Desire and Excess

Desire and Excess PDF Author: Jonah Siegel
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400849829
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 381

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Book Description
In this fascinating look at the creative power of institutions, Jonah Siegel explores the rise of the modern idea of the artist in the nineteenth century, a period that also witnessed the emergence of the museum and the professional critic. Treating these developments as interrelated, he analyzes both visual material and literary texts to portray a culture in which art came to be thought of in powerful new ways. Ultimately, Siegel shows that artistic controversies commonly associated with the self-consciously radical movements of modernism and postmodernism have their roots in a dynamic era unfairly characterized as staid, self-satisfied, and stable. The nineteenth century has been called the Age of the Museum, and yet critics, art theorists, and poets during this period grappled with the question of whether the proliferation of museums might lead to the death of Art itself. Did the assembly and display of works of art help the viewer to understand them or did it numb the senses? How was the contemporary artist to respond to the vast storehouses of art from disparate nations and periods that came to proliferate in this era? Siegel presents a lively discussion of the shock experienced by neoclassical artists troubled by remains of antiquity that were trivial or even obscene, as well as the anxious aesthetic reveries of nineteenth-century art lovers overwhelmed by the quantity of objects quickly crowding museums and exhibition halls. In so doing, he illuminates the fruitful crises provoked when the longing for admired art is suddenly satisfied. Drawing upon neoclassical art and theory, biographies of early nineteenth-century writers including Keats and Scott, and the writings of art critics such as Hazlitt, Ruskin, and Wilde, this book reproduces a cultural matrix that brings to life the artistic passions and anxieties of an entire era.

Desire and Excess

Desire and Excess PDF Author: Jonah Siegel
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400849829
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 381

Get Book

Book Description
In this fascinating look at the creative power of institutions, Jonah Siegel explores the rise of the modern idea of the artist in the nineteenth century, a period that also witnessed the emergence of the museum and the professional critic. Treating these developments as interrelated, he analyzes both visual material and literary texts to portray a culture in which art came to be thought of in powerful new ways. Ultimately, Siegel shows that artistic controversies commonly associated with the self-consciously radical movements of modernism and postmodernism have their roots in a dynamic era unfairly characterized as staid, self-satisfied, and stable. The nineteenth century has been called the Age of the Museum, and yet critics, art theorists, and poets during this period grappled with the question of whether the proliferation of museums might lead to the death of Art itself. Did the assembly and display of works of art help the viewer to understand them or did it numb the senses? How was the contemporary artist to respond to the vast storehouses of art from disparate nations and periods that came to proliferate in this era? Siegel presents a lively discussion of the shock experienced by neoclassical artists troubled by remains of antiquity that were trivial or even obscene, as well as the anxious aesthetic reveries of nineteenth-century art lovers overwhelmed by the quantity of objects quickly crowding museums and exhibition halls. In so doing, he illuminates the fruitful crises provoked when the longing for admired art is suddenly satisfied. Drawing upon neoclassical art and theory, biographies of early nineteenth-century writers including Keats and Scott, and the writings of art critics such as Hazlitt, Ruskin, and Wilde, this book reproduces a cultural matrix that brings to life the artistic passions and anxieties of an entire era.

Shoes Outside the Door

Shoes Outside the Door PDF Author: Michael Downing
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1582432546
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 407

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Book Description
A close-up look at the scandals that rocked the San Francisco Zen Center, a leader in alternative religious practice and the counterculture in America, and their repercussions. The remarkable forty-year history of the people who established the first Buddhist monastery outside of Asia in the history of the world has never been told. Michael Downing wondered why. "I'm living proof of why you better not speak out," explained one ordained Zen priest. "The degree to which I was scapegoated publicly was most effective in keeping everyone else quiet." In 1959, a Soto Zen priest took leave of his family in Japan to minister to the congregation of a Buddhist temple in San Francisco. Alan Watts and others spread the word that an authentic Zen Roshi was living there, and students, poets, drifters, and seekers began to attend his lectures. Impressed by their sincerity and commitment, Suzuki Roshi began to offer instruction in zazen (meditation) and other Buddhist practices to these devoted young spiritual pioneers. The San Francisco Zen Center was born. And then, in 1983, meltdown. A sex scandal rocked Zen Center, and it triggered tragedies and headlines about abuse of power that called into question the whole matter of alternative religious practice in America. Overnight the most prominent community of Buddhists in the West found itself at the vanguard of a cultural revolt against spiritual authority. For Shoes Outside the Door, Michael Downing spent three years studying documents and interviewing more than eighty people who were there, at ground zero. As engaging as any mystery, as mysterious as any political campaign, as political as any family gathering, this story will haunt and challenge readers as they unravel this essential chapter of American history.

The Aesthetics of Desire and Surprise

The Aesthetics of Desire and Surprise PDF Author: Jadranka Skorin-Kapov
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498518478
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
The Aesthetics of Desire and Surprise: Phenomenology and Speculation covers issues central to contemporary continental philosophy (desire, expectations, excess, rupture, transcendence, immanence, surprise). The proposed term desire||surprise captures the phenomenological-speculative character of the pair not yet and no longer. Non-obvious parallels between different thinkers are drawn, and the argumentation is organized around philosophical figures relevant in the sequence desire – excess –pause (rupture, break) – recuperation (surprise). The works of Levinas, Žižek, Bataille, Blanchot, Foucault, and Ricoeur are interpreted and positioned according to the proposed template of desire - excess - pause. The consideration of limit experiences involves authors fascinated by transgression, and the question of whether excess is immanent or transcendent. This discussion considers works by Nietzsche, Deleuze, Žižek, and Foucault. The analysis of surprise and the beginning of recovery after the pause considers works by Fink, Merleau-Ponty, Nancy, Lyotard, Dufrenne, Bachelard, and Seel. The provocative argument elaborated in this work is that surprise starts with indifference. Furthermore, the argument is that surprise begins where the concept reaches its ending, hence that the limit of speculative thinking at its ending is the limit of aesthetics at its beginning. The work of Hegel, Schelling and Jaspers are discussed in order to argue for the beginning of aesthetics there where knowledge ends. Philosophical thematic is contextualized via sections on artists such as Duchamp and Mondrian, and on some films, provoking interest of aestheticians working in art history and cultural studies departments.

Fulfilled

Fulfilled PDF Author: Ashley Bigham
Publisher: Applied Research & Design
ISBN: 9781951541644
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 144

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Book Description
Based on the eponymous symposium and exhibition, Fulfilled: Architecture, Excess, and Desire considers the role of architecture in a culture shaped by the excessive manufacturing and assuagement of desire. Until the term became synonymous with Amazon warehouses, the concept of fulfillment described the achievement of a desire--sometimes tangible, often psychological or spiritual. With the rapid growth of e-commerce, our understanding of fulfillment has evolved to reflect a seemingly endless cycle of desire and gratification--one whose continuity hinges on our willingness to overlook the cultural, economic, and environmental impacts of our ever-increasing expectation of quick and efficient fulfillment. A closer look at fulfillment reveals a social, typological, formal, aesthetic, and economic practice constructed collectively through both digital and physical interactions. It is a cultural practice which evolves like a language, both universally transferable and contextually specific. As a symposium, exhibition, and now publication, this project aims to draw out these new arrangements, sticky relationships, and material byproducts of cultural production and to ask again the age-old question, "What does it mean to be fulfilled?" This book examines the architecture of fulfillment through three lenses: logistical, material, and cultural fulfillment. Each reveals the new forms of architectural practice and research that are possible, typical, and even surreptitiously encouraged in the age of Amazon. Fulfillment networks are not invisible systems; they are tangible objects--warehouses, suburban houses, parking lots, cardboard boxes, shopping malls, mechanical systems, shipping containers--with which architects necessarily interact. From political mapping and questions of labor to digital and physical storage typologies, contemporary architects learn from and work critically within the architecture of fulfillment. Their interests and approaches include the material and environmental shortcomings of global logistics and the formal, representational, and cultural potentials of a culture of excess. This book highlights architecture's unique capacity to offer methodologies for confronting an increasingly ambiguous, alienating world and produce new knowledge and unexpected solutions that go beyond the dichotomies of rural and urban territories.

Vectors of Desire

Vectors of Desire PDF Author: Jim Zimmerman
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 0595328849
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 162

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Book Description
Desire, in all of its complexity and excess, defined the American millennial moment. On the surface, to listen to the present political cacophony, things have changed, but not in the way people actually think and behave in private life. Though terror and trauma are said to have gained the upper hand, desire continues to provide the propulsive force of the culture. But how do you paint desire? How do you capture its richness, power, and meaning? This monograph addresses those questions in the process of considering more than fifty major oil paintings made by the American realist Terry Rodgers between 1990 and 2005. Because most of these spectacular paintings are in the hands of private collectors, the best way to get to know them is www.terryrodgers.com, where all of the images reproduced here in black and white are available in color. Rodgers, with upcoming shows scheduled in Amsterdam and Atlanta, is in the midst of a prodigiously productive period and is on the verge of attracting the international critical notice he deserves, and will certainly soon command, owing to his irresistible subject matter, his remarkable technical accomplishment, and his brilliant overall vision of painting and culture.

Women Novelists and the Ethics of Desire, 1684–1814

Women Novelists and the Ethics of Desire, 1684–1814 PDF Author: Elizabeth Kraft
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351871900
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
In Women Novelists and the Ethics of Desire, 1684-1814, Elizabeth Kraft radically alters our conventional views of early women novelists by taking seriously their representations of female desire. To this end, she reads the fiction of Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, Eliza Haywood, Sarah Fielding, Charlotte Smith, Frances Burney, and Elizabeth Inchbald in light of ethical paradigms drawn from biblical texts about women and desire. Like their paradigmatic foremothers, these early women novelists create female characters who demonstrate subjectivity and responsibility for the other even as they grapple with the exigencies imposed on them by circumstance and convention. Kraft's study, informed by ethical theorists such as Emmanuel Levinas and Luce Irigaray, is remarkable in its juxtaposition of narratives from ancient and early modern times. These pairings enable Kraft to demonstrate not only the centrality of female desire in eighteenth-century culture and literature but its ethical importance as well.

Theorizing Desire

Theorizing Desire PDF Author: K. Gorton
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230582249
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
What is the nature of desire? This book gives an accessible introduction to the concept, and a coherent critique of the competing theories of desire within contemporary theory. Through analysis of representations of desire in television and film, it considers ways in which the concept is theorized and presented on screen.

Paul and Ancient Views of Sexual Desire

Paul and Ancient Views of Sexual Desire PDF Author: J Edward Ellis
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0567446212
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
Paul and Ancient Views of Sexual Desire refutes the argument put forward by some scholars that Paul, in his sexual ethics, is in partial agreement with a current of thought in the Greco-Roman world that condemns sexual desire and advocates the elimination of such desire from marital sex. Ellis argues against not only this line of thought but also the attendant notion that this way of thinking underlies Paul's comments on homosexual activity in Romans 1. Through close analysis of numerous ancient passages relating to sexual desire, Ellis demonstrates that ancient thinkers tend to condemn not sexual desire in itself but excessive sexual desire and lack of self-control. Furthermore, he contends that ancient auditors would have been unlikely to see condemnation of sexual desire in Paul's words in 1 Thessalonians 4 or 1 Corinthians 7.

Learning Desire

Learning Desire PDF Author: Sharon Todd
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135247641
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
First Published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The Enigma of Desire

The Enigma of Desire PDF Author: Galit Atlas
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317655273
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
The Enigma of Desire: Sex, Longing and Belonging in Psychoanalysis, introduces new perspectives on desire and longing, in and outside of the analytic relationship. This exciting volume explores the known and unknown, ghosts and demons, sexuality and lust. Galit Atlas discusses the subjects of sex and desire and explores what she terms the Enigmatic and the Pragmatic aspects of sexuality, longing, female desire, sexual inhibition, pregnancy, parenthood and creativity. The author focuses on the levels of communication that take place in the most intimate settings: between mothers and their babies; between lovers; in the unconscious bond of two people— in the consulting room, where two individuals sit alone in one room, looking and listening, breathing and dreaming. Atlas examines the ways in which different languages, translations and integrations focus on birth, death, sexuality, and human bonds. In The Enigma of Desire each chapter opens with a narrative, a therapeutic story which illustrates both the analyst’s and patient’s desires and the ways these interact and emerge in the consulting room. This book will be of interest to anyone who is interested in the intricacies of sex and desire and of great appeal to psychoanalysts, therapists and mental health professionals.