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4Creativity and Style in GAN and AI Art: Some Art-historical ReflectionsPhilosophy and Technology 37 (2): 1-17. 2024.This paper explores the intersection of art history and AI technology. Special attention is paid to Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), a machine learning technology widely used in AI art. This technology is particularly interesting to art history and the philosophy of art because it raises enduring questions about the creative process of artmaking, especially what constitutes a new and original work of art. While this is a relatively new area, it is possible to discern emerging directions w…Read more
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14Wollheim on art’s historicity: an intersection of theoretical art history and the philosophy of artBritish Journal of Aesthetics 64 (2): 173-186. 2023.Art and its Objects by Richard Wollheim had a major impact on aesthetics and the philosophy of art when it was first published in 1968. Of the arguments offered in response to Wollheim’s essay, Jerrold Levinson’s intentional-historical theory of art has been one of the most enduring. Levinson was influenced by three key sections of Wollheim’s enquiry: Section 40, which considers the claim that works of art fall under a concept of art, or that we are disposed to regard certain things as works of …Read more
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8Too Close to Nature: On the Representational Problems of Death Masks and Life CastsJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. forthcoming.While historians of art have found death masks and life casts conceptually problematic, it is also noteworthy that these objects have received scant attention from philosophers of art. In this paper, I begin to redress this omission by offering examples of how the philosophy of art can help us understand these images. Two problems stand out: the problem of representation, for example, what type of representation a death mask is; and the problem of style and historicity, for example, whether imag…Read more
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53Bernard Smith’s Formalesque and the end of the history of artThesis Eleven 123 (1): 3-16. 2014.The concept of the Formalesque preoccupied Bernard Smith during the last decades of his life. First propounded in Modernism's History (1998), the Formalesque is a proposed period style describing the art of the 20th century. Yet, despite his ambitions for the Formalesque as a new classification for modern art, the idea failed to appeal to academic art history. This paper does not attempt to salvage the Formalesque from art-historical obscurity. But it does argue Smith's work on this topic is rel…Read more
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48Gombrich’s critique of Hauser’s Social History of ArtHistory of European Ideas 43 (5): 494-506. 2017.This article examines E.H. Gombrich’s critical appraisal of Arnold Hauser’s book, The Social History of Art. Hauser’s Social History of Art was published in 1951, a year after Gombrich’s bestseller, The Story of Art. Although written in Britain for an English-speaking public, both books had their origins in the intellectual history of Central Europe: Gombrich was an Austrian art historian and Hauser was Hungarian. Gombrich’s critique, published in The Art Bulletin in 1953, attacked Hauser’s dial…Read more
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26A comparison of the German and Russian literary intelligentsia in Arnold Hauser’s Social History of ArtStudies in East European Thought 71 (2): 141-155. 2019.To date, critical engagement with Arnold Hauser’s sociology of art has been confined to the field of art history. This perspective has ignored Hauser’s interest in literary history, which I argue is essential to his project. Hauser’s dialectical model, composed of conflicting realist and formalist tendencies, extends to the literary sphere. In The Social History of Art, these two traditions are epitomised by the Russian social novel and German idealism. Anti-enlightenment tendencies in German in…Read more
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15V. Gordon Childe and Arnold Hauser on the social origins of the artistThesis Eleven 168 (1): 21-36. 2022.Vere Gordon Childe’s theory of craft specialisation was an important influence on Arnold Hauser’s book The Social History of Art, published in 1951. Childe’s Marxist interpretation of prehistory enabled Hauser to establish a material foundation for the occupation of the artist in Western art history. However, Hauser’s effort to construct a progressive basis for artistic labour was complicated by art’s ancient connections to religion and superstition. While the artist’s social position and class …Read more
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24Frederick Antal and the Marxist challenge to art historyHistory of the Human Sciences 35 (2): 55-76. 2022.First published in 1948, Frederick Antal’s Florentine Painting and Its Social Background was an important milestone in anglophone art history. Based on European examples, including Max Dvořák, it sought to understand art history’s relationship to social and intellectual history. When Antal, a Hungarian émigré, arrived in Britain in 1933, he encountered an inward-looking discipline preoccupied with formalism and connoisseurship; or, as he phrased it, art historians of ‘the older persuasion’ ignor…Read more
Areas of Specialization
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Aesthetics and Culture |
Philosophy of Visual Art |
History of Aesthetics |
Art and Artworks |
Social and Political Philosophy |
Aesthetics |