Composed in a series of scenes, Aisthesis–Rancière’s definitive statement on the aesthetic–takes its reader from Dresden in 1764 to New York in 1941. Along the way, we view the Belvedere Torso with Winckelmann, accompany Hegel to the museum and Mallarmé to the Folies-Bergère, attend a lecture by Emerson, visit exhibitions in Paris and New York, factories in Berlin, and film sets in Moscow and Hollywood. Rancière uses these sites and events—some famous, others forgotten—to ask what becomes art and what comes of it. He shows how a regime of artistic perception and interpretation was constituted and transformed by erasing the specificities of the different arts, as well as the borders that separated them from ordinary experience. This incisive study provides a history of artistic modernity far removed from the conventional postures of modernism.

Composed in a series of scenes, Aisthesis–Rancière’s definitive statement on the aesthetic–takes its reader from Dresden in 1764 to New York in 1941. Along the way, we view the Belvedere Torso with Winckelmann, accompany Hegel to the museum and Mallarmé to the Folies-Bergère, attend a lecture by Emerson, visit exhibitions in Paris and New York, factories in Berlin, and film sets in Moscow and Hollywood. Rancière uses these sites and events—some famous, others forgotten—to ask what becomes art and what comes of it. He shows how a regime of artistic perception and interpretation was constituted and transformed by erasing the specificities of the different arts, as well as the borders that separated them from ordinary experience. This incisive study provides a history of artistic modernity far removed from the conventional postures of modernism.

Why do we keep returning to certain pictures? What is it we are looking for? How does our understanding of an image change over time? This investigates the nature of visual complexity, the capacity of certain images to sustain repeated attention, and how pictures respond and resist their viewers' wishes.

This volume examines the great varieties of artistic experience from first hand phenomenological descriptions. It features detailed and concrete analyses which provides readers with in-depth insights into each specific domain of artistic experience. Coverage includes phenomenological elucidation of the aesthetic attitude, the power of imagination, and the logic of sensibility. The essays also detail concrete phenomenological analyses of aesthetic experiences in poetry, painting, photography, drama, architecture, and urban aesthetics. The book contains essays from "Logos and Aisthesis: Phenomenology and the Arts," an international conference held at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. It brings together a team of top scholars from both the East and the West and offers readers a global perspective on this interesting topic. These innovative, yet accessible, essays, will benefit students and researchers in philosophy, aesthetics, the arts, and the humanities. They will also be of interest to specialists in phenomenology.

Only yesterday aesthetics stood accused of concealing cultural games of social distinction. Now it is considered a parasitic discourse from which artistic practices must be freed. But aesthetics is not a discourse. It is an historical regime of the identification of art. This regime is paradoxical, because it founds the autonomy of art only at the price of suppressing the boundaries separating its practices and its objects from those of everyday life and of making free aesthetic play into the promise of a new revolution. Aesthetics is not a politics by accident but in essence. But this politics operates in the unresolved tension between two opposed forms of politics: the first consists in transforming art into forms of collective life, the second in preserving from all forms of militant or commercial compromise the autonomy that makes it a promise of emancipation. This constitutive tension sheds light on the paradoxes and transformations of critical art. It also makes it possible to understand why today's calls to free art from aesthetics are misguided and lead to a smothering of both aesthetics and politics in ethics.

A timely book that identifies the practice of '(syn)aesthetics' in artistic style and audience response, which helps to articulate the power of experiential practice in the arts. This exciting new approach includes interviews with leading practitioners in of theatre, dance, site-specific work, live art and technological performance practice.