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]

Within a few days following the invasion of Ukraine, Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO) was formed as a grass-roots approach to identify and archive at-risk sites, digital content, and data in Ukrainian cultural heritage institutions. In this presentation I will identify the methods and technology we are employing, provide examples…[Read more]

Over approximately the last decade, the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI), has become a recognized international community-driven effort that has developed and maintains the MEI schema, standards, and shared documentation. The potential of machine-readable music data that can be reused, rendered, shared, or analyzed using a computer, is quite…[Read more]

Materials created for a Music Encoding Pedagogy Workshop facilitated at the American Musicological Society virtual conference on November 7, 2020. Workshop presents MEI use cases and approaches; pedagogical approaches; an MEI workflow; and options to publish MEI.

Over approximately the last decade, the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI), has become a recognized international community-driven effort that has developed and maintains the MEI schema, standards, and shared documentation. The potential of machine-readable music data that can be reused, rendered, shared, or analyzed using a computer, is quite…[Read more]

Presentation given as part of the session “Music encoding use-cases in US libraries: aims, pedagogy, and workflows” at the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres (IAML) Congress held virtually on July 26-30, 2021.

Dogma persists in aesthetic discourse in the assumptions that art consists primarily of objects, that these objects possess a special status, and that they must be regarded in a unique way. I claim that they are assumptive and misleading, while Carson opposes this by supporting the dogmas. I argue that Carlson begs the question (the relevance of…[Read more]

Traditional attempts to ground ethics may be seen to be governed by the intent to preserve established values even when they seem to be most rational and critical. This essay probes the connections of some of the most prominent justifications of ethical theories to the prevailing morality of the dominant social order. This claim is examined in…[Read more]

The sensuousness of perception leads us to recognize the role of the senses in aesthetic experience. Aesthetics has traditionally admitted the sensuous through sight and hearing but has excluded the contact senses of taste, smell, and especially touch. These contact senses challenge the place in traditional aesthetics of distance and…[Read more]

This is a comment on Marcia Eaton’s article interpreting Joseph Brodsky’s claim that “aesthetics is the mother of ethics.” Eaton challenges this claiming that they are conceptually interdependent, neither coming first. While Eton wishes to retain the metaphor, I argue in favor of Brodsky’s position, giving ethics priority.