Art Theory and Ethics

The concept of Original Artistic Intent is difficult to apply to Tibetan thangkas. Thangkas are composite objects produced by painters and tailors with differing intents, skills and training. Iconographic specifications, regional and doctrinal differences in style, changes in form from harsh treatment and altered mountings all complicate the issue. 2008

“Un giorno, preso dal cruccio, mi scappò di dire che l’arte è una forma della morale, ma non un mezzo morale. Mi si rispose che era una massima oscura”. Nell’oscurità di questa formula riportata nelle Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen c’è tutta l’ambiguità della morale manniana, una morale eteronoma, le cui leggi sono quelle cui l’artista obbedisce nella produzione, nell’obbedienza all’opera. Etica, pessimismo, sacrificio, senso della forma sono, in Thomas Mann, termini difficilmente svincolabili gli uni dagli altri, ricondotti all’“aura etica” di una Heimatsphäre che contempla in sé, insieme al senso più alto dello Humanitätsideal, le declinazioni più oscure o tragiche del nichilismo. L’arte è il luogo privilegiato i cui convergono le antinomie delle spirito, un’arte ‘morale’ e ‘antimorale’, morale per il rigore della forma, la verità dell’espressione che non può darsi senza l’esperienza profonda e radicale di ciò che solo apparentemente le si oppone, senza le estasi erotico-wagneriane di tanti personaggi manniani, senza le irrinunciabili componenti di dilettantismo, malattia e degenerazione, senza, dunque, le implicazioni ‘antimorali’ dell’arte stessa, origine del ‘dolore’ e della ‘grandezza’ che costituiscono la dignità e l’ambiguità dell’attività artistica. Per il ruolo preminente della forma e del rigore strutturale, per la sua specificità metafisica e la potenza dei suoi effetti, la musica è, per Mann, il paradigma, “il più sacro archetipo di ogni arte”, l’arte in cui “la morale diventa forma”.

There’s a quite-famous scene in the now-cult film American Beauty (1999) in which a man watches a plastic bag blowing around a parking lot. “Do you want to see the most beautiful thing I ever filmed?… Sometimes there ’s so much beauty in the world… I feel like I can’t take it… and my heart is just going to cave in.” It’s a regular white supermarket bag set against a generic red folding door surrounded by autumn leaves, also in flight. Air to ground. Ground to air. The man is transfixed. One might argue that the man is both inside and outside the scene at the same time. It’s meant to communicate something about the possibility of art in everyday life, or the ultimate banality of the American dream, or both. That these two things can coexist suggests the manifestation of a very particular variety of indifference, and it’s this contradictory indifference I’m concerned with.

In this paper I will discuss some concerns that the creative team of Umbilical , a collaborative multimedia arts project of which I am conceptual director, faced regarding the portrayal of female sexual identity through the embodied and representational media of dance and digital image. Representing the erotic raises creative challenges for any artist. Representing the female erotic raises particular conceptual and aesthetic challenges, provoking concerns regarding the ubiquitous, yet often apocryphal and arbitrary, nature of cultural and social signifiers inscribed upon female sexual identity. Visual and embodied media which are marked by such cultural signifiers inscribed upon female sexual identity often belie or fail to do justice to the immanent and intimate nature of individual female sexual and erotic experience. As representational, embodied and performative media, dance and digital image risk an over exposition of the intimacy of sexual experience: the intrinsic is made extrinsic. In this paper I will address some of the most challenging conceptual and aesthetic concerns that the creative team have attempted to address in Umbilical such as how to negotiate with such manufactured signifiers for the sexual/sexualised, erotic/eroticised female viewed body.

Borrowing from Marxist thought, postcolonial studies and critical social theory, this essay will explore the main curatorial and ethical issues facing the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem. Specifically, this essay will evaluate the success of their representations of the Holocaust by analysing the delivery of their collections and architectural features. An important critique that surfaces from this research is of the power dynamics present in modern museological practice, and whether it is morally correct for dominant cultures to narrate the racially charged trauma of marginalized groups of which the hegemonic class do not have lived experience.

Bill Cosby's immorality has raised intriguing aesthetic and ethical issues. Should the crimes that he has been convicted of lessen the aesthetic value of his standup and, even if we can enjoy it, should we? I first discuss the intimacy between the comedian and audience. The artform is both structurally intimate and the comedian claims to express an authentic self on stage. After drawing an analogy to the debate over the ethical criticism of art, I argue that it is reasonable to find a comedian's performance less funny because standup's artistic success relies on this intimacy. I contrast the comedy of Bill Cosby with that of Louis CK. CK's moral flaws are much more present in his comedy, and it is therefore more difficult to find him funny. Last, it is ethically permissible to enjoy their comedy, if no harm to others results, both because it does not corrupt the audience's character and because amusement is valuable.

Le interdipendenze del sistema globale e la Rete come sua espressione e strumento espongono il soggetto a un overload simbolico e informativo che, a fronte della crisi dei legami tradizionali, destabilizza le sicurezze e incrementa la domanda di identità. La capacità del Web di favorire autonarrazioni e autorappresentazioni individuali e collettive orienta la fruizione dei media in questa direzione. Priva del supporto di un’adeguata mediazione sociale e culturale, la costruzione dell’identità alimenta così l’autoreferenzialità di un soggetto che produce, riceve o gestisce informazione senza estendere l’esperienza “al di là del proprio sé”, non riuscendo pertanto a sfruttare il potenziale conoscitivo e relazionale dei nuovi media.
I modelli interpretativi del pensiero critico della società di massa ritornano attuali in questo contesto, indicando la crisi della soggettività nell’età tecnocratica come un problema allo stesso tempo etico e antropologico, che esige il ricorso a operazioni di tipo cognitivo e conoscitivo per riattivare nei soggetti la capacità di elaborare e di gestire l’esperienza condizionata dalla fruizione mediale.
Con questa finalità, le pratiche narrative e l’esperienza artistica sono qui assunte come paradigmi alternativi al paradigma informazionale, in quanto capaci di dar luogo a un distanziamento dal piano della comunicazione tecnologicamente mediata necessario a riaffermare il primato dell’alterità e della relazione nei processi comunicativi e a riabilitare una soggettività morale in grado di comprendere, relazionarsi e agire in una società complessa e altamente informatizzata.

The #MeToo movement has put a spotlight on sexual harassment and abuse in a number of industries, notably the arts. It has raised a set of questions about how to receive the artistic works of the accused, particularly when such work has been beloved or formative for an individual, and collectively when it has cultural significance and influence. Claire Dederer, writing in The Paris Review, posed the question bluntly in her piece, "What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?" This question, and the range of (often perplexed) responses to it, reveal the lack of adequate resources to evaluate responses to an artist's actions that may bear on our aesthetic valuations of the artist's work and that may be experienced as quite intimately personal. What do we do with the sense of betrayal that may follow on the discovery of an artist's bad behavior? What are the implications of consuming of such art? What concepts and norms might help to guide reflection? These questions bear on the ethical significance of love and appreciation for artworks and artists, and, more broadly, the ethical consumption of artworks. This paper responds to these questions in two ways: first, it develops an account of "aesthetic involvement" to elaborate the sense of betrayal that may follow accusations or revelations of sexual harassment and abuse. Second, it proposes a feminist ethics of aesthetic involvement in response to such betrayals and to dilemmas about the individual and collective ethical consumption of artworks.

The research undertaken in the following paper bases its analysis on the model of the decentralized governance, offered in the case of blockchain technologies. The focus will be centered on some social elements of innovation introduced by the blockchain system, such as the Non-fungible tokens (NFT) and on the argument of their undeniable influence on a social, political and cultural levelinto forming a new model of governance. More specifically, it will be given an insight on the modes in which the compliance to the blockchain and NFT model, gives rise to new levels of relations between people, influencing their ways of living and socializing. Thus, NFTs are putting forward some novel aesthetics of interaction-exemplified by the case of a new perspective on art, and enhancing individual will and autonomy, through the circulation of cryptographic tokens within the digital space.

Patrícia Castello Branco and Susana Viegas (Eds), “Film and Ethics,” Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image 11.

ARTICLES
'Film Realism and the Possibility of Using Cinematic Characters as Moral Examples', by William Pamerleau (University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg)
'Nihilism On The Metaphysical Screen: The Fate of Gilles Deleuze’s Cinematic Ethics', by Laurence Kent (King’s College London)
'Staging Disagreement and Its Ethics: A Rancièrian Approach to Lanthimos’ Dogtooth', by Seckin Goksoy (University College Dublin) and Tugce Bidav (Maynooth University)
'Law And Image: The Minor Ethics in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Decalogue One', by Aleksi Rennes (University of Turku)
'Phenomenological Imagination, Ethics, and Empathy: The Case of Epilepsy', by Isabelle Delmotte (Waikato University)
'Trauma and Rationalization: Ethical Tensions and Confounding Empathies in Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing', by Joseph G. Kickasola (Baylor University)
'A Psychoanalytic Ethics for Screen Aesthetics? The Case of Spring Breakers', by Alison Horbury (University of Melbourne)
“They’re Bad People – They Should Suffer”: Post-British Crime Films and the Ethics of Retributive Violence', by Mark Schmitt (TU Dortmund University)

How should we judge the quality of the art of encounter? Through conversations, meals, walks and community activities, visual artists strive for solidarity, commitment, intimacy and friendship. What about these good intentions? What if art and morality merge? How do artists work with moral dispositions?
Hagoort spoke with prominent representatives of the art of encounter in the Netherlands and turned to moral philosophy for answers.
Written in a clear and illuminating style, Hagoort examines the relation between art and morality. He demonstrates that the assessment of good intentions can enrich art criticism, provided that we are prepared to forsake the will to pass judgement.

This essay is the first part of the essay series commissioned by the Netherlands Foundation for Visual Art, Design and Architecture, currently Mondriaan Foundation.

Abstract
In this chapter I will discuss death in the museum in the form of exhibitions of photographic images of the dead focusing on ‘The Morgue’ (1992), by Andreas Serrano, and ‘Life before Death’ by Walter Schels and Beate Lakotte, exhibited at the Welcome Collection (WC) in 2008. In recent years there have been a number of exhibitions that have presented us with photographs of the dead that have instigated and contributed to discussions concerning the role of art and the appropriateness of photographing the dead, and have highlighted cultural sensitivities concerning the treatment of the corpse. These exhibitions are often discussed in relation to ethical considerations; however, I will posit the argument that the ‘ethical turn’ in discussions of contemporary art is often an avoidance of difficult subjects rather than an engagement with them. To elucidate some of the issues involved in public perceptions of the ethical issues involved in the display of the dead and images of the dead, I will explore two exhibitions that took place in Manchester in 2008. Gunther Von Hagen’s ‘Body Worlds 4’ exhibition took place at the Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI), while at the same time the Manchester Museum (MM) (in the university) covered some of the mummies in their Egyptian display - the unwrapped mummy of Asru and a partially wrapped child mummy - in order to raise issues about the ethics of showing human remains. Both exhibitions had a stated educational purpose though these were framed differently. In the longer version of this chapter I also discuss the appropriation of the dead through a discussion of the funeral in Uppsala Cathedral in 2002 of Fadima Sahindal, a 26 woman of Kurdish decent who was shot by her father because she persisted in a relationship of which he disapproved, exemplifies Durkheim’s assertion that public ritual reinforces common values and social integration. It is precisely the concept of integration that was one of the principle elements of ‘social glue’ that was being preserved in the Swedish establishment’s response to the murder.

Since forever humanity moved amid primordial images, there is an imaginary that, since the background of individual consciousness emerges in the collective through the symbolic complexes that are the myths. This primordial root was approached with different, although close, meaning for the imaginary theories, in particular by Henri Corbin, Mircea Eliade and Gilbert Durand, all connected by a belief in a suprasensible reality.
In various traditions are imaginary of the great cosmic cycles that give new meaning to history and that are articulated in two branches: the cyclical time (myth of eternal return) and the finite time (myth of the end of the world). It is in this soil germinates the Revelation of St. John, which strongly will influence the Russian artistic and literary tradition. Among others, in the nineteenth century it will be incorporated by figures such as Dostoevsky and Soloviev and in the twentieth century by Boulgakov and Solzhenitsyn.
The Tarkovsky's cinema, does not escape of these influences. In Stalker and in The Sacrifice the apocalyptic narrative becomes more explicit. Tarkovsky himself, during a retrospective of his films in 1984, in an intervention known as “Discourse on the Apocalypse”, puts light on the apocalyptic reading of his film work. For him the book of St. John would be the most poetic work created on earth.
This article, discusses the issue of the apocalypse in the Tarkovsky's cinema in dialogue with the theories of imaginary.

Emmanuel Levinas's philosophy asks us to look at the face of the Other, the
stranger and foreigner, and to listen to its outcry. According to Levinas, the
exposed face of the Other exposes the onlooker and compels him or her to
comply with its outcry. Our ability to look at the Other's face is bound to
lead us to a reformed world.In many of the works shown in "Broken Beads:
Contemporary Artists on their Moroccan Identity," the faces of the artists or
the people they portray are seen either looking straight forward at the viewers,
or intentionally and consciously hiding them. The face serves as a weapon
or a means of communication. Here, it becomes a medium for changing
the viewer's consciousness, by making him or her look at a new, complex,
variegated, three dimensional and rich human image, instead of seeing the
habitual, one dimensional, stereotypical image of the "Moroccan."

Au milieu du XXe siècle, Robert Klein s’est attelé à une tâche immense : repenser l’art et son histoire à partir de la notion aristotélicienne de  technè. Loin d’être réductible à la représentation ou à la production du beau idéal, l’art est manière de faire, habitus ou disposition à produire selon une droite raison. Dans L’Esthétique de la technè, cette thèse placée sous la direction d’André Chastel et restée jusqu’à ce jour inédite, Klein montre de quelle façon cette conception artificialiste de l’art irrigue l’essentiel de la pensée et de la production artistique du XVIe siècle. L’œuvre maniériste, qu’il s’agisse d’une sculpture « terrible » de Michel-Ange, d’un tableau « capricieux » d’Arcimboldo ou d’un bronze « virtuose » de Cellini, a pour finalité de susciter la stupeur et l’émerveillement, conduisant le spectateur à s’interroger sur les procès techniques (alliance d’intelligence et d’habilité manuelle) qui l’ont fait advenir sous cette forme. En mettant ainsi l’accent sur le comment, Klein conteste le privilège de l’idée sur les moyens et offre une vision « aristotélicienne » de la Renaissance bien différente de celle, essentiellement néoplatonicienne et idéaliste, à laquelle on la réduit encore trop souvent.

Cette thèse inédite est transcrite, éditée et présentée par Jérémie Koering
Avec une préface de Henri Zerner

This paper examines the role of art and curatorial practice in relation to the Anthropocene, asking what effects Anthropocene-themed narratives developing in the art world might have on the discourse as a whole. Leonardo Journal Vol. 48, No. 4 (August 2015). Published by MIT Press on the occasion of SIGGRAPH 2015

RESUMEN: Ad Reinhardt, además de pintor, se dedicó a labores editoriales, al diseño gráfico y a la realización de cómics desde su juventud y a lo largo de toda su vida. Estas obras no eran meros trabajos alimenticios, sino algo en lo que se implicaba con un personal compromiso ético, estético e ideológico perfectamente deslindado de su producción pictórica. Su muy conocida serie How to Look…, que se publicó en el diario PM, constituye uno de los comics más originales del siglo XX además de una reflexión sobre qué es el arte moderno, sus conceptos, vicios y virtudes. Junto con esto se implicó en multitud de cabeceras siendo editor jefe o director de arte en algunas de ellas. Esta implicación con políticas editoriales supusieron una labor tan comprometida como la realización de sus conocidas Pinturas negras. PALABRAS CLAVE: Ad Reinhardt, expresionismo abstracto, cómic, revistas ETHICS AND POLITICS OF THE EDITION IN AD REINHARDT'S WORK. BEYOND PAINTING AND COMICS ABSTRACT: Ad Reinhardt was a painter but also developed a large production of press, graphic design and cartoons. These were not merely a means to earn his bread and butter, but are works with an ethic, aesthetic an ideological commitment, though are separate from his paintings. His best known comic, How to Look… published by PM newspaper is one of the most original twentieth century comics and a reflection on what modern art is, its concepts, vices and virtues. Besides, he was involved in many mastheads as editor or art director in some of them. This implication with editorial politics has a deep commitment similar to that of his well-known Black Paintings.

Art surrounds us throughout our life. What makes something art? What makes art valuable? How should we interpret or criticize art? These are just some of the many questions we will explore in looking at what art means to society. We will read many classical and contemporary authors on what makes art valuable or unique. We will also discuss a variety of case studies in the arts to illustrate our theoretical readings. This course represents an interdisciplinary examination of what art is and what its value to society could be. Students will read a variety of authors writing about art from a range of disciplines—art history, rhetoric, English, philosophy, and communication studies. We will work diligently on charitably understanding the arguments of others while honing our own views and argumentative skills. The course will also allow students to think about the role of art in their own lives and the values it brings to their experience. The course culminates with each student leading a presentation and writing a sustained argumentative paper on a topic of their choice relating to art and society.

My aim here is to provide a context within which we can develop an applied ethical criticism of narrative art-one which has a public relevance and is not limited to philosophical discussions characterized by value-interaction debate or conducted under the theoretical banner of aesthetic cognitivism. In the first part I reinforce the challenge of finding empirical evidence which either corroborates or denies the cognitivist's claim regarding the causal impact of art on the audience, and I argue, in the second part, that such evidence is needed in order to determine the possibility of moral corruption and/or moral enhancement via art. Taking cues from Ted Nannicelli, I end by offering pointers on domains of research we should incorporate into our ethical criticism of art, so as to come up with an informed understanding of an artwork and of spectators' engagements with it.

R. G. Collingwood’s 'The Principles of Art' argues that art is the expression of emotion. This dissertation offers a new interpretation of that philosophy, and argues that this interpretation is both hermeneutically and philosophically plausible. The offered interpretation differs from the received interpretation most significantly in treating the concept of ‘art’ as primarily scalarly rather than binarily realisable (this is introduced in ch. 1), and in understanding Collingwood’s use of the term ‘emotion’ more broadly (introduced in ch. 2).

After the exposition of ch. 1, the remainder of that chapter and the subsequent three chapters are each centred around one sort of objection. In ch. 1, I consider the objection that Collingwood’s scalar understanding of ‘art’ is deviant and unhelpful. I respond by first observing that the understanding is not deviant, and second that it is more philosophically and artistically illuminating. In ch. 2, I consider the objection that Collingwood’s understanding of ‘emotion’ is so narrow that it fails to do justice to the fact that art can be philosophically potent. I respond that his understanding of ‘emotion’ is broad enough that this objection fails. In ch. 3, I consider the objection that Collingwood has no theoretical room for the prima facie plausible thought that some emotions are not worth expressing in art. In response, I reinterpret the points that appear to support this contention in a way that makes them both more plausible and more Collingwoodian. Finally, in ch. 4, I consider the objection that Collingwood does not have the theoretical room to do justice to the value of the delight we take in art. I respond by arguing that although he does not have this room to say that this delight is itself an artistic value, it does yet have an important place in his philosophy.

This jointly authored paper will explore the discomfort created by performance practice in terms of an ethical sacrifice; in sacrifice something is given up for a greater gain. The paper will discuss if comfort is sacrificed for the greater gain of the sensuous knowledge offered by performance works that may make the audience feel uncomfortable. In Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality, Zygmunt Bauman described humans as fundamentally moral beings, which he distances from the notion of goodness. Rather than being connected to the debate about the ‘essential goodness’ of humans he suggests that to be moral is ‘to exercise one’s freedom of authorship and/or actorship as a choice between good and evil.’
Discomfort can be brought into the reception of performance practice that makes bodily fluids visual and tangible. Art practice that includes the release and transfer of bodily fluids produces anxieties, and raises questions of health and welfare, safety and conduct. This sees the individual experiences what Bataille called ‘impotent horror’ as they negotiate the implied danger of the experience. This paper will make specific reference to Bartram’s performance work and its relationship to the audience, which uses saliva and the impact of its displacement at its core.

What are the ethical issues raised by fans creating works involving their favorite public figures and celebrities? A case study on the ethics of real-person fan fiction. Authored by Oluwasemilore Adeoluwa & Scott R. Stroud. More case studies at www.mediaethicsinitiative.org

What happens when the #MeToo movement meets the artworld? A case study analyzing the controversy over Balthus' use of a young model for his paintings, and the Met's showcasing of these works. Authored by Bailey Sebastian & Scott R. Stroud. More case studies at www.mediaethicsinitiative.org

Discussion on artist's social responsibilities and ethics, using examples from Mayu Kanamori's theatre work Yasukichi Murakami - Through A Distant Lens.
This talk was given at the 5th Asian Australian Studies Research Network (AASRN) conference  "mobilities" (26-27 Nov 2015) at the Immigration Museum, Melbourne as part of a panel entitled  "Creative politics, political creations".  Chaired by Owen Leong
More info: mobilities conference: https://aai5conference.wordpress.com/
More info: AASRN
https://aasrn.wordpress.com/

בתערוכה חרוזים שבורים: אמנים עכשוויים על זהותם המרוקאית נראים
בעבודות רבות פניו של האמן או האמנית, או של הדמויות בעבודותיהם, כשהם
מישירים מבט אל הצופים, או כשהם נוקטים הסתר פנים. הפנים משמשות
כאמצעי לשינוי תודעתו של הצופה, מהתבוננות בדימוי סטריאוטיפי של
'המרוקאי/ת' נקרא הצופה להבחין בדימוי אנושי חדש, מורכב ועשיר.

Turgut Cansever's primary concern was to combine architecture with ethics that entailed a quintessential overlap of religion, tradition, architecture and cultural identity on a sociopolitical axis in contemporary Turkey. His architectural practice and intellectual legacy have a huge impact on the new generations of educated middle-class conservatives of Turkey and will probably influence the next generation of architects in decades to come.

Il racconto di Th. Mann Tristan (1902) si gioca sulle diverse modalità di ricezione del Tristan und Isolde: una procede dai fondamenti romantici e postromantici della Kultur germanica, così come delineati da Mann nelle Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, simbolizzati dal celebre Dreigestirn Schopenhauer-Wagner-Nietzsche; l’altra è improntata alla retorica estetistica del wagnerismo fin de siécle. Le tendenze culturali che L. Mittner individua come ‘estetismo di Morte’ ed ‘estetismo di Vita’ diventano il bersaglio dell’ironia critica cui Mann contrappone la propria etica pessimista e borghese. In questo senso, Mann accoglie l’eredità del Dreigestirn in direzione opposta a quella dell’estetismo vitalistico di Gabriele D’Annunzio, che pone il culto della bellezza (per Mann qualcosa di specificamente italiano) a fondamento del culto wangeriano. Il Tristan und Isolde diventa allora per Mann il paradigma di un wagnerismo specificamente tedesco in senso antiestetistico, di cui mette in luce la matrice schopenhaueriana, metafisica e pessimista, e la sua ricezione nietzschiana – non solo del Nietzsche della Nascita della tragedia ma anche del Nietzsche “antiwagneriano” del Caso Wagner. In tal modo il racconto di Thomas Mann sintetizza e critica, anticipandola, una ricezione di Wagner che aprirà la strada, nel corso del Novecento, alle sue derive ideologiche.