ESPES

8

Authors: Hrkút Ján

Diverse and extended philosophical approaches to the art cover also the ontological questions. There are plenty authors who are doing their research to explore the question on the nature of the existence of works of art. What is challenging on the existence of works of art? Artworks are basically things, but necessarily artifact, products of human intentional activity. But from the other point of view, they are just objects, sometimes strange, sometimes old, but (physical) objects. Nobody denies particular function and value of artworks. Nevertheless, this function and value of artworks is hidden in very interesting way. Someone who is not familiar to the work could miss artistic meaning of the work at all. Therefore, we can argue there are not explicit artistic properties in art. On the other hand, physical configuration of the artwork-object offers magnificent and enormous source of meaning, pleasure and content. But there are not other properties then physical. So, philosophers of art should explain how artworks exist in contrary to the nature existence of others entities or artifacts. The text examines the hypothesis of the physical object and R. Wollheim's arguments against this hypothesis. He put the robust argumentation in his famous ‘Art and its objects’. But, the core of the article is the reconstruction of P. Lamarque's approach. Lamarque in his book ‘Art & Object’ distinguishes two elements: work and object. He considers this as a key to explain how works of art exist. The object is considered to be a medium, and work is entity depending on cultural and institutional contexts. Lamarque argues that art occurs where there is specific cultural and institutional background and understanding of objects as works of art. Pure existence of object (physically similar to artwork) does not guarantee existence of artworks. Surprisingly, identical entity could be and could not be artwork in the same time. The difference is in the presence of absence of appropriate cultural and institutional contexts.

9

Authors: Pašteková Michaela

The starting point for the topic of this paper was finding out that for today’s students of photography who were born in the digital era, publications and magazines about photography are no longer the reference sources of information, but it is the social platform Instagram. There, they are looking not only for current aesthetic trends, but they also actively use Instagram in their art projects. In the introductory part of our paper, we analyze three types of the most common aesthetics of Instagram, as described by Lev Manovich in tnis book Instagram and Contemporary Image - causal photos, professional photos and designed photos. Subsequently, we study the so-called phenomenon Instagramism, whose representatives are a young digital class, actively using social platforms and communicating in particular visually. They work with photography in more conceptual way and their Instagram profile must have greater aesthetic consistency. The neologism “Instagram” suggests speed, quick decision, and fast action. If this was the platform’s original intension, then the visually sophisticated global youth and members of Instagramism use it today in a completely opposite way. Instagramism needs slowness, craftsmanship, and attention to tiniest details. Than we discusse how Instgram was used by established artists as Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince and Czech photographer Libuse Jarcovjakova. Sherman surprised the art world with a selfie-filled Instagram account, Prince gained attention with his series New Portraits and Jarcovjáková uses Instagram as visual diary. By shifting to new medium, they continue in their previous work; new technologies are used here to raise questions about our relationship with internet and social platforms. On the other side, for Instagrammers and thus also for the current students of photography, Instagram is a way of lifestyle and space for self-presentation. It is a new gallery space for them.

14

Authors: Kastnerová Martina

In the fifth scene of the fourth act of Shakespeare’s King Lear, Edgar reads a letter written by Lear’s daughter Goneril to his bastard brother Edmund. In it, she reveals her longing for Edmund, inciting him to kill her husband in order to win her heart and body and lay claim to her husband’s title and property. Shocked by the discovery of her treachery, Edgar cries out, “O indistinguished space of woman’s will!” (Shakespeare, 2008, p. 2463). In Shakespeare’s time, the word “distinguish” meant “to differentiate or to classify” and was synonymous with “faithfully acknowledging or recognizing something and giving reason...its due” (Abate – Mazzolla, 2003, p. 2). The meaning of “will” in a modern context is related to desire, longing, even lust. But traditionally, a woman’s “will” was thought of as irrational, unpredictable, capricious, amoral. In Hilský’s Czech translation of the play, “will” is compared to a bottomless ocean, a fitting metaphor given that the ocean itself is often characterised as indistinct, unfathomable, mutable, illogical and dangerous. I argue that this “indistinguished space” is one of the important motifs in Renaissance culture, which allows us to explore the restrictive gender roles during this time (Abate – Mazzolla, 2003, p. 2). The literary representation of the “indistinguished space” was largely a male invention. This hegemony was shaken in 1621 with the publication of Lady Mary Wroth’s romance The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania and her sonnet sequence Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. The daughter of Robert Sidney and niece of Philip Sidney and Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, Wroth was the first English woman to compose a prose romance (Urania) and original dramatic comedy (Love’s Victory) (Brennan – Hannay – Lamb, 2015b, p. 77.) and the second English woman to write a sonnet sequence (Pamphilia to Amphilanthus). In the final poem of her collection Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, Pamphilia, Wroth’s alter ego, rejects “the discource of Venus, and her sunn” (Wroth, 1983, p. 142). I contend that this marks the point at which Wroth creates an alternative discourse of love based on a new erotic mythology in which the key element is Constancy (Kingsley-Smith, 2010, p. 128). As Pamphilia herself remarks: “Now lett your constancy your honor prove” (Wroth, 1983, p. 142). Based on the imaginary dialogue between Herbert and Wroth, Wroth’s identification with the constancy of love emerges. It is difficult to assess to what degree their poetry can be seen as forming mutual responses to each other, but it is possible to assume a strong biographical basis given that both authors pick up and riff on the themes of the other. Wroth’s narrative foregrounds the constancy of love as personified in the character of Pamphilia. “This testament of me”, as Pamphilia puts it, becomes a story of her own journey of finding solace through consolation, sharing and communication with other women, an act of self-fashioning that reasserts female power through the fulfilment of both real and fictional destinies.