Art & Its Shadow

by Perniola, Mario

• ISBN13: 9780826462435
• ISBN10: 082646243X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-05-01
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

Art and its Shadow is an extraordinary analysis of the state and meaning of contemporary art and film. Ranging across the work of Andy Warhol, cyberpunk, Wim Wenders, Derek Jarman, thinking on difference and the possibility of a philosophical cinema, Mario Perniola examines the latest and most disturbing tendencies in art.Perniola explores how art - notably in posthumanism, psychotic realism and extreme art - continues to survive despite the hype of the art market and the world of mass communication and reproduction. He argues that the meaning of art in the modern world no longer lies in aesthetic value (above the art work), nor in popular taste (below the art work), but beside the artwork, in the shadow created by both the art establishment and the world of mass communications. In this shadow is what is left out of account by both market and mass media: the difficulty of art, a knowledge that can never be fully revealed, and a new aesthetic future.

Author Biography

Mario Perniola is Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Rome at Tor Vergata Massimo Verdicchio, the translator, is Professor of Italian in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada

Table of Contents

Foreword: Perniola's Postmodern Shadows	vii
Introduction	xv
1 Idiocy and Splendour in Current Art	3	(11)
1 The 'shock' of the Real	3	(2)
2 Idiocy of Today's Realism	5	(5)
3 Splendour of Today's Realism	10	(4)
2 Feeling the Difference	14	(12)
1 Aesthetics and Difference	14	(2)
2 Bliss and Text	16	(1)
3 The 'Epoche' and the Neuter	17	(3)
4 Two Versions of the 'Sex Appeal' of the Inorganic	20	(1)
5 Psychotic Realism	21	(3)
6 Toward the Extremely Beautiful	24	(2)
3 Warhol and the Postmodern	26	(8)
1 The Postmodern Dissensus	26	(2)
2 Warhol's Cynicism	28	(3)
3 Sexuality, Suffering and Genetics	31	(3)
4 Towards a Philosophical Cinema	34	(10)
1 A Visual Philosophy?	34	(1)
2 The Library of Images Not Seen	35	(2)
3 Is It Fair to Punish Horizontal Collaborators?	37	(3)
4 Iconoclastic Undinism	40	(2)
5 Deafness and Estrangement	42	(2)
5 The Third System of Art	44	(11)
1 Art without Aura, Criticism without Theory	44	(1)
2 On the Credibility of Art and the Uniqueness of the Artist	44	(2)
3 Beyond the Aura and Mechanical Reproduction	46	(1)
4 Modern and Contemporary Paradigms	47	(3)
5 The Heroic-Ironic Role of Art and Philosophy	50	(1)
6 Greatness, Justification, Compromise	51	(4)
6 Art and Remainder	55	(16)
1 Philosophy and the Other Arts	55	(1)
2 Situationist's Anti-Art and the Event	55	(4)
3 Conceptual Art and the Non-Identity of Art	59	(6)
4 Art as Crypt	65	(6)
Notes	71	(5)
Mario Perniola's Books in English	76	(1)
Index of Names	77