Postmodernism, Postsocialism and Beyond - Hardcover

Ale Erjavec

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1847185770 ISBN 13: 9781847185778

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008

Synopsis

The book focuses on three interrelated issues: the relationship between modernism and postmodernism; visuality and visual culture; and the relation between the East (former European socialist countries) and the West as regards aesthetics, globalization, culture, and the mechanisms of the presentation and representation of contemporary visual art. In the first part the author reflects upon some of the less noticed issues of modernism and its dominant theoretical narratives regarding art: its privileging of truth and its obfuscation of some segments of European art. One of his central tenets is that recent postsocialist politicized postmodern visual art contradicts Peter Bürger's canonical theory about the avant-garde art of the previous century. The art and culture discussed throughout this volume predominantly concern the visual. For this reason, in the second part visual culture and its uneasy relationship with art and art history are an object of reflection, a topic which is then complemented with that of the embodied eye in the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty. Photography, its relation to truth, and the problematic expectation that an ontology of photography is possible or necessary is the theme of the closing chapter of this part of the book. In the third part the author offers a global view on philosophy of art, visual culture, and the institutions that disseminate them.

About this title

About the Author:

Ale Erjavec is Director of Research in the Institute of Philosophy of the Center of Scientific Research of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (Ljubljana) and Professor of Aesthetics in Ljubljana University and in the Faculty of the Humanities, Koper, where he is also the Chair of the Department of Cultural Studies. He authored or edited 13 books, among them Ideology and the Art of Modernism (Ljubljana 1988; Sarajevo 1991), Towards the Image (Changchun 2002), Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition: Politicized Art under Late Socialism (Berkeley 2003), and Love at Last Sight. Avant-Garde, Aesthetics, and the End of Art (Ljubljana 2004).

Review:

"I recommend this book to South African artists, art historians, and philosophers of art." E. A. Mare, SAJAH, volume 23, No. 2, 2008

About this edition

• Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1847185770
• ISBN 13: 9781847185778
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 199