We can identify two issues which are important with respect to anthropology’s approach to aesthetics in non-Western societies: firstly, are we obliged to consider the anthropology of *art and the anthropology of aesthetics as inseparable? We are...

. Also called philosophy of art. Roughly, that branch of philosophy concerned with the creation, value and experience of art and the analysis and solution of problems relating to these. The primary topic is the appreciation of art, and major problems...

Lévi-Strauss has been described as sensitive, dignified and reserved, someone who has always privileged rigorousness in his professional life, and no doubt striven, as a result, to maintain a certain distance from events, people and facts. In...

A term increasingly used in discussions of a balanced curriculum to indicate those subjects or areas of experience by means of which a pupil is introduced to the world of beauty (e.g. art, music, literature). The basis for this distinction dates back...

Aesthetics is the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste. Aesthetics is a subdiscipline of axiology, a branch of philosophy, and is closely associated with the philosophy of...

The following cluster of essays addresses the contemporary art world's renewed engagement with aesthetics, a debate that emerged in the early 1990s and, as yet, shows little sign of abating. Three of the essays, by Alexander Alberro, Anna Dezeuze, and Margaret Iversen, are...

Creative thinkers do not merely answer questions that interest others, they answer questions that others have not realized are interesting or even are questions. For example: Starbucks coffee is not that much better than everyone else's coffee, so what is Starbucks really selling?...

Whose idea was it to host concurrent retrospectives of Romare Bearden and Isamu Noguchi at the Whitney Museum of American Art? It was a brilliant stroke, really. Noguchi's streamlined, abstract sculptures distill experience by expunging it of clutter; Bearden's collaged portrayals of farmers, jazz musicians...

The exhibition called Logical Conclusions: 40 Years of Rule-Based Art, organized by Marc Glimcher for the PaceWildenstein Galleries, has come and gone, but it has left in its wake an encyclopedic catalog that's likely to remain a standard work of reference for a long time....