Philosophers on Art from Kant to the Postmodernists

Philosophers approach art from a wholly unique perspective, and by incorporating their thought into an analysis of art, both our notion of what art can embody and our understanding of what criticism can achieve expand. Here, for the first time, Christopher Kul-Want brings together twenty-five primary philosophical texts on art written by twenty different philosophers. Stretching from the Enlightenment to postmodernism, these essays represent Continental philosophy and aesthetics, the Marxist intellectual tradition, and the practice of psychoanalysis, each introduced by an overview and interpreted by the author.

In these essays Martin Heidegger discusses the meaning of the Greek temple and Van Gogh's painting of shoes; Georges Bataille elucidates Salvador DalA-'s The Lugubrious Game; Theodor W. Adorno questions capitalism through an analysis of collage; Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes address the uncanny effects of photography; Sigmund Freud muses on Leonardo Da Vinci and his interpreters; Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva look closely at paintings by Holbein; Freud's postmodern critic, Gilles Deleuze, considers the visceral paintings of Francis Bacon; and Giorgio Agamben, taking his cue from Kant and Aristotle, explores the twin traditions of the Duchampian ready-made and Pop Art. Kul-Want intersperses these texts with essays on aesthetics (from Hegel and Nietzsche to Badiou and RanciA]re) that prove philosophy adopted an entirely new orientation toward aesthetic experience and subjectivity in the wake of Kant's powerful legacy.