APA Western Division
Eugene, Oregon, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Value Theory
Other Academic Areas
PhilPapers Editorships
Feminist Aesthetics
  • Feminism and Tradition in Aesthetics (edited book)
    Penn State Press. 2010.
  • Why is painting unique among the visual arts? And why in the late sixteenth century did Cesare Ripa in his landmark Iconologia choose to create a distinctly female template for the act of painting? Moreover, why would a woman--Artemisia Gentileschi, among others--ever choose to paint herself as La Pittura (The Allegory of Painting)? This essay offers the thoughts of a painter-philosopher on the historic significance of the choice of topic, iconography, and gender of the most recognized allegory …Read more
  •  25
    Out of Order, Out of Sight: Selected Writings in Meta-Art and Art Criticism, 1968-1992 (review)
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56 (4): 405-406. 1998.
    Review of the artwork and essays created by conceptual and performance artist and philosopher Adrian Piper whose two-volume selected writings in meta-art and art criticism span 1968-1992. Addressing issues of "passing" and "crossing" for a woman of color and performing a male persona in public undergirds her explorations of identity, gender, and race. It is no coincidence that her deep commitment to making political art--in which the artist is an agent of social change--functions in tandem with …Read more
  •  439
    Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art (review)
    College Art Association Reviews. 2007.
    College Art Association Review of Nehemas' 2007 book on beauty that challenges his exclusion of consideration of issues of gender, i.e., I ask the questions, "whose beauty?" and "beauty for whom?"
  •  7
    Enhancing Artistic Presence through Contemplative Contextual Criticism
    In Julien Robson (ed.), Presence, The Speed Art Museum. pp. 180-193. 2006.
    "Presence" is a word that can function both as a descriptor of the uniqueness, identity, and strength of an(y) identifiable, individual work of art (as used in the phrase, its "artistic presence") and, more specifically, and with a capital P, the name of a year-long exhibit consisting of a series of artworks in a uniquely created architectural environment with the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky. In addition, as well-known art theorist Donald Preziosi points out in his 2004 essay ["Art …Read more
  •  162
    ORLAN Revisited: DIsembodied Virtual Hybrid Beauty
    In Peg Zeglin Brand (ed.), Beauty Unlimited, . pp. 306-340. 2012.
    This essay offers an update on the author's thoughts on the French feminist performance artist ORLAN, analyzing her visual representations as a new category of feminist visual art, namely, virtual hybrid beauty.
  • Beauty Unlimited (edited book)
    Indiana University Press. 2013.
  •  1
    Introduction to Beauty Unlimited
    In Beauty Unlimited, Indiana University Press. pp. 1-25. 2013.
    We are more than a full decade into the new millennium and, inevitably, the world has become smaller, more complex, and immanent. Post 9/11, we live daily with the "war" on terror. An image of a veiled woman is fraught with political overtones, yet stunning in its starkness, simplicity, and evocation of beauty that is innocent and long gone. . . . The essays of Beauty Unlimited position readers in the twenty-first century by pointing them forward and forcing them into the future, toward a more e…Read more
  •  5
    Editors' Introduction
    with R. Scott Kretchmar
    Journal of Intercollegiate Sport 14 (3): 1-4. 2021.
    This Special Issue [available free online] co-edited by Peg Brand Weiser (University of Arizona) and R. Scott Kretchmar (Pennsylvania State University) is entitled, "The Myles Brand (1942-2009) Era at the NCAA: A Tribute and Scholarly Review." The late Myles Brand was a philosopher (of action theory; social and political applied philosophy, philosophy of sport), former department chair (University of Illinois at Chicago; University of Arizona), dean (Arizona), provost (The Ohio State University)…Read more
  •  24
    Feminist Aesthetics
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2021.
    Overview essay of the field of feminist aesthetics updated Winter, 2021.
  •  435
    How Beauty Matters
    In David Goldblatt & Stephanie Patridge (eds.), Aesthetics: A Reader in Philosophy of the Arts, Routledge. pp. 94-97. 2017.
    How do we view, understand and appreciate a complex and challenging work of visual art such as Leon Mostovoy's Transfigure and how, in our encounter with it, does beauty matter? Transfigure Project--a 2013 book, film and photographic installation that is now also an interactive website--is "a project of corporal self-expression, presented as an experimental, visual feast" by which 'transfigure' means "to transform into something more beautiful or elevated." Photographs of fifty nude trans-identi…Read more
  •  1
    Surface and Deep Interpretation
    with Myles Brand
    In Ernest Lepore & Mark Rollins (eds.), Danto and his Critics, Wiley‐blackwell. 2012.
    This chapter contains sections titled: Analogy with Human Action The Dependency Theses Are Deep Interpretations Weakly Dependent on Surface Interpretations? Consequences for the Constitutive Dependency Thesis.
  •  613
    Painting the Difference: Sex and Spectator in Modern Art
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65 (2): 244-246. 2007.
    British art historian Charles Harrison presumes the existence of a patriarchal world with power in the hands of men who dominate the representation of women and femininity. He applauds the ground-breaking work of feminist theorists who have questioned this imbalance of power since the 1970s. He stops short, however, of accepting their claims that all women have been represented by male artists as images of “utter passivity” (p. 4), routinely reduced by the male gaze to the status of exploited s…Read more
  •  9
    Definitions of Art (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 54 (2): 492-494. 1994.
    Davies presents the reader with a sterling review of the literature--the recent history of the interest in defining "art" through the writings of Anglo-American philosophers that follow Morris Weitz' well-known 1956 essay, "The Role of Theory in Aesthetics"--and a stimulating discussion of the role of conventions in the making and appreciating of contemporary art. His emphasis on the social nature of art leads one to wonder how other recent inquiries into the multilayered contextually of the art…Read more
  •  397
    Perfect Me: Beauty as an Ethical Ideal offers a unique approach to an old topic, that of human beauty, written by an ethicist specializing in global ethics who considers herself "an applied philosopher" (14). It seems to be written primarily for ethicists and not--of preferred interest to this reviewer--for aestheticians, that is, those who routinely write about the value of the complex notion of beauty and its many permutations that involve ethics. . . . Perfect Me: Beauty as an Ethical Ideal i…Read more
  •  113
    Revising the Aesthetic-Nonaesthetic Distinction: The Aesthetic Value of Activist Art
    In Peg Zeglin Brand Weiser & Carolyn Korsmeyer (eds.), Feminism and Tradition in Aesthetics, Pennsylvania State University Press. pp. 245-272. 1995.
    This essay explores the role that the aesthetic-nonaesthetic distinction plays in assessing activist art by women and artists of color. First, I shall review one traditional line of philosophical thought and show how it serves as the foundation for three types of reasons typically given for artworks reputed to lack aesthetic value. I develop two of the three reasons by examining recent writings opposed to the aesthetic value of activist art by well-known art critic Donald Kuspit, pointing out hi…Read more
  •  8
    Not everyone faces “modern” death equally, whether in Oran or today’s world. In this chapter, I argue that the “difficulty” in Oran of “modern death” as described by Camus is still with us today in that Americans neither faced death together in any form of solidarity under the Trump administration nor faced death individually in any traditional “decent” manner (as proposed by the character Tarrou), that is, comforted by family or friends. One reason is overwhelming fear of death—what neuroscient…Read more
  •  299
    The Introduction provides a historical and literary context for the examination of Albert Camus’s 1947 fictional novel, The Plague, to suggest its relevance to our own lived experiences of the 2021 Covid-19 pandemic that brought the routines and expectations of our normal, daily lives to an unprecedented halt. Details of Camus’s life and work inform our reading of the narrative that give rise to multiple interpretations as well as intriguing questions of scholarly inquiry: How realistic are the …Read more
  •  367
    Camus's The Plague: Philosophical Perspectives (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 2023.
    _La Peste_, originally published in 1947 by the Nobel Prize-winning writer Albert Camus, chronicles the progression of deadly bubonic plague as it spreads through the quarantined Algerian city of Oran. While most discussions of fictional examples within aesthetics are either historical or hypothetical, Camus offers an example of "pestilence fiction." Camus chose fiction to convey facts--about plagues in the past, his own bout with tuberculosis at age seventeen, living under quarantine away from …Read more
  •  341
    Introduction
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48 (4): 277-280. 1990.
    This is the co-authored--with Carolyn Korsmeyer--Introduction to the first published feminist scholarship in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (Volume 48, Number 4, Fall 1990). Contributors included Hilde Hein, Paul Mattick, Jr., Timothy Gould, Joanne B. Waugh, Joseph Margolis, Mary Devereaux, Noel Carroll, Flo Leibowitz, Anita Silvers, Elizabeth Ann Dobie, Renee Cox, and Ellen Handler Spitz. All essays were subsequently published in an expanded book version entitled, Feminism and Trad…Read more
  •  295
    The Beauty of the Game
    with Myles Brand
    In Jerry Walls (ed.), Basketball and Philosophy, The University Press of Kentucky. pp. 94-103. 2007.
    Imagine a deep philosophical conversation about a beautiful shot by a college player in a Final Four basketball game!
  •  135
    Feminism in Context: A Role for Feminist Theory in Aesthetic Evaluation
    In John W. Bender & Gene Blocker (eds.), Contemporary Philosophy of Art: Readings in Analytic Aesthetics, Pearson College Division. pp. 106-112. 1993.
    This paper explores the role of 1980s to early 1990s feminist theory of art within the analytic philosophical tradition of aesthetics starting with a critique of the noncontextual criticism of aesthetics of Jerome Stolnitz and Monroe Beardsley contrasted with contextual feminist theory, informed by contextual theories of Arthur Danto, George Dickie and Marcia Eaton, and concluding that knowledge of external, contextual data is necessarily required to assess a work of art that has been deemed a w…Read more
  •  154
    Feminism and Aesthetics in Contemporary American Art
    American Studies 15 133-146. 1997.
    What is feminist art? Can an ordinary viewer experience it in a neutral, detached, and objective way? These two questions are the focus of this essay which attempts to bridge a gap between philosophical aesthetics and feminist theorizing about women's art. The first question is purely historical, easily answered by means of a brief overview of the past twenty-five years of feminist art in America. The second question raises philosophical issues squarely within the realm of aesthetics, contingen…Read more
  •  254
    Changing Perceptions of Beautiful Bodies: The Athletic Agency Model
    In Andrew Edgar & William Morgan (eds.), Somaesthetics and Sport, Brill. pp. 85-113. 2022.
    I consider what draws us to perceiving beautiful bodies in art and athletics--repeatedly and over time--that is informed by viewers' changing perceptions derived from recent publications in fashion and sport, the philosophy of sport, feminist film theory and aesthetics under the ever-expanding umbrella of somaesthetics. This paper won the American Society for Aesthetics 2023 Somaesthetics Prize.
  •  324
    Feminist Criticism: On Disturbatory Art and Beauty
    In Jonathan Gilmore & Lydia Goehr (eds.), A Companion to Arthur C. Danto, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 344-353. 2022.
    Arthur C. Danto, philosopher and art critic for The Nation from 1984-2009, offered interpretations of artworks by a wide array of artists, including Eva Hesse, Judy Chicago, and Cindy Sherman, whose "disturbatory" works were either ignored or denounced by mainstream critics at the time. Danto's championing of feminist art was deliberate and delightful; he openly endorsed the Guerilla Girls! His feminist art critical writings ultimately shaped the early development of what has come to be known as…Read more
  •  18
    Revising the Aesthetic-Nonaesthetic Distinction: The Aesthetic Value of Activist Art
    In Peg Zeglin Brand Weiser & Carolyn Korsmeyer (eds.), Feminism and Tradition in Aesthetics, Pennsylvania State University Press. 1995.
  •  296
    VIRTUAL BEAUTY: Orlan and Morimura
    L and B (Lier En Boog) 16 92-104. 2001.
    This essay offers some thoughts on the editors' (Annette w. Balkema and Henk Slager) project "Exploding Aesthetics" with the goal of extending aesthetics based on a specific type of artistic output. Both artists--Orlan and Morimura--have already expanded the normal parameters of artistic inquiry and the resulting critical discourse. As an aesthetician, I merely offer some elaboration and philosophical backdrop to their creative enterprise. They constitute the paradigm of the avant-garde artist e…Read more
  •  129
    Bound to Beauty: An Interview with Orlan
    In Peg Zeglin Brand (ed.), Beauty Matters. pp. 289-313. 2000.
    The feminist performance art of the controversial French artist named Orlan is discussed in this interview with the artist.
  •  207
    Beauty as Pride: A Function of Agency
    APA Newsletter on Philosophy and Medicine 2 (10): 5-9. 2011.
    This paper (presented along with others at an APA session with the late Dr. Anita Silvers commenting) explores and engages a mode of defiant challenges to the traditional, able-bodied standard of female beauty evidenced throughout the history of art as portrayed by the controversial photographer, Joel-Peter Witkin. Witkin's images of Ann Millett-Gallant, author of the book, The Disabled Body in Contemporary Art, "visualize disability" as they explore issues in agency, otherness, and the medical …Read more
  •  1062
    Misleading Aesthetic Norms of Beauty: Perceptual Sexism in Elite Women's Sports
    In Sherri Irvin (ed.), Body Aesthetics, Oxford University Press. pp. 192-221. 2016.
    This essay is about the history of challenges that women in elite sports have faced with respect to their gender identity within a society that perpetuates misleading aesthetic norms of beauty; it is a history fraught with controversy and injustice. . . . We recommend both the acknowledgment within the realm of elite sport of perceptual sexism based on misleading aesthetic norms of beauty, and a way of correcting such erroneous categorization that allows athletes the autonomy and agency to choo…Read more