Introducing Aesthetics: A Graphic Guide

Introducing Graphic Guides

by Christopher Kul-Want, Piero (Illustrator)

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.

Genres: Philosophy, Art, Nonfiction, Comics, History, Graphic Novels, Theory

366 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 1, 2014

Reviews

[Ali Mousavi]

اول کتاب های علوم راهنمایی بخش هایی داشت که میومد نظریه های اتمی و چیز های این مدلی رو با ابری بالای سر هر دانشمند و توضیح کوتاهی می‌نوشت. این کتاب هم اومده از آغاز تا پست‌مدرنیسم نظریه های زیبایی شناسی رو با سر و شکل کمیک جمع کرده. اونقدر کامل و مشخص نبود برای من بعضی مطالب اما از اونجایی که از اولش هم نمی‌خواستم تخصصی خیلی از مطالب رو بدونم و نیازی هم نداشتم؛ در حد آشنایی خوب بود.

[Tarlan A. Latif]

demek olar ki,modernizme qeder hamısı bildiklerim idi.amma çox gözel kitabdı.düzü mövzulardan heç xeberi olmayan adam üçün menasız ve çetin ola biler amma men çox sevdim.yene de deyirem karikaturaları meni menden aldı :3

[Mat Ranson]

A thorough introduction to a thick soup of contradictory, egotistic and largely unfathomable thought. It seems that since the art of the Greeks, the problem of subjectivity and the Meaning Of Things and their interpretation has become wildly convoluted. Every big name in contemporary philosophy has had a crack at Aesthetics and no one seems to really agree on anything. Ironically, that is probably the greatest testament to the subject. But it also means there is no cohesive school of thought and this lets art critics off the leash and emboldens art dealers to perpetuate myths around overpriced artworks in Christies.

[Çağdaş T]

Ntv yayınlarının çizgibilim serisi görselliğiyle
okuyucuyu cezbedip konuları basite indirgiyormuş gibi gözükse de gerçek öyle değil. Daha önce Kuantum, Görelilik ve Kapitalizm'le ilgili kitapları da okumaya çalışmıştım ama aynı düşünceye sahip olmuştum. Çizgibilimi anlayabilmek için konuyla ciddi ilgili olmak gerekiyor. Misal bu kitap özelinde; ressam ya da sanat tarihçileri dışındaki meslek gruplarının özel ilgi alanı değilse kitaptan pek şey anlayacaklarını düşünmüyorum. Ayrıca çoğu yerde kötü çeviri
olduğunu hissediyorsunuz.

[Abhi]

Makes you question whether there is an underlying force majeure which drives our appreciation of life and the world around us. Although, personally, I was a little disillusioned about the existence of any such thing by the end of the book.

Still, a great primer to how aesthetics have evolved since Socrates. Can be used as a platform for diving deeper into the areas that interest you.

[Alkimeya]

ترجمه خیلی ایراد داشت

[for-much-deliberation ...]

A really fast way to learn the basics of aesthetics...

[Bernie Gourley]

This volume is one in a large series of books that provide concise outlines of various subjects using graphics for support. In this case, it examines the philosophy of aesthetics. Aesthetics (the study of perception, sensation, and beauty) is a sub-discipline of axiology (the study of value), which – in turn – is a sub-discipline of philosophy.

The book consists of over one-hundred short (1 to 2 page) sections that present aesthetics from various angles. Some of that chapters focus on philosophers that had a particular impact on the subject, including: Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant, Hegel, Adorno, Nietzsche, Barthes, Derrida, and Lyotard. Others examine the approaches to evaluating aesthetics during various eras, including: ancient, medieval, Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Romance, Modern, Post-modern. Some define key terms, and others relate the subject to the broader human world. Still others relate the subject to other philosophical concepts, such as: reality, semiotics, or modes of governance and economy. There are sections that explore the subject’s classic questions, such as: “Are truth and beauty synonymous?” and “Should art have a purpose, and – if so – what?”

This entire series uses graphics as a support for the text. As with many of the books in the series, this volume mostly uses cartoon drawings that repeat key lessons from the text, sort of like an elaborate text-box. I can’t say that there was any point at which these graphics made anything easier to understand, but they don’t hurt either.

I found this book useful in getting a basic overview of the topic. There were times when it felt like it was straying from the topic of aesthetics, but I think that was just because so much of philosophy from post-modernism onwards looks at everything through a certain lens, regardless of whether such an examination seems particularly relevant or not (e.g. psychoanalysis, Marxism, etc.) [It’s interesting to think about “Communist Aesthetics” as the very term seems like an oxymoron. If you’ve ever seen the brutalist architecture or sculptures of Cold War Eastern Europe, you might conclude that the absence of aesthetic viewpoint was the prevailing Communist aesthetic viewpoint.] At any rate, while the book is not highly engaging reading, it’s a quick and concise outline of the subject (which is what it’s meant to be.)

[Castles]

I enjoyed this book from the series, and the illustrations were really good. This book debate on aesthetics run from Ancient Greece to postmodernism, and even though I’m pretty sure it ignored some thinkers along the way, it’s still a good place to start.

[Mohammad Reza]

کتاب از نظرمحتوی یکم سخت شروع می شه ویکم سخت به اتمام می‌رسه ولی در این بین یعنی بیش از ۸۰ درصد متن، برای خواننده‌ای که اطلاعات زیادی از عنوان کتاب نداره، مطالب جدید و قابل فهم هست به خصوص این‌که یک سیر تاریخی کاملا قابل مفهوم در پی می‌گیره- نه تنها این کتاب بلکه تمام کتاب های قدم اول برای مطالعه توصیه میکنم
ترجمه هم سعی شده خیلی خوب باشه ولی شاید کمی در اصطلاحات تخصصی به شک بیفتید

[Brian]

Western thought is so tedious and boring. Every line of thinking harkens back to the same like five or six people. Fuck those guys; tear it all down.

[Ankit Attri]

Might be different from what you'd initially expect, more about stages of art (modern-postmodern)

[Bill]

One of the more confusing "Graphic Guides" that I've read, but that's partially understandable, since Aesthetics isn't an easy subject. The author and illustrator do a good job when exploring the history of art, perception, and representation. As they gradually approach the modern day, things get a little chaotic. I understand that there's a lot to cover, and that a brief guide like this can't explore every concept in depth, but it's frustrating that the author chooses to skim past certain concepts (such as hermeneutics, or abstract expressionism -- heck, Dada barely gets a mention) to spend more time focusing on art as a criticism of capitalism and consumerism. Definitely could have used an editor to keep the book more on topic. That said, this is a great jumping off point to explore the ideas of many philosophers, artists, and thinkers, and the further reading list at the end is a good springboard for those next steps.

[Greta]

It's a good thing my first book about the philosophy of aesthetics was in comic book format. There's a lot to grasp when it comes to the subject of truth and beauty and our feelings about the nature of experience explored through our perceptions and emotions that I probably would have been totally overwhelmed by it all. This book breaks it all down into little bite-sized chunks that I could swallow without choking. I'd like to explore this topic further, but I think I need to digest it a bit first.

[Essam Munir]

I read this book with no prior knowledge about aesthetics and I found it too difficult. ( I knew about it just from the neuroscience books that talk about the science of beauty and this is why I started reading this book).
Introducing series, as I think about it, is a series that summarize the topics that you are interested in and I found it very helpful when I read the books that I knew something about their topics.

I guess I'll read this book again when I read more about aesthetics.

[Natalie]

Too Much Editorializing

I typically enjoy the "Introducing: ... A Graphic Guide" because the author's try not to confuse the subject with their own opinions. This book is the exception. I cannot recommend it because the author editorializes against capitalism too much to be trusted to give a straightforward and comprehensive take.

[Stephen Witt]

Not a fan of this series of books, but the art is good in this one. I especially liked the portrait of Nietzsche, although it symbolizes the problem with the whole enterprise: all moustache and no mouth.

[Hayley]

While a general idea can be gotten from reading Introducing Aesthetics: A Graphic Guide, there is just too much material that the author is trying to cover in too few pages. I wouldn't mind looking into the subject of aesthetics again, but with perhaps more room to explore and expand concepts.

[ben]

“Beauty exists outside all orders of rank, because in beauty opposites are tamed.” Friedrich Nietzsche/ Pg. 171

[Amar Pai]

Incomprehensible even in cartoon form

[Andy]

I still have no understanding of aesthetics but the book made me exercise my brain just to get through it, so that's good I guess.

[David Resendes]

Good overview, but very compacted.

[Biggus Dickkus]

Ancient Greek မှာ art က mythology ကို ကိုယ်စားပြုခဲ့တယ်
အလယ်ခေတ် ရောက်တော့ art က religion ကို ကိုယ်စားပြုခဲ့တယ်
Enlightenment ခေတ်ရောက်တော့ art က subject ရဲ့ autonomous ဖြစ်မှုကို ကိုယ်စားပြုခဲ့တယ်
Art က Plato ပြောသလို သဘာဝကို ပုံတူကူးထားတဲ့ simulacrum သက်သက်ဘဲလား?
ဒါမှမဟုတ် Kant ပြောသလို ကျိုးကြောင်းသိ ဆင်ခြင်မှု(reason)ကဘဲ အလှအပ ကို သိမှတ် ခံစားနိုင်ဖို့ အတွက် စိတ်ရဲ့ အမြင့်ဆုံးစွမ်းအား ဖြစ်လို့ နက်နဲ သိမ်မွေ့မှုဆိုတာ အရာဝတ္ထုမှာ မတည်ဘူး ဆိုတာကရော subject ရဲ့ လွတ်လပ်မှုကို ဖော်ကြူးပြနေတာလား?
ဒါမှမဟုတ် မာ့က်စ်ဝါဒီတွေ မြင်သလို အစဉ်အလာ art ဆိုတာဟာဘူဇွာလူတန်းစားရဲ့ အတွေးအခေါ် (capitalist ideology)တွေနဲ့ ပုံဖော်ထားတဲ့ အတွက် ဒါကို ချေဖျက်ပြီး art ဟာ ပစ္စည်းမဲ့ လူတန်းစားအတွက် ဖိနှိပ်မှုကို တော်လှန်တဲ့အရာဖြစ်စေရမယ် ဆိုသလို art အထဲမှာ radical ဖြစ်မှု ကိန်းအောင်းနေသလား?
ပိုစ့်မော်ဒန် အတွေးအခေါ်ရဲ့ မြစ်ဖျားလို့ ခေါ်ရမယ့် နစ်ရှေး ရဲ့ တန်ဖိုးစံ အားလုံးကို ပြန်လည်သုံးသပ်ခြင်းအရ လူ့သဘောသဘာဝ ရဲ့ အပိုလိုနီးရှန်းနဲ့ ဒိုင်အိုနီးရှန်း ဖြစ်မှုမှာ ဒိုင်အိုနီးရှန်းရဲ့ libido ကြောင့်ဖြစ်ရတဲ့ excess ကနေ အလှတရား ဆိုတာ ဖြစ်ပေါ်လာတာဘဲ နစ်ရှေးရဲ့ အလှတရားက ကိုယ်ကျင့်တရားပိုင်း ဆိုင်ရာ နဲ့ အယူအဆ ဆိုင်ရာ သဘောတရားတွေကနေ ကင်းလွတ်နေတဲ့အရာဘဲ
Aesthetics နဲ့ပတ်သက်တဲ့ ပိုစ့်မော်ဒန် အယူအဆမှာတော့ ဘယ်အရာဟာ အလှတရားဖြစ်သလဲ ဆိုတာထက် ဘယ်အရာကို art လို့ ခေါ်ဆိုနိုင်မလဲ ဆိုတဲ့ ဖက်ကို ဦးတည်သွားပါပြီ
တကယ်တော့ art ဆိုတာဟာ လူတွေရဲ့ သိမှု ခံစားမှု ရှင်သန်မှု အစရှိတဲ့ အကန့်အသတ်တွေ ကို ကျော်လွန်တည်ရှိ နေတဲ့ အရာဘဲ လို့ ပြောပါရစေ

[Bill]

The ideas of the philosophers of aesthetics are presented here so concisely that they cannot be clearly understood and their deep profundity cannot be appreciated. The ideas are unclear, confused, tedious, boring, abstract, irrelevant, and often so ridiculous that they are laughable. In short, my impression is that the philosophy of aesthetics is mostly bullshit. This book did not inspire me to want to learn more about aesthetics. I would rather spend the time viewing art and learning about and making art.

[Steph De Mel]

This was interesting, but quite dense. Kul-Want attempts to cover a lot of material in this little volume, and I feel that he might have done a better job of organising it. The first half is well done, but the latter half feels somewhat disorderly and fragmented. I'm keen to read more on the subject, though - perhaps I'll pick up the VSI.

[Al]

O livro fala pouco, quase nada, de muita coisa, o que torna o assunto totalmente hermético para quem o contata pela primeira vez. No fim, o "Graphic Guide" termina não funcionando como guia, pois a superficialidade que trata assunto tão complexo inutiliza toda a informação, tampouco como gráfico, uma vez que o mais importante das ilustrações é o texto que elas encerram.

[Wsclai]

Aesthetics is a very challenging philosophical topic and the guide doesn't really help me a lot in understanding these abstract and difficult concepts. Certainly need further reading if one wants to have deeper understanding of the topic.

[Juan A. Ramirez]

would've made grad school a whole lot easier had I read this freshman year of college, when I bought it, but after years of mental degradation this wonderfully elucidated and illustrated primer was a great way to wake up those brain cells

[Rose]

I like this series for reminding myself of the basics, but there are a few things that were inaccurate in here, or slightly misleading in wording.

[Georgiana]

'As throughout class history, the underside of culture is blood, torture, death and torture.'