Introducing Aesthetics: A Graphic Guide (Graphic Guides)

"Every day we talk about the aesthetics of a piece of art or design. More than a simple response, aesthetics is a philosophy in which perceptions, feelings, and emotions combine to form the whole nature of experience. Through clear text and fitting illustrations, Introducing Aesthetics provides a captivating insight into the subject."--Publisher description Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright -- Contents -- What is Aesthetics? -- The Nature of Experience -- Socrates and Plato -- The Power of Poetry -- Painting as Imitation -- The Simulacrum -- Deception is Truth, Truth Deception -- Art and the Audience -- Art and Reality -- Catharsis -- Medieval Aesthetics -- The Theological Time-bomb -- The Beauty of Order -- Thomas Aquinas -- Beauty and Cognition -- Art as Religious Instruction -- Art and Melancholy -- The School of Night -- Renaissance Aesthetics -- Painting as Philosophy -- The Rise of the Bourgeoisie -- The Lives of the Artists -- The Classical Episteme -- The Subject -- The Sovereign Eye -- Et in Arcadia Ego -- The Imperialist Subject -- Capitalism and the Other -- The Enlightenment -- Kant's Critical Philosophy -- The Critique of Judgement -- The Sublime -- Universal Reason -- The Unknowable -- Hegel and the Universal Consciousness -- Symbolic, Classical, Romantic -- The Origins of Modern Aesthetics: Nietzsche, Freud and Marx -- Nietzsche and the Revaluation of All Values -- Apollonian and Dionysian Energy -- The Intoxication of Change -- Freud and Psychoanalysis -- Sublimation -- Marx and the Alienation of Capitalism -- Art and the Bourgeoisie -- Aestheticism -- Modernist Aesthetics -- Synaesthesia -- Romanticism -- Marxist Aesthetics in the 1920s and 30s -- Lukács and Critical Realism -- Brechtian Realism -- Communist Aesthetics -- Socialist Realism -- Aesthetics in the Modern Era -- The Aura -- The Radical Power of Early Photographs -- The Fragments of History -- Theodor Adorno -- Art After the Holocaust? -- The Hollowed Subject -- Nietzschean Aesthetics -- The Happening of Truth -- Georges Bataille -- The Philosophy of Expenditure -- The Pursuit of the Extreme -- Psychoanalysis and Aesthetics after the Second World War -- Language and the Autonomous "I" -- The Gaze -- The Fantasy of Control. Marxist Theories of the Image in the 1960s and 70s -- Debord and the Society of the Spectacle -- Lack -- The Situationist International -- Ways of Seeing -- Modernist Aesthetics: 1940-70 -- Winckelmann and Lessing -- Minimalist Art -- Aesthetics, Contemporary Experience and Postmodernism -- Fredric Jameson -- The Rise of the Multinationals -- Modernist vs Postmodernist -- Parody or Pastiche? -- Schizophrenic Culture -- Antonio Negri and T.J. Clark -- Postmodernism and Continental Aesthetics -- The Medium is the Message -- The Aesthetics of Simulation -- The Ironies of Postmodern Capitalism -- Roland Barthes -- Messages Without a Code -- The Punctum -- Julia Kristeva -- The Chora and the Semiotic -- Feminist Aesthetics and Postmodernism -- Jacques Derrida -- Deconstruction -- Undecidable Art -- Jean-François Lyotard -- Newman and Duchamp -- Gilles Deleuze -- The Body without Organs -- Conclusion -- Further Reading -- Kristeva and Jouissance -- Détournement -- Jouissance -- Aristotle's Poetics -- Author's Acknowledgements -- Index. What is beauty, and what is truth? These are some of the questions which aesthetics tries to answer. In our everyday life, we talk about the 'aesthetics' of an artwork or a piece of design. But aesthetics goes beyond the simple experience of art. It is also a branch of philosophy concerned with the whole nature of experience itself, explored through our perceptions, feelings and emotions.