Aesthetic engagement is a term that has come into increasing prominence in aesthetic discourse. It identifies an understanding of aesthetic experience, appreciation, and value characterized by active participation in the perceptual process and by the continuity and reciprocity of the central factors in aesthetic appreciation. The concept of…[Read more]

This essay interweaves Stefan Morawski’s critique of postmodernism and Jean-François Lyotard’s expression of the postmodern sublime as “the presentation of the unpresentable” in a wide-ranging appraisal of the culmination of the postmodern age. This juxtaposition finds expression in the concept of the two modes of a negative sublime: the negative…[Read more]

The work of Marcel Duchamp occupies a unique and enigmatic place in the history of modern
Western art. Starting with his striking cubist painting Nude Descending a Staircase, Duchamp
quickly turned modern art upside down with the succession of Readymades that followed.
These culminated in Étant Donné, presumably an environmental sculpture but m…[Read more]