From an Aesthetic Point of View

by Peter Osborne

Contemporary visual art stands on the ruins of beauty. What is the place of aesthetic in the experience of such art? And how has it changed in the two hundred years since the emergence of the modern conception of art as the object of a distinctive kind of pleasure? The essays in this volume, by philosophers and art theorists from Britain, France, Germany and the USA (Christopher Menke and Jay Bernstein), investigate the changing role of the aesthetic in art. From an Aesthetic Point of View is one of a new series of books, Prisms, which aims to bring to bring the best of contemporary philosophical thought about culture to the attention of a wider literary public.

Peter Osborne is Professor of Modern European Philosophy at Middlesex University, London and an editor of the Journal Radical Philosophy. His books include The Politics of Modernity and Avant-Garde (1995), A Critical Interviews with Intellectuals (1996), and What Is Conceptual Art?

Genres: Philosophy

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Peter Osborne is Professor of Modern European Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), Kingston University London and was appointed Visiting Professor of Critical Studies at Yale in 2017. From 1983 to 2016, he was an editor of the British journal Radical Philosophy. He has contributed to a range of international journals (including Art History, Cultural Studies, New German Critique, New Left Review, October, Telos and Texte zur Kunst) and to the catalogues of major art institutions (including Manifesta 5, Tate Modern, Biennale of Sydney, Walker Art Center Minneapolis, Office of Contemporary Art Norway, National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design Oslo, CGAC in Santiago de Compostela, and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León.)
He has recently held Visiting International Chairs in the Philosophy Department at the University of Paris 8 (2012 & 2014) and in ‘Philosophy in the Context of Art’ at the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm (2015).
His books include The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (1995; 2011), Philosophy in Cultural Theory (2000), Conceptual Art (2002), Marx (2005), El arte mas alla de la estetica: ensayos filosoficos sobre el arte contemporaneo (2010), Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (2013) and The Postconceptual Condition (2018).

Reviews

[Christina Bridges Glover · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a fantastic investigation of the barometer for modern consideration in art aesthetics. Many passages Osborne has edited in this work reference empiricism as a philosophy that lives within our judgment of art— it dictates what art we deem worthy and unworthy within its respective execution. The philosophy presented in this text challenged me to think of big ideas, such as what life experiences have molded my perspective and opinions of particular art forms. I was deeply interested in the question of where theory ends, and art begins. Osborne does a fantastic job of presenting the reader with the pursuance of defining the idea of what “art” is: art begins when one closes the eyes that see it as art; art begins where our theory - our way of linking the power of thought to the power of the gaze - begins.