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The Philosophy Of Art And Art Essay

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Introduction
Whilst the initial roots of aesthetics as a philosophical mode of enquiry may be traced as far back as the ancient Greek philosophers, with the discipline itself arising as a cohesive branch of philosophy in eighteenth century Europe in parallel with the emergence of fine art and museum culture, what is now often referred to as feminist aesthetics or feminist philosophy of art constitutes a strikingly novel area of intellectual enquiry, having arisen as recently as the 1970’s (Brand and Korsmeyer, 1995, 12; Ziarek, 2012, 8). It hence seems reasonable to assert that aesthetic approaches which address the relevance of gender as a central unit of analysis within both art world practices, as well as philosophical and art historical discourses concerning art and human creativity, remain in their embryonic stages, and it is only now that they are beginning to coalesce into a coherent collection of theories within the academy. Rather than representing a single monolithic body of theory, feminist aesthetic scholarship can loosely be characterised as a collection of theoretical approaches - plural, rather than singular - which seek to problematise and de-naturalise the underlying assumptions that underpin dominant traditional theories concerning both the production and reception of art. In this sense, they constitute a set of responses to the vast body of aesthetic theory which precedes them.

As such, feminist aesthetic discourse has covered a vast terrain of

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