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...

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....

Abstract painters like to bitch and moan about their lot in life. Abstract art, they complain, was once the standard-bearer of high culture, but now it’s just another item on display in the dizzying contemporary art bazaar. Still, I’m not so sure figurative painters don’t...

Raising the Bar is the title of a show at Sideshow Gallery in Williamsburg, and it's been irking me to no end. What on earth can it mean? I know it's a sports analogy-something about setting new standards and posing new challenges. But please explain...