ESPES

7

Authors: Skalický David

What is the sense of the question “What is art?” It may seem that the only adequate answer will be the effort to define the notion of art, that is, the exclusive purpose of this question is the classification of art, encompassing all artifacts regarded as works of art and distinguishing them from those do not belong to art. The study points to the connection between our classification of artifacts and our evaluation and understanding of them. It also recalls reflections on the subject “What is Art?”, which does not even attempt to define it. Their aim is different: to change our understanding, evaluation or explication of art.

10

Authors: Hadravová Tereza

In the 1990s and early 2000s, researchers in the field of so-called neuoaesthetics recruited research subjects who had been untrained in arts and did not have any pronounced interest in aesthetic matters for their laboratory experiments. The prevalent choice of research subjects has recently changed. Currently, a great number of studies uses subjects who are professionally engaged in the art world. In my paper, I describe, analyze, and critically discuss the two research paradigms regarding the subjects involved in the experiments in neuroaesthetics. I claim that although the more recent one can be generally regarded as an improvement of the research framework, it underestimates the difficulties brought by the notion of expertise in aesthetic perception

13

Authors: Makky Lukáš

The current form and transformation of artistic practice in the 20th and 21st century caused some estrangement of the recipient and the art. The current discourse is therefore dominated by some distrust in defining the criteria of (not only) contemporary art, or even the dilemma of whether or not art has to be defined at all, mostly under the influence of Morris Weitz. Arthur Danto very aptly reminds that there is currently no way to distinguish art from objects that are not art, even though many theorists have tried to come up with a (normative) solution. The need to distinguish different objects in order to carry out the theoretical examination or to have a functional defining apparatus for criticism, or the exhibition practice is not necessary only on the semantic level. The aim of the submitted paper is therefore to offer a brief cross-section of theories, which, over the past sixty years, dealt with the problem of the definition of art and (re)appreciate/re-think the need for a functional definition of art as the determinant of adequate aesthetic theory.

10

Authors: Beličová Renáta

Musical idioms may appear side by side in a wide variety of historical, group-based or individual compositional styles used in the postmodern compositions. The reception interpretation of musical works is based on the idioms of musical speech as meaningful and expressive constants. Not only do the reveal the positive or negative ties of current musical language to the musical poetics from previous periods, they also update their meanings. The idiomatic musical structures naturally grow into the social system of music and thus become part of the deeper levels of European compositional tradition. Musical meanings are becoming typical for the particular sectors of European musical culture, and may even become their emblem. It is even likely that the idioms cease to be seen as a complex musical structure in the process of reception and they become a plain composition material, singular units of musical language. Using the postmodern composition Apolloopera by Marek Piaček, we illustrate the in-depth reference platform of musical idioms and examine the role of idiomatic units in the structure of a postmodern piece.

19

Authors: Dytrtová Kateřina

The text introduces the reader to the teaching method of problem setting, its solution by introducing and applying theoretical concepts, conceptual analysis of the selected work and consistent support for the context and the co-text of the work. He chooses examples from the contemporary scene of fine arts and aims to provide a reasoned interpretation of the work. He relies on Goodman's terms of denotation, exemplification, and expression. The metaphorical exemplification, the expression is broken down by the perspective of the cognitive perspectives of the first and third person on the experience and empathic component, relying on the theory of artefiletics. It opens and solves the problem of the relationship between the relative objective dances of the work, its intersubjectively anchored interpretation, and the subjectively perceived experience of the work. Creation is understood as a way of knowing.

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.

8

Authors: Alcaraz Aleksandra L.

The selection of papers in the 6th Volume of the ESPES journal focusus on the development, analyses and critique of Arnold Berleant’s ideas on aesthetic engagement, social aesthetics, negative aesthetics, and environmental aesthetics. These issues are aproached by researchers from various continents showing the inspirational potential of Berleant’s perspective, inviting metaphors, opening paths for individual development in the field of art philosophy and aesthetics.

10

Authors: Xiangzhan Cheng

In order to develop environmental aesthetics, Berleant takes environment as an aesthetic paradigm. His understanding of the nature of environment decides the nature of his aesthetics of engagement, which emphasizes experiential continuity and rejects the separation between subject and object. Based on these ideas, he criticizes Kant’s core idea of disinterestedness in his series of books. Berleant’s environmental aesthetics has a significant impact on ecoaesthetics in China. However, Berleant’s criticism of Kant’s core idea of disinterestedness is a misunderstanding and his conception of environment is not fundamentally sound. The future of ecoaesthetics is taking ecosystem not environment as a new aesthetic paradigm.

10

Authors: Hinkes Benno

The article discusses installation art and its potential contribution to a transdisciplinary research practice, in which not only artistic, but also aesthetic theoretical approaches could play a central role. However, as the article shows, this firstly requires a change in perspective concerning the way we approach art. Secondly, it entails changes to a common understanding of aesthetic theory and, thereby, philosophy. A term of central significance in this context is the notion of aisthesis. The article will illustrate these thoughts through the examples of Bruce Nauman, Ilya Kabakov, and Arnold Berleant.

12

Authors: Nawrocka Katarzyna

This paper describes the general concepts of Arnold Berleant's urban metaphors (garden city, forest city, asphalt jungle, wilderness) in order to use them as a background for presenting a different perspective on the aesthetics of engagement through the prism of contemporary dance strategies and design practices in architecture and urban planning.

8

Authors: Hudáčová Alexandra

In the present study, we deal with the thinking of John Amos Comenius, who is considered to be not only a significant teacher but also a philosopher. In his work, Comenius focuses on the individual as well as the society with an emphasis on the upbringing of human. At the same time, he philosophically points to such a perception of the world that should help us to understand reality, cope with it, understand its meaning and find the place of human in this reality. Comenius regards the philosophy as the way to knowledge and understanding of human. He thinks about the philosophy in many of his works. Primarily, the contribution focuses on Comenius ́s philosophical and aesthetic thinking about society and education.

11

Authors: Migašová Jana

The paper is the contribution approach to interpretations of Ernst Gombrich’s contribution to the understanding of modern fine art. The basis of the paper stems out from knowledge of domestic and foreign interpretations of Gombrich’s art history concept (Bakoš, Mikš, Kesner, Hříbek, Elkins etc.). The main hypothesis of the paper is idea that Gombrich’s posthumously published work The Preference for the Primitive (2002) is, in spite of legitimate critiques on the part of contemporary art historians, not solely contribution to the primitivism phenomenon, but also to the understanding of modern art by its own historical perspective.