Fontana, seems to wear the clothing of the angel and those of the musical director of the oratory, postponing not the dating of the work, but his retouching until 1600.

L'impatto della poetica surrealista sul cinema d'avanguardia si traduce in un rivoluzionario sguardo sulla realtà. "L'occhio selvaggio" di Bréton ispira artisti e registi che collaborano col proposito di sovvertire la mentalità borghese, i cui risultati sono sintetizzabili in una sostanziale identificazione tra arte e vita.

Nella ricerca del compositore Erik Satie il dialogo con le arti visive è sempre costante e fecondo, ma in particolare nei suoi lavori orchestrali (Parade, Relâche, Socrate) si fa ancora più assiduo. Picasso, Cocteau, Picabia, Brancusi, Clair sono solo alcuni dei compagni di viaggio di un'avventura che tocca i campi del teatro, del cinema e del balletto per approdare all'estetica del bianco e del silenzio.

In this paper, I suggest that the notion of qiyun (qi: spirit; yun: consonance) in the context of landscape painting involves a moral dimension. The Confucian doctrine of sincerity involved in bringing the landscapist's or audience's mind in accord with the Dao underpins the moral dimension of spiritual communion between artist, object, audience, and work. By projecting Kant's and Schiller's conceptions of aesthetic autonomy and the moral relevance of art onto the qiyun-focused context, we see that the reflection on parallels and differences between the two cultural traditions helps to better understand the moral dimension of qiyun aesthetics.

This monograph puts together both 'classical and 'contemporary' understanding of aesthetics within a pervasive space, beyond the fixed stereotypes. In doing so, it also tends to view the question of power and hierarchy without undermining aesthetics as cultural activity that engages with beauty, sensorial experience and epistemic frameworks, which all have resonated through the essays that together update Indian aesthetics within a contemporary frame.

This paper explores the elusive dialectic between concentration and forgetfulness, consciousness and unconsciousness in spontaneous artistic creation favoured by artists and advocated by critics in Chinese art history, by examining texts on painting and tracing back to ancient Daoist philosophical ideas, in a comparison with Kantian and post-Kantian aesthetics. Although artistic spontaneity in classical Chinese aesthetics seems to share similarities with Kant’s account of spontaneity in the art of genius, the emphasis on unconsciousness is valued by classical Chinese artists and critics inspired by the Daoist idea of ‘Wu Wei’ (acting without conscious intention or effort). As the Qing painter Wang Yuanqi (1642–1715) claimed when admitting his failure to copy the Yuan master Ni Zan (1301–1374), Ni Zan’s success in
natural and untrammelled expression lies ‘in between having an intention and not having one’. A similar idea about the dialectic of consciousness and unconsciousness in artistic spontaneity was suggested by Heinrich von Kleist’s On the Marionette Theatre (1880), which demonstrated that while self-consciousness might disturb and hinder the naturalness of artistic expression and thus encourage affectation, it does not mean that there is no role for consciousness. Although the views on unconsciousness in art and the co-play of consciousness and unconscious in artistic creation by Schelling, Schiller, Goethe, and even Nietzsche might get inspirations from Kant’s hidden view of the unconscious, Kant’s emphasis on the harmonious cooperation between imagination and understanding disguises his inexplicit idea of the unconscious. This paper will demonstrate that while in both Classical Chinese and European cultural contexts, artists, critics and philosophers talk about the same elusive relation, the philosophical explanations of the same phenomenon are essentially distinctive.

This paper examines Confucian and Kantian accounts of aesthetic experience. Although Confucius is often regarded as a moral philosopher, I show that he considers a meaningful life to be an ongoing aesthetic activity, an attitude that one pursues throughout the course of life. Significantly, Kant and Confucius diverge as to how one should develop an aesthetic attitude, that is, whether one should adopt an emulative and reciprocal standpoint with others or critically evaluate, for oneself, judgments of taste. When discussing Kant, I adopt Rudolf Makkreel’s distinction between emulation and evaluation in an effort to demonstrate the Kantian point that one cannot defer to tradition. Aesthetic evaluation (Beurteilung) serves to disabuse us of residual presuppositions ingrained in our cultures. This is especially important when assessing one’s views set against the norms of another culture. For Confucius, an aesthetic attitude likewise develops taste in all facets of life, but taste here is rather emulative. However, I show that, far from advocating that one should blindly follow rules, the Confucian notion of emulation makes it clear that self-development is an outcome of aesthetic self-reflection. The key here is to understand how, in the give and take of our relationships with others, emulation is about recognizing the appropriate response required in each context. For both Kant and Confucius, the enjoyment of art and the beauty of nature teach us how to develop emulative and evaluative aesthetic attitudes. My aim in the end will be to show that reading the one philosopher through the other allows us to approach contemporary intercultural issues.

The paper attempts to raise certain methodological issues concerning the study of Indian aesthetics. It seeks to draw attention to the need for conceptual rigour in the usage of related terms derived from western aesthetics through a critique of the comparative method in the study of Indian aesthetics. In particular, this method, predicated upon a certain binarism (east/west, culture/nature, practice/theory), offers a disciplinary coherence to comparative aesthetics even as it renders it open to criticism. Body as a central trope gets caught up in the polemics concerning the representation of Indian art and philosophy, either as a marker of difference or sameness, in relation to western art and philosophy. It underlines the importance of contextualizing aesthetics in its emergence as a discipline within a specific intellectual history of the West and of understanding the circumstances of its entry into the non-West under the aegis of colonialism.

In this paper, I propose to examine the constitutive role played by the notion of cultural otherness in some of the contemporary art historical writings and what implications they have, direct or indirect on my pedagogic as well as cultural practices as an art historian in India. By the latter, I broaden the scope of impingement of these hegemonic constructs to include the political immediacy given the communally charged cultural politics in the post-colonial realities in India. This paper consists of two sections - the first part largely conceived as a response to another paper presented at a recent international conference on Aesthetics by Chantal Maillard, an authority of Indian aesthetics from Malaga University, Spain. The second part sets out to focus on the particular use that Norman Bryson's now famous dyad, the gaze and the glance is put to in his art historical project.