Gaga Aesthetics Art, Fashion, Popular Culture, and the Up-Ending of Tradition
Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Adam Geczy is an artist and writer who teaches at Sydney College of the Arts at the University of Sydney, Australia.
Vicki Karaminas is Professor of Fashion and Director of Doctoral Studies in the School of Design, Massey University, New Zealand, and Honorary Research Fellow at the Centre of Visual Arts, University of Melbourne, Australia.
Starting from the question of culture and the up-ending of tradition, passing through Hegel, Adorno, the culture industry, light music, jazz and fashion, examining closely the aesthetics of alienation, ugliness and kitsch, and finally arriving to Madonna and Lady Gaga, <i>Gaga</i><i> Aesthetics</i> offers a convincing and fascinating interpretation of leading trends and fundamental aspects of both contemporary art and everyday life, which can be of the greatest concern not only for academic scholars but also, in general, for all readers genuinely interested in understanding our time.
Stefano Marino, Associate Professor of Aesthetics, University of Bologna, Italy
A sharp and polished new theory book by two mature, well-published and highly respected scholars. It represents a major contribution to not just culture studies but to art theory, visual culture, philosophy, fashion theory and communication studies, and it will be of general interest to anyone interested in today’s global intersectional and intertextual world.
Joy Sperling, Professor of Art History and Visual Culture, Denison University, USA
Pop art has traditionally been the most visible visual art within popular culture because its main transgression is easy to understand: the infiltration of the “low” into the “high”. The same cannot be said of contemporary art of the 21st century, where the term “Gaga Aesthetics” characterizes the condition of popular culture being extensively imbricated in high culture, and vice-versa.
Taking Adorno and Horkheimer’s "The Culture Industry" and Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory as key touchstones, this book explores the dialectic of high and low that forms the foundation of Adornian aesthetics and the extent to which it still applied, and the extent to which it has radically shifted, thereby ‘upending tradition’. In the tradition of philosophical aesthetics that Adorno began with Lukács, this explores the ever-urgent notion that high culture has become deeply enmeshed with popular culture. This is “Gaga Aesthetics”: aesthetics that no longer follows clear fields of activity, where “fine art” is but one area of critical activity. Indeed, Adorno’s concepts of alienation and the tragic, which inform his reading of the modernist experiment, are now no longer confined to art. Rather, stirring examples can be found in phenomena such as fashion and music video. In addition to dealing with Lady Gaga herself, this book traverses examples ranging from Madonna’s Madam X to Moschino and Vetements, to deliberate on the strategies of subversion in the culture industry.
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Culture and the Up-Ending of Tradition
2. Hegel, Art and Adequation
3. Adorno, The Constriction of the Aesthetic and Difficult Art
4. Modern Music and the Pact with the Devil
5. At the Precipice of Pop Culture: Wagner and Mahler
6. Art Beyond the Horizon
7. The Culture Industry and Popular Culture
8. Light Music and Lazy Listening
9. Jazz and “Jazz”
10. Ugliness and Kitsch
11. Aesthetics of Alienation
12. “Fashion Theory”: A Philosophy of Dress
13. Lady Gaga’s Gaga Aesthetics
14. Madonna to the Power of X
15. Fashion and the Redeployment of Kitsch
16. Philosophy in Fabric: Deconstruction in Contemporary Fashion
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Philosophers and cultural historians typically discuss works of art in abstract terms. But the significance of art for philosophy, and philosophy for art, can be better established through close analysis of specific examples. With art increasingly being used to introduce and discuss problems in philosophy, and many works of art raise important philosophical issues of their own, this series provides a productive context for interactions between analytic philosophy, art history and contemporary art.
Shedding light on conceptual art, abstract art and the role of the artist, Aesthetics and Contemporary Art discusses the work of major international contemporary artists as well as significant matters in contemporary artistic production. The aim of the series is to promote philosophy as a framework for understanding the study of contemporary arts and artists, showcasing research that exemplifies cutting-edge and socially engaged scholarship, bridging theory and practice, academic rigour and insight into 21st century art.
Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Adam Geczy is an artist and writer who teaches at Sydney College of the Arts at the University of Sydney, Australia.
Vicki Karaminas is Professor of Fashion and Director of Doctoral Studies in the School of Design, Massey University, New Zealand, and Honorary Research Fellow at the Centre of Visual Arts, University of Melbourne, Australia.