ABSTRACTS: American Society for Aesthetics Annual Meeting 2015

Bartel, Christopher. “Are Video Game Worlds Fictional?” It would seem natural to regard video game worlds as fictional, however many cases of our interactions within video game worlds seem to challenge this assumption. I examine two specific cases —virtual theft and virtual sexual assault—and argue that fictionalist accounts of video games are unable to satisfactorily explain our emotional responses to these cases. Instead I argue that we should consider adopting a dualist account of video games: we interact with video games through real-world game code and the distinction between the code and its presumed fictional content is merely a matter of description.

Black, Dylan "Imaginative resistance, analyticity, and intelligibility" I criticize critically examine recent literature on the problem of imaginative resistance and the alethic puzzle. In particular I try to clarify how assumptions about the nature of concepts and their application have shaped recent debates. I defend mostly by way of negative support, a new position according to which there are no constraints on what is fictionally possible but there are constraints on what we can imagine.

Boardman, Frank “Are We Still in Yoknapatawpha?” We often interpret two or more narrative fictions as depicting the same fictional world. This practice is somewhat more problematic than we typically appreciate. I raise some concerns here especially about the common assumption that later works can change the meaning of earlier works. First, it may not be immediately clear what conditions are sufficient for this sort of effect. Second, even under (what I take to be) the most plausible such conditions, we have some compelling reasons to think either that retroactive changes to meaning are impossible, or at least that interpretations that imply such changes are inadvisable.

Caldarola, Elisa “Street art as hybrid art” There are many varieties of street art: stencil, paste-up, stickers, street sculpture, yarn bombing, and so on. Is street art a single peculiar artform or does it encompass various artforms? I consider three hypotheses and defend the third one: (i) Street art is a single, unified artform; (ii) we subsume various artforms under the category of street art, all based on art practices relating to “the street”; (iii) street art is a broad, but unified, category encompassing various forms of hybrid art. All such forms hybridize conceptual media and various visual media. "

Clavel-Vázquez, Adriana “The diversity of counter-moral fictions and the ethical criticism of art” This paper examines the possibility of the ethical criticism of counter-moral fictions. I argue that, even among those fictional narratives whose moral content is intrinsically related to the prescribed imaginings, not all fictions with counter-moral content can be ethically assessed, and thus are not subject to ethical criticism. I propose a distinction between fictional and actual immorality in counter- moral fictions. I argue that only actual immorality can be subject to ethical assessment and, therefore, to ethical criticism, inasmuch as it is only in these cases that the audience participates in immoral views that refer to the actual world."

Conter, David “Names in Fiction Are Really Pronouns” In line with his favoured direct reference theory, Kripke has argued that because names in fiction have no actual referents, they have no semantic value – no meaning. For that reason, the sentences in fiction do not express propositions and thus have no semantic value or meaning, either. We merely pretend that they do. I argue, first, that if sentences in fiction have no semantic value, then the relevant sentences about pretending will have no semantic value, either. An alternative, which avoids this, is that names in fiction function like bound pronouns or variables. This allows sentences in fiction to be meaningful, and in this way saves the pretense theory.

Cova, Florian & Goffin, Kris “Guilty Pleasures and Aesthetic Normativity A guilty pleasure is a seemingly paradoxical experience: you have a pleasurable experience about an artwork, but you feel bad about liking it. At first sight, guilty pleasure is aesthetic pleasure “gone wrong”, which means that elucidating the nature of this phenomenon can provide us invaluable insights on the nature of aesthetic normativity. Through a series of empirical studies, we show that the kind of aesthetic normativity at work in guilty pleasures is not the one Mind-Independent Aesthetic Realism would traditionally predict. Rather, our results suggest the existence of a new type of normativity connected to personal values: appraiser-directed normativity.

Cross, Anthony “The Role(s) of Reasons in Art Criticism” Most recent discussions of reasons in art criticism focus on reasons that justify beliefs about the value of artworks. Reviving a long-neglected suggestion from Paul Ziff, I argue that we should focus instead on art-critical reasons that justify actions—namely, particular ways of engaging with artworks. I argue that a focus on practical rather than epistemic reasons yields an understanding of criticism that better fits with our intuitions about the value of reading art criticism, and which makes room for a nuanced distinction between criticism that aims at universality and criticism that is resolutely personal.

Curry, Nick "Perspectives, Criticism, and Metaphor: On the Structural Similarity of Metaphor and Critical Speech Acts" Two major books on criticism by aestheticians—Noel Carroll’s On Criticism (Routledge 2009) and James Grant’s The Critical Imagination (Oxford 2013)—have recently been published. Both Carroll and Grant account for criticism by thinking about the nature of the judgment that underwrites works of criticism. In this paper, I suggest a different starting point: criticism is, at the most basic level of description, a speech act. This framework reveals two answers to the question ‘What is the point of criticism?’ by revealing two ways in which critical speech acts and metaphors are structurally similar. Fokt, Simon “The paradox of fiction: an irrational solution” The solution to the paradox of fiction I offer rests on a distinction between doxastic and practical rationality. I argue that in the case of fiction it is practically rational to choose to feel genuine, but doxastically irrational emotions towards fictional characters and situations. This is because feeling such emotions serves a practical goal: it leads to a better experience of the fiction. I then defend this view against some likely objections, showing that irrational emotions involved are genuine, of the right kind, appropriate, and that the view is applicable to documentary fictions.

Forsberg, Maria “Non-discriminatory creativity and unpredictability” Many writers seek to describe an ordinary concept of creativity, which does not allow creativity to be the result of a bias: psychological creativity. This is, unlike the concept assumed by e.g. the systems approach, a non-discriminatory kind of creativity. Kronfeldner (2009, 2011) argues for a definition of such creativity, that she takes to refer to unpredictable products. I argue that there are products which meet Kronfeldner’s conditions, but which are not hard to predict: contagion thoughts. This leaves us with a choice: (i) accept the definition, and give up the unpredictability assumption, or (ii) reject it. "

Gilmore, Jonathan “The Problem of Discrepant Affects” The problem of discrepant affects is how to explain why a given subject may feel one kind of emotion for some state of affairs when she imagines it as prescribed by a fiction, but feel a contrary kind of emotion when she takes the state of affairs to be real. In this talk I try to (i) identify why cases of discrepant affect present a philosophically interesting problem; (ii) better characterize the precise nature of such mismatches between our responses to the contents of fictions or imaginings and the contents of our beliefs (or other truth-apt representations such as perceptions and memories); and (iii) survey and criticize some tentative solutions to that problem.

Harold, James “Consequentialism for Aesthetics” In the twenty years or so since the revival of “ethical criticism” in Anglophone philosophy of art, very little has been said about whether or not works of art pose real moral dangers to audiences. My aim is to show that this studied avoidance of thinking about the possible moral consequences of art is a mistake. First, I argue that the central strategy for evaluating art morally using non-consequentialist criteria faces a serious and possibly fatal objection. Second, I critique the reasons most commonly given against using consequentialist criteria for evaluating art. Third, I offer some reasons for thinking that consequentialist thinking can suggest fruitful lines of future research.

Holliday, John “The Puzzle of Factual Praise” It seems that we are not willing to give up the intuitions that (a) works of fiction are free from the constraints of historical truth and (b) historical inaccuracies sometimes count against the artistic value of works of fiction. Christopher Bartel (2012) calls this the puzzle of historical criticism. I argue that this puzzle extends beyond historical facts. While it is especially salient that historical accuracy at times appears to be relevant to evaluation of fictional works, such relevance appears to be a feature of facts in general. I then propose a partial strategy for resolving the puzzle.

Horn, Justin “Resemblance and Intention in Depiction” Depiction, or picture-making, is central in many art media. One doesn't get far in talking about pictures without mentioning resemblance; pictures generally “look like” what they are pictures of. Theorists impressed by this have offered resemblance theories of depiction, but these face a host of objections. Here, I suggest that resemblance theories misapprehend the proper role played by resemblance in our interactions with pictures; it should be evidentiary, not criterial. I further suggest intentional theories of depiction can avoid the objections while still maintaining the centrality of resemblance, outlining an example intentional theory.

Huddleston, Andrew “Beyond Value: Expanding Aesthetic Normativity” When it comes to interpreting, staging, appreciating, performing, or displaying artworks, we usually have the idea that an interpretation, staging, etc., might be inappropriate or wrong. I argue in this paper that in order to understand the structure of the normativity at work in such matters, we cannot —as is often done with other matters in aesthetics—couch the question of aesthetic normativity along axiological lines, with the primary issue being about aesthetic or artistic value and the meta-level status of such value. This, I suggest, is because a) notions of the fitting play a primary role in these alternative forms of normativity and because b) being fitting isn’t reducible to an issue of aesthetic or artistic value.

Jagnow, René “Pictorial Experience and Inflection” Richard Wollheim famously argued that pictorial experience is a unique type of visual experience, which he called seeing-in. Seeing-in is characteristically twofold: when you see an object in a picture, you are aware of both the object depicted in the picture and certain features of the picture surface that permit you to see that object. A number of authors have developed Wollheim’s proposal in form of what I will call a double-experience theory of seeing-in. According to this theory, the two aspects of visual awareness belong to two distinct experiences. Yet, as Dominic Lopes has made particularly clear, the double-experience theory needs to be supplemented with a plausible to account of inflection. My goal in this paper is to provide such an account.

Kajtár, László “The Cognitive Value of Literary Narratives: A Phenomenological View” Do literary works provide knowledge in an aesthetically significant way? This is the central question of the cognitive value debate. I describe and argue against a propositionalist answer: true propositions are not the most important loci of cognitive value. Truth should not be the focus of the discussion. I take my cue from a development in the work of Martin Heidegger. After attempting to redefine truth, Heidegger conceded that it is better just to call attention to a more fundamental phenomenon of disclosedness. I argue here that such a move opens up a new position in the cognitive value debate.

Kulvicki, John “Depiction and chromatic perspective” Some pictures are excellent spatial and chromatic surrogates for the scenes they depict. The spatial case is usually explained by appeal to perspective-dependent shape properties called visible figures (Reid 1764), occlusion shapes (Hyman 2006) or outline shapes (Hopkins 1998). Using those thoughts as a guide, this paper suggests that chromatic surrogacy can be explained by appeal to awareness of perspective-dependent chromatic qualities, which I call colluminations. Reid and Helmholtz (1903) had related notions in mind, but they have not made their way into contemporary discussions of color or the depiction of color. In this way, philosophy of art informs philosophy of perception.

Leddington, Jason “The Experience of Magic” Theatrical magic is all but ignored by philosophers. This is unfortunate, since magic seems to offer a unique and distinctively intellectual aesthetic experience. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to initiate a philosophical investigation of the experience of magic. First, I address the nature of magic performance and the sort of depiction it requires. Next, I argue that the experience of magic involves what Tamar Gendler calls “belief-discordant alief.” Finally, I present an account of the experience of magic that recalls a canonical form of philosophical inquiry and raises questions directly relevant to core issues in contemporary aesthetics.

Leddy, Thomas “When is Food Art? And Can it Ever be Fine Art?” Philosophical defenders of the aesthetics of food tend to stop short of saying that food can be fine art, although the position that food can be a minor art form is popular. Two aestheticians, Elizabeth Telfer and Carolyn Korsmeyer, have addressed the issue in a popular textbook, Arguing about Art. Despite their differences, both fall into the camp of denying that food can be fine art. In each case, as I show, the authors provide arguments that could be used to support the claim that food can be fine art. This is not to say however that food is always or even usually fine art. Sometimes even when it is not even a minor art it plays a richly satisfying role in our aesthetic lives.

Merritt, Christiane “What is Street Art? The Politics of the Public" I consider three conditions that, plausibly, must hold for something to count as an instance of street art: Site Publicity (the work must appear in space commonly regarded as public); Audience Publicity (the work’s proper audience is the public); and Illegality. I examine instances of political artworks and argue that they are street art – indeed, paradigmatic works of street art – despite failing to satisfy one or more of the above conditions. The upshot is twofold: (1) the conditions fail despite initial plausibility; (2) philosophers must consider a wider array of artworks, including political artworks, when forming theories of street art.

Miller, Jay “Relational Aesthetics from Bourriaud to Bishop and Beyond” This paper aims to reinvigorate discussion of Nicholas Bourriaud’s concept of “relational aesthetics” by addressing one of the primary objections to it. While acknowledging Clair Bishop’s well-known criticism that relational aesthetics lacks a normative basis for evaluating such social relations aesthetically, I argue that such an account is not only possible, but also preferable, to the alternative model of “relational antagonistic” that she and many other contemporary theorists advocate. By analyzing several contemporary performance artworks, I will show that the prevailing model of antagonistic art amounts to a simplistic return to aesthetic autonomy that is both aesthetically and ethically problematic.

Pavlovich, Alexis “Aesthetic Ideas and the Individual in Kant” In the 3rd Critique, Kant gives two descriptions of aesthetic ideas: (1) ideas arising from expanded empirical concepts, and (2) ideas that exhibit rational ideas through metaphor. Ample attention has been paid to the latter group, but many scholars neglect the former. I offer a reading of (1), arguing that there are explanatory gaps present in Kant’s account of these ideas which can best be filled in by reference to reason’s idea of the individual. This leads to a more thorough understanding of the contribution of reason to aesthetic experience than the one we get if we consider the symbolic model alone, and gives us a starting place from which to consider the relation between the two kinds of idea.

Pueyo-Ibanez, Belén “Experience and Aesthetic Quality: On the Continuities within John Dewey's Philosophy” The aim of this paper is to reconstruct the intellectual journey that connects John Dewey's study of the principle of experience to his aesthetic theory. From Dewey’s point of view, the individual must be seen not as an external observer of an immutable and antecedent reality, but as an active agent who is capable of creating the appropriate conditions to construct a better, more intense and meaningful life. As he argues, regardless of the form human experience acquires—the experience of a scientific discovery, of an engaging philosophical discussion or of Bruckner's Fourth Symphony—it will be an experience with aesthetic quality insofar as it leads to the expansion and enrichment of life.

Ransom, Madeleine "Aesthetic expertise, high-level perceptual content and non-inferential justification" Are aesthetic judgments non-inferentially justified by experience? Recently it has been argued they are not (Dorsch 2013). First, because Sibleyan aesthetic perception is an acquired skill, the resulting aesthetic judgments depend on implicit reasoning for justification. Second, because recognizing aesthetic properties requires first recognizing non-aesthetic properties, the former epistemically depend on the latter. Against the first argument I consider several potential ways in which aesthetic training is compatible with immediate justification. I then argue that the second strategy rests on an implausible theory of perception. Finally, I diagnose the source of inferentialist intuitions as mistakenly taking ontological dependence to be a good guide to epistemic dependence. Renault-Steele, Summer “Behind a Surface with no Center: Siegfried Kracauer and Michèle Le Doeuff” Blending figurative language with ontological analysis, Siegfried Kracauer’s Weimar era work is not readily identifiable as “philosophy.” And yet, this ambiguity is perhaps what makes Kracauer most valuable to philosophy, particularly its historically marginalized subfields and scholars. This paper draws out that possibility, advancing key affinities between Kracauer and the scholarship of feminist philosopher Michèle Le Doeuff. The former’s heterogeneous compositional principle can be interpreted as what Le Doeuff calls unrepressed philosophy. Employing unrepressed philosophy as an interpretive lens allows for a study of Kracauer’s writing that retrieves the value of its interdisciplinary nature and unlocks its feminist potential.

Riggle, Nick “Poetic Self-Conceptions” Sometimes our actions are motivated by our identifying with a personal ideal. What are personal ideals, and how do they move us to act? Someone who aspires to be a philosopher might think “I am a philosopher” by way of motivating herself to think hard about a philosophical question. But doing so seems to require her to act on an inaccurate self-description, given that she isn’t yet what she regards herself as being. How should we understand this kind of self-regard? J. David Velleman develops the thought that ideals are a kind of fictional self-conception. In this paper, I discuss Velleman’s view and develop and defend an alternative model, according to which ideal-self-conceptions are metaphors. Thinking of oneself as a philosopher, under the guise of an ideal, is like thinking of Juliet as the sun, under the influence of love. I use this to suggest that poetic thought has an equally important role to play in moral psychology as does narrative thought—ideal self-conceptions are a kind of poetic self- conception.

Rough, Brock “Why Games Are Not Art” Recent debate has focused on whether videogames are art or not. Whatever the answer, the debate has largely taken it for granted that videogames are games, and that this is unproblematic for the art status of videogames. This paper argues that for something to be a game is incompatible with it being an artwork, and thus insofar as videogames are games, they cannot be artworks. This incompatibility arises out of the different attitudes that are prescribed for engaging with games versus those for engaging with artworks. Citing a modified definition of games from Bernard Suits and commonly held conditions of artworks, I show that for an artist to intend something as a game or an artwork is to intend essential constitutive conditions of the object that preclude the object from being both a game and an artwork.

Shelley, James “The Default Theory of Aesthetic Value” Strict perceptual formalism is the thesis that aesthetic value is value had strictly in virtue of perceptual properties. Hedonism is the thesis that aesthetic value is value had in virtue of pleasurability. The default theory of aesthetic value is the conjunction of strict perceptual formalism and hedonism. Any theory of aesthetic value that takes either thesis of the default theory as its starting point is a version of the standard theory of aesthetic value. I argue that the standard theory fails because it takes the default theory as its point of departure.

Song, Yuija “What Does It Mean to Be Moved by Art?” There is an ambiguity in saying that we are moved by art. I think we mean at least two things | two sorts of emotional experience | when we say we are moved by a work of art. This paper is an attempt to illuminate our understanding of what it is to be moved by drawing on Zolt_an Kovecses's insights on conceiving of emotions as metaphors. In particular, getting clear on what it is to be moved by art will provide us with another perspective on exploring the relation between art and emotions.

Spaid, Sue “Do Posthumous Productions Count as Finished Artworks” In the philosophical literature, there are primarily two views regarding an artwork’s completion. The first considers “when” and the second considers “what.” Philosophers have variously pinpointed the precise moment the artwork is finished at being before, at or after publication. Publication is used here generically to encompass publication of a score, script, or text; or presentation of artwork, film, or performance. Others prefer to defer to the artist’s “completion decision.” In this paper, I analyze six case studies to tease out six completion conditions. So long as all six conditions are met, posthumous productions match philosophical intuitions regarding finished artworks.

Stear, Nils-Hennes “Meriting a Response: Accounting for ‘Seductive’ Artworks” According to what I call the Merit Principle, roughly, works of art that invite audiences to respond in ways that are not merited thereby fail on their own terms and are thus aesthetically flawed. The Merit Principle is not only intuitive, but endorsed in some form by Aristotle, David Hume, and a number of contemporary figures. In this paper, I show how the principle leads to paradox by considering an undertheorized class of works I call “seductive works”. These works are so structured that they necessarily invite an unmerited response, meaning that according to the Merit Principle they are necessarily aesthetically flawed, which seems absurd. I consider a number of unsuccessful ways to solve the paradox, propose one ultimately unsuccessful way of dissolving it, and close by suggesting that, tentatively and reluctantly, we should abandon the Merit Principle.

Tafalla, Marta “The Aesthetic Appreciation of Animals in Zoological Parks” Can we appreciate in a serious and deep way the aesthetic qualities of captive animals exhibited in the artificial installations of a zoo? To answer this question, I invoke theories concerning the aesthetic appreciation of nature propounded by Yuriko Saito and Allen Carlson, and argue that zoos impose their story on animals, thereby preventing us from appreciating the animals on their own terms. I claim that captivity and its consequences for the health, behavior and appearance of animals makes a serious and deep appreciation of their aesthetic qualities impossible.

Tenen, Levi "Why Noël Carroll, and Everyone Else, Should be a Contextualist" Noël Carroll rejects contextualism—the view that artworks can be aesthetically better for being immoral. Separately, Carroll argues that artworks can expand the dialectic of art by repudiating themes in other works. I use Carroll’s account of repudiation to argue for contextualism: A work’s moral flaw can be an aesthetic merit if the moral flaw encourages viewers to see how the work achieves its aim— repudiating morally commendable art. I provide two examples that exemplify my point. I end by suggesting that anyone who thinks that a work’s historical context can influence its aesthetic value should adopt contextualism.

Tinguely, Joseph “Streiten and the Public Form of Judgment” There is a defensible model of an essentially public form of judgment extractable from Kant’s account of the way we talk—or, better, “quarrel”—about beauty. The paper provides a close reading of several Kantian texts in order to distinguish the particular kind of speech act called “Streiten” from two alternatives, “Disputieren” and “Geschwatz”. This reading ultimately ties the discourse of “quarrelling” to the establishment of a sensus communis aestheticus. Marking out the normative and linguistic space in which aesthetic quarrels occur thereby provides insight into the conditions and possibilities of political discourse.

Walden, Kenneth “The Autonomist Argument for Ethicism” I formulate and defend an argument for ethicism. It is descended from some familiar aesthetic ideas in German Idealism, but has received scant attention in recent debates about the ethical criticism of art. The argument is premised on two thoughts: works of art can enhance and degrade the autonomy of their audiences, and the moral law is a law of autonomy. Combining these yields the claim that the ethical criticism of a work of art may be appropriate when undertaken as an assessment of its liberatory potential.

Wartenberg, Thomas “Can There Be a Philosophy of Book Illustration?” Book illustration is an art form that has not received any systematic attention from aestheticians. I seek to understand this lacuna in philosophical aesthetics and to put forward some tentative steps in the development of a philosophy of book illustration. I consider, and reject, one line of argument that is dismissive of illustrations in books. I propose a way of categorizing various types of illustrated books and explore one issue about the validity of such a framework. My overall aim is to argue that a philosophy of book illustration would be a useful contribution to contemporary aesthetics.

Wilson, Daniel “A Buck Passing Cluster Theory of the Arts” I take up the question of whether Dominic McIver Lopes’ framework for theories of the individual arts could be used to develop a theory of the arts. In section one, I present some features of Lopes’ framework for theories of the individual arts as medium-centred appreciative practices. In section two, I consider Lopes’ treatment of hard cases—those artworks that cause problems for traditional (aesthetic) theories of art—and suggest some modifications to Lopes’ framework that produce a cluster theory of the arts. In the final section I note the consequences of my proposal for other claims that Lopes endorses."

Xhignesse, Michel-Antoine “Art's Intention-Dependence” The distinction between art and nature mirrors a distinction that forms the cornerstone of the philosophy of action: the distinction between actions and happenings. Actions involve an essential reference to some agent's intentional activity, happenings do not. I argue that intention-dependence is distinct from and precludes the widely accepted notion of concept-dependence. By distinguishing between a weaker and a stronger sense of intentionality, we can see that art's intention-dependence requires, at minimum, only the former. Concept dependence, however, takes the de re sense of intentionality as its minimum criterion. So theories of art must decide which criterion is more fundamental.

PANEL PRESENTERS

Political Uses of Interactive Art

Argüello, Gemma "Interactivity and Computer-Based Tactical Media" In this paper I will present how highly political works raise problems for certain accounts of computer art and its related notion of interactivity. Contrary to some narrow definitions of interactivity, I will argue that political computer-based interactive artworks, such as Tactical Media Art, are not just types whose instances are those produced by the interaction users have with them, like Dominic McIver Lopes argued. They are also not just the performances (instances) of a type, like David Z. Saltz proposed. Instead, highly politically engaged interactive works of art underscore the need to explain how users engage with specific interfaces. In addition, these examples highlight how accounts of interactivity must consider the way users engage with those interfaces. After explaining some of the artworks that use tactical media practices, I argue that a definition of interactivity should include the users’ actual participation in the actions the artwork prescribes in a particular social context, that is, interactivity in a broad sense. These examples highlight the way in which interactivity is also used to further political and social activism: tactical media empowers nomadic, isolated individuals in contemporary societies to engage in non-violent disturbances using electronic and computer media to dismantle communication and information systems. These examples are interesting, because they reveal a new way that computer art’s interactivity is specifically designed to allow nomadic groups of individuals to assert their political agency.

Nguyen, C. Thi "Games, Consent, and Unsafe Spaces" The usual approach to computer games criticism is to treat games as a subset of fictions, and to treat their ethical concerns as a sub-variety of the ethical concerns of fictions. This focuses ethical concerns on the representational content of computer games - which often involve a lot of violence. Treating games as merely a type of fiction de-emphasizes the unique nature of games: that they are robust choice architectures. Playing a game involves a substantive exercise of autonomy; for one, the player is causally crucial in shaping the emergent narrative. I argue that, by the mere fact that they are choice architectures, computer games offer a significant moral good. The moral good arises from the creation of a space in which free choices can be partially detached from the usual set of practical and moral consequences. Multiplayer games, in particular, offer a peculiar and novel moral good: they offer the opportunity to, through the consent of all participating parties, create a space for the safe and productive exercise of what are usually considered unsafe and antisocial tendencies. This argument draws on Bernard Suits’ analysis of the artificiality nature of game obstacles to provide a philosophical basis for traditional, anthropological conceptions of play as being set in a ‘magic circle’ apart from everyday life. I finish by pointing out similarities between my defense of aggressive games and Thomas Nagel’s defense of pornography and ‘deviant’ sexual fantasy and activity.

Gomez-Lavin, Javier "Simulating the Margins" In this paper I argue that video games offer a unique way of exploring both socio-politically embedded situations and ethical decisions. First, I build on the claim that video games, as an ontological category, are an inherently social form of computer-facilitated interactive art. I further argue that many video games, by providing a socially embedded context and a set of constrained rules-of-play, allow their players to engage in an experiential simulation of a given situation, in contrast to many other popular media. I will discuss three examples of recent video games that employ experiential simulation to address issues of violence, oppression, and stigmatization. The first game I review is developer 11 Bit Studios’ survival game, “This War of Mine,” where the player controls civilians caught in the midst of an urban siege and confronts the player with classical ethical dilemmas. The second is developer Nicky Case’s adventure game, “Coming out Simulator 2014,” which handles the struggles of coming out as a LGBTQ immigrant youth. The last is developer Zoe Quinn’s text-based adventure game, “Depression Quest,” that is an attempt to convey the developer’s own experience with depression and the stigma surrounding it. I use this set of three games with varied mechanics and designs not only to illustrate cases of experiential simulation, but also to preempt objections that such “autobiographical” games aren’t games “in the traditional sense,” and to delineate strategies for how future games ought to explore socio-political and other issues."

Cover Versions in Rock and Pop Music

Judkins , Jennifer "On Tour with the Saturated Allusions" Theodore Gracyk has identified rock/pop music covers as recorded interpretations positioned to “communicate the performer’s awareness of, and attitude toward, a particular recorded fusion of musicianship and musical work.” He briefly notes that live performance covers “are a special case.” Here I examine some of the aesthetic struggles of the touring, entirely make-believe, live cover band “Saturated Allusions.” What is the musicians’ own experience in concert, playing and singing covers? What might count as a “successful” live cover performance? Can SA cover any rock tune? What is the role of the live audience at that concert? Are they really necessary?

Mag Uidhir, Christy "Cover Songs & Appropriation Art" I enquire as to whether some appropriately analogous counterpart to the cover song might be found within the traditional Visual Arts. I am especially interested in what might account for the way in which Contemporary Artworld practice and convention surrounding works of Art Appropriation look to diverge from those surrounding Cover Songs within the world of contemporary popular music. To this end, I focus on two points of comparison between Art Appropriation and the Cover Song. The Metaphysical: does the two-stage compositional/performative division for music entail Cover Songs to stand in a fundamentally different sort of relation to that which they cover than do works of Art Appropriation to that which they appropriate? The Evaluative: Do the respective aims of Art Appropriation and Cover Songs sufficiently depart from one another so as to yield markedly distinct evaluative frameworks such that what makes for a good work qua appropriation art fails to track what makes for a good work qua cover song. Along the way I discuss and compare bodies of work by various artists on both sides (e.g., Mike Bidlo, Elaine Sturtevant, Pat Boone, Tom Jones).

Rings, Michael "Radical Transformation and the Limits of the Cover" I focus on a handful of examples I call radical transformations: Half Japanese’s “Tangled Up in Blue,” U.S. Maple’s “The Wanderer,” Dirty Projectors’ “Police Story,” etc. These tracks, while presented by their artists as “covers,” bear little to any musical resemblance to their originals, likely counting as performances of different songs altogether. How should we understand these tough cases? Are they to be considered covers at all, perhaps as a special subcategory, or a distinct form of derivative work? What limits, if any, should be drawn on the extent that artists can diverge from the composition in question and still be considered to be “covering”? Aside from such questions of category and limit, these tracks also pose the aesthetic puzzle of how to make sense, as appreciators, of their putative framing as “covers.” Are they best understood as some kind of performative commentary on covering itself, perhaps even as a kind of reductio on the practice? I will discuss these questions, considering these “covers” in light of the experimental post-punk context in which we encounter them, and offer an exploratory account of just what their radical musical strategies might suggest about the nature and status of covers at this point in rock’s history.

Negative Aesthetics

Saito, Yuriko "Negative Aesthetics in Everyday Life" None of us live in an aesthetic utopia. Despite difference in degree and kind, all of us face negative aesthetic experiences in our daily life. Examples include a hideous eyesore marring a cityscape, banal piped-in muzak in a shopping center, stench from a factory, and dirty, stagnant lake water with dead fish floating. Unlike artistic treatments of these objects and phenomena in photography, painting, or literature, they are experienced in everyday life simply as negative with very little redeeming or overriding values. Such negative experiences have not received adequate attention in Western aesthetic discourse, but they are (unfortunately) common occurrences for many of us and compromise the quality of life. Among such negative aesthetic experiences in daily life, my presentation will focus on those caused by actions and objects that reflect lack of care, consideration, thoughtfulness, and respect for others. Caring, thoughtful, and respectful attitude toward others is expressed not only by what one does but how one carries out the action. Whether regarding the way we act toward others, interact with objects, or design objects, virtues such as respect and consideration toward others, or their opposites, are expressed through aesthetic means: facial expression, bodily movements, tone of voice, the manner of handling an object, and the design features of artifacts and built environments. After providing several examples to illustrate this point, I will argue that seemingly trivial aesthetic dimensions of our actions and creations have an important role to play in determining the quality of life and the character of a society.

Bradfield , Erin "Negative Aesthetic Response and Community" How do we respond to negative aesthetic experience? Historically, philosophical aesthetics has devoted much thought to positive aesthetic experience, including the beautiful, agreeable, charming, and tasteful. But this is only a partial picture of our aesthetic experience with art, nature, and the external world. Some aesthetic experience displeases: the ugly, disgusting, and horrific are but a few examples that aestheticians have grappled with in recent times. Do negative aesthetic experiences force us to turn away in displeasure or revulsion? Do we refuse to contemplate, engage, and communicate about them? If so, does the accumulation of such responses silence artists and their works? In my presentation, I aim to investigate how we respond to negative aesthetic experiences through the analysis of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Kant considers our responses to art to be extremely personal; judgments of taste are some of the most intimate communication in which we can engage with others. They are a sign of our sociability and civility. As such, the possible failure to respond to negative aesthetic experiences has important implications for both individuals and communities. What might be lost in passing over such experiences in silence, in Wittgensteinian terms? Worse yet, what are the effects of responding to negative aesthetic experience by marginalizing or censoring works that are displeasing? I will argue that the ability to communicate about such experiences, even those that bring us displeasure, could aid in the development of taste and in the refinement of critics and aesthetic communities.

Forsey , Jane "This Might Be Unpleasant" Pleasure in the beautiful, Kant notes, while being disinterested, still involves the maintenance of that state in the subject: the largely passive, spectator-like response to the beautiful, even though it is absent of desire, nevertheless invites us to linger. Displeasure on the other hand is bound up with attempts to actively resist or eradicate the object with which we are confronted. This paper explores the unpleasant, and the striving for action that accompanies our responses to it. Experiences of the unpleasant prompt our imagination (as we consider alternatives to that which displeases us), and demand a response—to change the way things are. In this way, the unpleasant requires more active aesthetic engagement than does the contemplation of the beautiful, or of the downright ugly. I will suggest that, just as error is a necessary part of learning, so too is the unpleasant central to a fully developed account of aesthetic experience, especially as it pertains to our everyday lives.

Bodies, Aesthetics, and Justice del Guadalupe Davidson, Maria "Kara Walker's Magic Lantern" In their book The Black Female Body: A Photographic History, Deborah Willis and Carla Williams take readers through four ways of perceiving black women’s bodies in photography: as colonized bodies, as cultural bodies, as beautiful bodies, and finally as reclaimed bodies. Some of the photos present black women as agents exercising autonomy, while others present their bodies as objects of sexual desire. This essay shifts attention from the content of these photographic images of the black female body and back to the white gaze that is behind the photographic lens. From this starting point, the chapter examines the work of contemporary artist Kara Walker. Walker’s use of black silhouettes on white walls offers a counter--?aesthetic to the white male gaze. She exposes the history of sexual and racial violence that lies underneath the eroticization of the black female body.

Eaton , A.W. "Bodily Taste and Fat Oppression" I argue that fat oppression has a significant aesthetic dimension, namely that our collective taste in bodies is geared toward aesthetic displeasure at fat. Our collective repulsion and disgust at fat is not, I argue, a mere effect of fat hatred but, rather, is an important constitutive element of the oppression of fat people. This paper first develops this new model of fat oppression and then explores some Aristotelian strategies for combatting it.

Irvin , Sherri "Transforming Negative Aesthetic Responses to the Body" Philosophical theories have often suggested that appropriate aesthetic judgments should converge on sets of objects consensually found to be beautiful or ugly. The convergence of aesthetic judgments about human bodies, however, is a significant source of social injustice, because people judged to be unattractive pay substantial social and economic penalties in domains such as education, employment and criminal justice. I argue that ethical considerations such as these should play a role in our decisions about which aesthetic practices to adopt. I advocate a form of aesthetic practice, aesthetic exploration, that involves seeking out the unique aesthetic affordances of bodies rather than aiming to make appropriate aesthetic judgments in relation to some standard or comparison class. I argue that there are good ethical reasons to cultivate aesthetic exploration, and that it is psychologically plausible that doing so would help to alleviate the social injustice attending judgments of attractiveness.

Neuroscience, Dance, and Aesthetics

Montero Barbara Gail “Should Dance Improvisation be Spontaneous?” Improvisation in dance often looks spontaneous, but might it benefit from motor planning and cognitive control? Although one cannot improvise a dance inside an fMRI machine, neuroscientists have recently been investigating the neural underpinnings of musical improvisation (on a non- ferromagnetic piano suitable for use inside a scanner). And some of this research points to a role for planning and cognitive control in musical improvisation. Might this be true of dance as well? I hypothesize that it is and explore the ways in which complete spontaneity might lead to suboptimal results when improvising for an audience or when using improvisational techniques to develop choreography.

Architecture, Public Art, and Social Justice Spector , Tom "Art, Architecture and Racism" Versions of moderate moralism have been gradually supplanting formalism to explain the relationship between art and morality. But even this enriched revision to formalism’s simplistic prohibition on intertwining art and morality only explains so much. The multiple ways in which art and morality intertwine can be studied in finer detail if we limit the topic to the investigation of the interaction between art and racism. We can, for example, find numerous instances of racism serving as the very subject matter of art. In recent times two movies, Selma, and 2 The Help both derive their narrative thrust from this source. Much Southern literature gets its story arc from racism as subject or as underlying theme. While both Selma and The Help present morally laudable sympathetic portraits of the triumph of human dignity over the dehumanization of racism, some works present a morally flawed take on the subject (Triumph of the Will is often cited here) which generally diminishes them as artworks. So much for narrative art forms, but what of art forms, like architecture, traditionally considered to lack narrative content? Can we sensibly applaud or deplore the moral vision these works embody? The case of non-narrative art forms is usually clumsily handled by moderate moralism but the stakes can be too high to ignore the issue. Consider the case of the Greek Revival—the very image of the slaveholding South. Here, works of architecture are conscripted into propping-up the legitimacy of a racist regime by creating works of artistic achievement to help sustain an image of cultural legitimacy. Does the existence of such problematic works speak to the limitations of moderate moralism, or do they contradict the supposed lack of narrative content? Donohoe, Janet "The Ethical Role of Monuments and Memorials" Monuments and memorials play an important role in civic memory. They function to preserve pivotal people and events in a people’s history. They do not do this objectively, however. Because monuments and memorials necessarily forget elements of historical events, they reveal levels of ideology that are not always obvious. This paper explores the moral/ethical role of monuments and memorials in helping us to remember focusing in particular on the how they shape our responses to race and racism. Case studies of the Civil Rights memorial in Montgomery, the (Toni Morrison) bench by the road in Charleston, the Neptune Small Memorial on St. Simon’s Island help us to see the ways in which monuments and memorials must be attentive to their ethical role vis-à-vis memory and forgetting. The argument will draw upon philosophical positions of Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger in making the case for a need for increased attentiveness to the role of monuments in public memory.

Anderson, Travis "Architecture and Artistic Freedom" The late modern shift from truth-oriented conceptions of art to aesthetic approaches produced some of the Western world’s most sophisticated ontological arguments in defense of artistic liberty. Both Kant and Hegel explicitly (and influentially) argued that art and artists require a certain kind of freedom in order to carry out their respective operations and projects, be they aesthetic, artistic, or cognitive. Alongside this freedom of imagination and creative expression, this paper will consider Isaiah Berlin’s value pluralism, his two concepts of liberty, and his insistence that the freedom to conceive and imagine without constraint is necessary to the realization of human nature itself. This paper will further argue that architecture can contribute to this dialogue in singular ways. Alone among the arts, architecture is valued primarily neither for its beauty or its truth, but for its use value. In fact, among the objects and artworks which structure our created environment and everyday life, among the entities we constantly use and create, works of architecture are by far the most prominent. In addition, however, architecture is the only form of art we inhabit. In consequence, architecture both expresses and influences our understanding of the world and ourselves in ways more direct, more profound, and at times, more pernicious than perhaps any other human production. With the help of Kant, Hegel, and Berlin, this paper will explore the effect of freedom on architecture and the effect of architecture on freedom. It will conclude that architecture is a distinctly human habitation in which creativity, practicality, and morality converge.

Giovanelli , Alessandro "Ethics in Architecture, between Rationality and Oppression" If the ethical criticism question concerns the art-critical relevance of ethical judgments about artworks, then the question in fact implies two questions: (1) whether artworks can be evaluated ethically, and if so how; (2) whether such judgment, if possible, is ever relevant, and if so how, to the work’s value as art. 4 Regarding question (1), we can certainly conceive of different ways of evaluating artworks, most notably: (a) the point of view or perspective the work embodies, (b) its consequences—actual or intended—on the work’s perceivers, and (c) the way in which the work was produced. Naturally, it should be noted, appeal to one sort of consideration may become relevant to a different type of ethical judgment (for example, the use of a certain mode of production may shed light on the perspective the work embodies). Elsewhere, I defended a moralist position (i.e., a thesis that admits ethical value as a bona fide art-critical dimension) that emphasizes the artistic relevance of ethically judging artworks for the perspectives they embody, and claimed such relevance to obtain for all representational artworks. Architecture, especially when conceived in abstraction from any representational elements a building may include or participate in, appears to be a more difficult—or at least special—case for such moralist approach. My contribution will investigate some of the ways in which buildings can, instead, be attributed a perspective, specifically a perspective that can be described as racist, or more generally ethnically exclusionary, or yet more generally totalitarian in spirit. My examples will be mostly drawn from public architecture from the apartheid era in South Africa and the Fascist era in Italy.

Moses Mendelssohn

Pollok , Anne "Mendelssohn’s theory of mixed sentiments reconsidered" In my talk, I will argue that the importance of the ‘mixed sentiments’ in aesthetic evaluation warrant a reconsideration of Mendelssohn’s ‘rationalistic’ perfectionism. The structure of mixed sentiments allows for a refined understanding of the mechanics of aesthetic pleasure, and offer a new direction for the source of aesthetic perfection. The aim of this paper is not to offer a new reading of the old narrative that all ways in 18th century aesthetics lead to Kant, but that the notion of perfection among the representatives of rationalism is much more complex than generally thought. Mendelssohn’s perfectionism will turn out to be deeply anthropological, and, in a way, inter-subjective. An aesthetic judgment, for Mendelssohn, is the human way to mirror divine perfect comprehension. When we perceive something aesthetically (i.e. clear and confused), we see it at once as a whole – same as a divine being apprehends everything all at once, but clearly and distinctly. All clear and distinct human perception is either too simple (and hence not of a high level of perfection as the unity of a manifold), or it is too complex for our full comprehension (and hence ceases to be a unity). Complex aesthetic perception, according to Mendelssohn’s writings between 1755 and 1771, turns out to be most alluring if its complexity is due to a breach in the order of perfection. A simple beautiful rose is pleasurable to look at. Its artistic rendering, however, if too smooth, can be displeasing: then, we are disturbed by a “lack of life”, a fundamental imperfection. To solve the riddle of such unpleasurable beauty, Mendelssohn introduces a shift in our understanding of the artistic act of imitation: Artistic semblance is always lacking, and a painting that does not point to this fact is, in fact, displeasing. This also serves as the main reason as to why we enjoy non-beautiful art: in the artistic rendering of an unpleasant ‘object’, we focus more on the artistic act itself, on its formal features, and its effects on us as the perceiver. Thus, a representation that evokes the mixed feelings of pleasure, appreciation, and rejection is superior to ‘pure’ beauty, in that it better refers us to higher forms of perfection: not the perfection of the object (which is in most cases an imitated object anyways), but for the perfection of the perceiving subject (who rejects a non-beautiful object) and the perfection of the creative subject (we appreciate the artist capable of delivering such an impression). It is the nagging, painful impression of mixed sentiments that, according to Mendelssohn, guides our self-perfection, the highest aim of all human endeavors.

Deckard , Michael "The Two Cultures Interweaving: Art and Science in Mendelssohn’s Letters on Sentiment" In C. P. Snow’s Rede Lecture, “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution” (1959), he explains how art and science have become disconnected since the seventeenth century. “Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension—sometimes hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding,” Snow writes. Where this disconnect originates is not as important as how certain thinkers have profoundly brought these two cultures together in their thinking. By looking at Moses Mendelssohn's eighteenth-century discussion of beauty and pleasure in his Letters on Sentiments, there are three major questions worth pointing to: (1) Does the setting of these letters and their overall meaning bear a relation to contemporary conceptions of beauty and pleasure? (2) What kind of thing is aesthetic feeling? Is it primarily cognitive (i.e. rational) or is it primarily bodily? (3) How does scientific and aesthetic truth (i.e. the two cultures) interweave? In this discussion, Theocles stands for the view that beauty is a kind of perfect perception and Euphranor stands for the Epicurean view of imperfection. Euphranor is the younger of the two and he likes immediate bodily pleasures as having a sensibility in and of themselves. If they are rationally situated, they are no longer feelings. When one immediately perceives something beautiful, does one find this a rational or bodily pleasure? Mendelssohn, the author of these letters, presents an ""editorial"" view, giving us the illusion that he found these letters and tells us what philosophers of the day to whom they are alluding: Leibniz, Baumgarten, Wolff, Sulzer. Baumgarten defined beauty as an ""indistinct representation of a perfection."" But Theocles challenges this definition, and the tradition in which it is situated, by claiming (based on Plato's Symposium) that there are two kinds of ""perfection"": sensuous perfection and intellectual perfection. The pleasure of intellectual perfection is described as an ability to grasp the purposive harmony of a multiplicity of things, but that earthly or sensuous beauty is a different kind of perfection that must be subservient to the ""higher"" rational powers of the soul. This paper will take into account the Letters on Sentiments to formulate a coherent early account of sensibility that bridges the two cultures of art and science, differentiating him from the German tradition of Wolff, Baumgarten, and Kant, on the one hand, and the British tradition of Hutcheson, Hume, and Burke on the other.

Race, Film, and Knowledge

Cherry, Myisha "Media, Knowledge, and the Cultivation of Emotions in Selma" In "Selma", we get a view into the non-violent strategy of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. We also see how King used the media to inform the world of the mistreatment of blacks in the South and to also pressure leaders and garner citizen support for the movement. In this paper I will examine how King, in the movie, used the media as an epistemic vehicle to cultivate emotions. While many agree that King was quite strategic in using the media to cultivate compassion, I will focus on how King used visual epistemic resources to cultivate shame, righteous indignation, and contempt. Through explaining the relationship between knowledge and emotions, I will also explore what viewers in King's day 'would now know' when experiencing these 'negative' emotions.

Flory, Dan "Race, Cinematic Spectatorship, and Embodied Cognition" Critical race theory in its analytic mode has focused on how higher forms of cognition have become racialized (e.g., Charles Mills’ ‘epistemology of ignorance’). More phenomenologically oriented theorists have alternatively focused on the body and its implications for race (e.g., George Yancy’s ‘elevator effect’). These forms of theorization have recently been further illuminated by work in cognitive psychology. In this essay I seek to reconcile these three strands of research through extending recent work on disgust as a form of racialized, embodied cognition and the implications of this affect for film. Carl Plantinga has already explored disgust as a form of affective cinematic response; what I will add to this discussion is how such a response may also be racialized, a point that I have recently argued in other work. I will further develop this connection by exploring additional theorization of racialized disgust and its implications for cinematic spectatorship.

Peterson, Charles "Race, Class, and Masculinity in Michael Roemer's Nothing but a Man" This paper will explore the presentation of intersectional identity in the 1964 Michael Roemer film, "Nothing but a Man". This presentation will contextualize the film in the midst of the Modern American Civil Rights movement; its explicit demand for the recognition of Black (humanity) manhood, its (the movement's) implicit investment in The Politics of Respectability and explore the construction of Black male identity within the possibilities of Black working class life. Taylor, Paul C. "An Aesthetics of Resistance" In The Epistemology of Resistance, José Medina argues that it is impossible to understand or ameliorate the problems of epistemic injustice while also approaching them as one-dimensional affairs. Medina argues that these problems are not simply epistemic, any more than they are simply ethical or political: they are all of these at once, and must be approached from that perspective. I will push this plea for theoretical breadth one step further and suggest, by appeal to the kinds of considerations that Dewey enshrined in his experimentalist phenomenology, that these problems are also importantly aesthetic, and that the resources of aesthetic criticism and practice are vital to their amelioration. I will suggest further that cinematic studies of racial injustice provide some of the best opportunities for this work, and some of the clearest examples of how it might go.

Understanding Interactivity in the Arts

Moser , Shelby "Ontological Bastards" A Goodmanian view of art would suggest that works fit neatly into some ontological category. This has since been challenged by the digital image because, though we usually associate pictures with autographic works, they seem more closely related to performance and other allographic kinds. For example, D’Cruz and Magnus (2014) grant that a digital image, no matter how it is encoded, has its own notational system—e.g., the binary digits, or the mapping of the RGB values. Additionally, digitally interactive works, such as those found in the gallery space, internet art, or videogames, can also be understood as allographic because their algorithms, or rules, are usually considered for their ontology. This would make the notationality of digitally interactive works similar to a musical score. However, unlike music, digitally interactive works are not performed for an audience but, rather, interacted with and for the users. In this sense, the interactivity is a direct ontological feature, which challenges the way they may be seen as abstract types. Distinctions between works of performance and interactivity are contingent on their differing structures, making the instances of digitally interactive works distinct from the token performances. Borrowing from Levinson’s view of initiated types, I suggest that while the structures of performance works can be connected to the provenance of the work, interactive structures are connected to the originator and the user. Digitally interactive works share some ontological characteristics with both autographic and allographic systems, but they do not fit neatly into either category.

Tavinor, Grant "What’s My Motivation?" The instantiation of interactive artworks typically requires the actions of a performer who in many cases is also the principal audience of the work. In the case of videogames this performer is the player. While much of the performance of a videogame is automated, by being generated by the game’s algorithm, the player’s performance also contributes significantly to the content of an individual playing. This might lead us to question the motivations that drive the performance of players. Are gamers like actors following some kind of script? Where there are player-characters in a game, do players identify in some sense with the motivations of their gameworld characters? How does the unfolding narrative motivate the player to act in the gameworld? How does rule and objective gameplay—presumably a powerful motivating feature in many games—relate to the genre conventions, narrative scripting, and roleplaying motivations? This example-driven paper examines the notion of performance motivation in videogames. I argue that the question of what motivates players is itself an ambiguous one, and that as well as involving the interests, emotions and goals of players, performance motivation also draws on the algorithmic and artistic structures that embody gaming interactivity. The paper illustrates these issues with examples drawn from the games, The Last of Us, Minecraft and Grand Theft Auto V.

Thomson-Jones, Katherine "Networked Images and the Power of Interactivity" This paper concerns the relation between the inherent replicability of digital representation and interactivity in the arts, where interactivity is understood in terms of the prescribed generation of multiple display types for an artwork by the work’s users. Digital replicability is the feature of the digital that we must understand in order to recognize the basic creative limits and possibilities of digital art. Interactivity is the feature of artworks most frequently cited as having acquired new significance and potential in the digital age. At first glance, there appears to be a strict incompatibility between digital replicability and interactivity in the case of works comprising digital images. This is because digital images are characterized by having a transmissible display, which requires a single, fixed display type, without the possibility of multiple display types generated by user-interaction. Despite this seeming incompatibility, there are plenty of examples of successful works of networked, interactive art incorporating digital imagery. On the one hand, there are works like I am we _ interactive image (April 2012-present) by the German artist, Wolf Nkole Helzle (http://interactive-image.org/en/). For this work, internet users contribute images from their daily lives to an ever-changing mosaic image that is displayed on line. On the other hand, there are numerous examples of on-line videogames, including multiplayer games in which several users interact with the same display at the same moment in time. These works, it can be argued, dodge the strict incompatibility of digital transmissibility and interactivity by rapidly alternating their reliance on the two features. The result is a class of works that are particularly emblematic of the contemporary information age, presenting a new kind of challenge to the place of art in society. This challenge stems from the fact that networked visual artworks cannot be confined to a traditional gallery or museum space; they come to internet users wherever they are, providing equal access to an original work and the power to transform that original.

Aesthetics of Popular Art

Bresnahan, Aili "How Popular Dance Achieves Fine Art Status" This presentation examines how popular dance achieves fine-art status through examining the case study of jookin’ dancer, Lil’ Buck, and his collaboration with classical music and ballet. This collaboration is then compared with how Michael Flatley (of Riverdance and Lord of the Dance fame) has brought Irish dance, a kind of sport or competition dance, to the popular entertainment stage. Through doing this the aim is to take some initial steps towards delineating what distinguishes popular street dance from fine-art theater or concert dance, and what distinguishes popular competition dance from entertainment dance.

Ross, Stephanie "Food as Popular Art" While Elizabeth Telfer and Carolyn Korsmeyer have persuasively argued that food should be considered at best a minor or an applied art, attention to the production, presentation, and assessment of food can tell us much about the multi-sensory rewards such an art can deliver and the range of meaning it can convey. Considering food as art can also enlighten us regarding the training of taste, the nature of critics, and the role of critical advice. Thus the lessons learned here can carry over to the traditional fine arts.

Gracyk , Theodore "What is Popular Music?" The English phrase ""popular music"" has been used in a non-quantitative way for more than two hundred years. This paper argues that, as a category of music, it corresponds roughly to what Herder identified as Volkslieder. It should not be equated with folk music, mass music or commercial music. At the same time, it is a cultural category that essentially positions it in opposition to art music.

Young, James O. "Is Popular Music as Good as Classical Music?" One can wonder whether popular music has matched the achievements of the best classical music. In particular, one can wonder whether popular music has the expressiveness that makes possible the psychological depth of the best classical music. This paper argues that it does not. Certain features of classical music, including functional harmony, inverted chords, contrary motion, and modulation, are not present, or only rarely present, in popular music, and popular music is consequently less expressive and less capable of psychological depth. This is not to say that popular music is not an aesthetic object and, in certain respects, it may equal or even exceed the value of classical music.