Showing titles in Aesthetics

Why are there so many examples of public figures, entertainers, and normal, everyday people in blackface? And why aren’t there as many examples of people of color in whiteface? This book explains what blackface is, why it occurred, and what its legacies are in the 21st century. There is a filthy and vile thread—sometimes it’s tied into a noose—that connects the first performances of Blackness on English stages, the birth of blackface minstrelsy, contemporary performances of Blackness, and anti-Black racism.

The central argument of Chromophobia is that a chromophobic impulse—a fear of corruption or contamination through color—lurks within much Western cultural and intellectual thought. This is apparent in the many and varied attempts to purge color, either by making it the property of some foreign body—the oriental, the feminine, the infantile, the vulgar, or the pathological—or by relegating it to the realm of the superficial, the supplementary, the inessential, or the cosmetic.

Imagine having more time and energy to do what you love. Minimalism will help you reduce your stress levels, pointless distractions, and even improve your overall mental health, well-being, and happiness. Do you want to live a simpler way of life? Are you tired of all the clutter around you? Are you finally realizing that owning more stuff does not equate to happiness? With minimalism, the less you have, the better!

We live in an age of the mobile image. This recent kinetic revolution of the image has enormous consequences not only for the way we think about contemporary art and aesthetics but also for art history as well. Responding to this historical moment, Theory of the Image offers a fresh new theory and history of art from the perspective of this epoch-defining mobility. The image has been understood in many ways, but it is rarely understood to be fundamentally in motion.

Everyone deplores narcissism, especially in others. The vain are by turns annoying or absurd, offending us whether they are blissfully oblivious or proudly aware of their behavior. But are narcissism and vanity really as bad as they seem? Can we avoid them even if we try? In Mirror, Mirror, Simon Blackburn, the author of such best-selling philosophy books as Think, Being Good, and Lust, says that narcissism, vanity, pride, and self-esteem are more complex than they first appear and have innumerable good and bad forms.

Imagination: A Very Short Introduction explores imagination as a cognitive power and an essential dimension of human flourishing, demonstrating how imagination plays multiple roles in human cognition and shapes humanity in profound ways. Examining philosophical, evolutionary, and literary perspectives on imagination, the author shows how this facility, while potentially distorting, both frees us from immediate reality and enriches our sense of it, making possible our experience of a meaningful world.

In recent decades, we have witnessed an explosion in the number of visual images we encounter, as our lives have become increasingly saturated with screens. From Google Images to Instagram, video games to installation art, this transformation is confusing, liberating and worrying all at once, since observing the new visuality of culture is not the same as understanding it.

Art is a distinct entity. It has its own characteristic, its own function, its own role to play in society. It must be afforded the status and identity it rightly deserves in a world that is becoming ever more needful of its existence. “Art”, however, has increasingly become a catch-all term. Intended primarily for artists of all colours and flavours, as well as art appreciators, this audiobook aims to free up the thinking of the artist – or indeed anyone – by opening their eyes to many unexamined assumptions, and thereby questioning the validity of strongly-held views.

In Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature, philosopher and cognitive scientist Alva Noë raises a number of profound questions: What is art? Why do we value art as we do? What does art reveal about our nature? Drawing on philosophy, art history, and cognitive science, and making provocative use of examples from all three of these fields, Noë offers new answers to such questions. He also shows why recent efforts to frame questions about art in terms of neuroscience and evolutionary biology alone have been and will continue to be unsuccessful.

Meditating on the labyrinthine nature of sexual identity and the performance of gender, High Heel moves from film to fairytale, from foot binding to feminism, and from the golden ratio to glam rock. Summer Brennan considers this most provocative of fashion accessories as a nexus of desire and struggle, sex and society, violence and self expression, setting out to understand what it means to be a woman by walking a few hundred years in her shoes.

For a century, magazines were the authors of culture and taste, of intelligence and policy — until they were overthrown by the voices of the public themselves online. Here is a tribute to all that magazines were, from their origins in London and on Ben Franklin’s press; through their boom — enabled by new technologies — as creators of a new media aesthetic and a new mass culture; into their opulent days in advertising-supported conglomerates; and finally to their fall at the hands of the internet.

Repulsive and yet strangely attractive, the gimmick is a form that can be found virtually everywhere in capitalism. It comes in many guises: a musical hook, a financial strategy, a striptease, a novel of ideas. Above all, acclaimed theorist Sianne Ngai argues, the gimmick strikes us both as working too little (a labor-saving trick) and as working too hard (a strained effort to get our attention).

Als siebenundzwanzigjähriger Philologieprofessor veröffentlichte Nietzsche die "Geburt der Tragödie", ein Werk, in dem er sein kulturelles Weltbild präsentiert. Schopenhauer, die griechische Tragödie, die Musik Wagners, verbunden mit seinen Vorstellungen von Kulturphilosophie und Ästhetik: Beim Hören zeigt sich, dass hier ein Gigant im Werden begriffen ist. Mit dabei: Ein pdf-Dokument mit Titelliste.

100 years after Proust's death, In Search of Lost Time remains one of the greatest works in World Literature. At 3,000 pages, it can be intimidating to some. This short volume invites first-time listeners and veterans alike to view the novel in a new way. Marcel Proust (1871-1922) was arguably France's best-known literary writer. He was the author of stories, essays, translations, and a 3,000-page novel, In Search of Lost Time (1913-27). This book is a brief guide to Proust's magnum opus.

When the metronome was invented in 1815, it transformed the music world. Composers and musicians now had a tool that could help them maintain a precise and consistent tempo. The metronome evokes strong feelings because of its uncompromising power. For that reason, this object has appeared in unlikely settings as athletes, scientists, psychologists, authors, and other professionals have found uses for it beyond music.

The concept of disparity has long been a topic of obsession and argument for philosophers but Slavoj Žižek would argue that what disparity and negativity could mean, might mean and should mean for us and our lives has never been more hotly debated. Disparities explores contemporary 'negative' philosophies from Catherine Malabou's plasticity, Julia Kristeva's abjection and Robert Pippin's self-consciousness to the God of negative theology, new realisms and post-humanism and draws a radical line under them.

In a narrative that moves from Mexico to the United States and back, Sánchez Prado discusses the definition of the taco, the question of the tortilla and the taco shell, and the existence of the taco as a modern social touchstone that has been shaped by history and geography. Challenging the idea of centrality and authenticity, Sánchez Prado shows instead that the taco is a contemporary, transcultural food that has always been subject to transformation.

In the last few decades, restaurants and food culture have achieved extraordinary cultural presence. Chefs are heroes and thought leaders, well-executed entrées go viral, dining out has become theater, plating has become art and ubiquitous Instagram content. It explores the meaning we find in good food and warm hospitality. It shows why the restaurant offers unique opportunities to change the quality of our engagement with others and to create shared meaning across the table.

The burger, long the All-American meal, is undergoing an identity crisis. From its shifting place in popular culture to efforts by investors such as Bill Gates to create the non-animal burger that can feed the world, the burger’s identity has become as malleable as that patty of protein itself, before it is thrown on a grill. Carol Adams’s Burger is a fast-paced and eclectic exploration of the history, business, cultural dynamics, and gender politics of the ordinary hamburger.

Over the span of a single decade, VHS technology changed the relationship between privacy and entertainment, pried open the closed societies behind the Iron Curtain, and then sank back into oblivion. In the West, its advent deepened the trends of the age: individualism, consumerism, the fragmentation of society, and the consolidation of corporate power in the entertainment industry and its victory over the regulatory powers of the state.