The Sublime: (Documents of Contemporary Art) Paperback – 22 Feb. 2010

interesting book, explains an almost indescribable feeling in layman"s terms. Great help for understanding contemporary art.Helped with my final major project.The Prevailing Human PresenceMy work is exploring the presence of the human spirit in war-torn environments. I am looking at the concept of humanity mixed with consciousness, and something bigger and deeper and more soulful than the notion of any established religion. If humankind is to flourish in partnership with each other and nature, we need to explore ways in which this can happen. My work discusses the ways in which War-torn environments clutter our screens as traumatic events shown through the media; we however continue our daily lives.I have explored the human presence in the large sculptural piece and have also taken the work to another level using photography. I developed a handmade pinhole camera to extend the theme and the images, developed in the negative state and are resolved, requiring no further processing. The pictures look like relics from a destroyed landscape, almost like a glimpse into a family album of old photos that have survived a traumatic event; each photo captures an element of the human presence.Digital images take the viewer further into the war zone, both as a visitor and as prey. Ariel views give a sniper's viewpoint, and narrow passageways create an anxious feeling of danger lurking in the shadows. Lights in the buildings implant a human presence, and the viewer experiences a moment in time.

Super quick delivery! The book came in perfect condition and I highly recommend the Whitechapel Gallery series, really useful for referencing in essays at uni.

The book is exactly what I needed for my dissertation and will be used for future research. It is a reader so you have different perspectives of the Sublime, even Beauty, and it's relationship with contemporary art with discussions of abstract-expressionism.

brilliant

Graet as advertised

very good conditions

Good list of artists and works to do with the idea of the 'sublime'However, the language is so dense I am surprised if anyone has actually read the whole book! I only read a few paragraphs needed to write an essay but I found the rest of this book excruciatingly boring and heavyNot a joy to read at all! And I think it is overpriced for what it actually provides.Would only recommend if you wanted a good list of artists/writers to reference from.

Brilliant read, would recommend to anyone interested in the complexities of the sublime, both within art and the natural world.

merci !

this is a very good book if you want to learn more about the sublime. Not many books out there, so this is a great start.

This collection of writings is phenomenal. My favorite book out of the whole series.

thank you

I wanted to learn what new ideas have come up since Hegel in aesthetic theory on what accounts psychologically for the sense of the sublime, or historically for its initial emergence in 1st century Rome and again in 17th century Europe. According to this book, very little. Rather than providing new ideas about the sublime, this book takes the idea of the sublime and uses it to justify deliberate stupidity. By stupidity I mean a resolute clinging to Dark Age ideas about reason, transcendence, and philosophical idealism, enabled by an ignorance of history and of science. The book is an extended rejection of the scholastic rationality of the High Middle Ages, mistaking itself for a rejection of science and technology. Predictably, then, the authors often merge or replace the “sublime” with what someone in the Middle Ages would have meant by “beauty”, so that rather than moving forward from post-classical beauty to the sublime, they are moving backwards from post-classical beauty to classical beauty. Transcendence is the goal of the classical concept of beauty, not of the sublime.The sublime is a mixture of pleasure and terror. Note the timing of the concept, appearing in 1st century Rome, and popularized in 18th century Europe. These were the two times in history when great peace and security were first achieved. The people interested in the sublime were the first people with little need to fear barbarian hordes or invading armies. Not only was the sublime not a concept in the intervening time from the Dark Ages through the 30 Years War, but it was absent from art. No one wrote music, or painted paintings, or built architecture tinged with terror like Bach's fugues, 19th century romantic paintings, or the Sedlec Ossuary. When such things arose before the Romantic era, like Bach's fugues, people didn't like them. People didn't like Bach's fugues until the 19th century.This is because the sublime is art to replace the fear, terror, and aggression that civilization have taken away. People had no need of it until the 18th century.I just made that theory up, because I believe that when someone criticizes a book as harshly as I'm about to criticize this one, they should give a positive example of what they have in mind. I used real-world facts to put together partial psychological and historical explanations of the sublime. That's what the writers in this book don't do.The reasons aren't hard to discover; they are the same in nearly every case, and are deliberate:1. LACK OF EMPIRICISM. We can trace the degradation of aesthetic theory throughout the second half of the 20th century in these essays by the amount of empirical content. It went through 4 stages, the first of which was already bad:I. Brief, often inaccurate or anecdotal references to external reality, such as cultures and physical places. Newman (1948) mentions the Greeks, the Renaissance, and cathedrals. Rosenblum (1961) goes through case studies: Niagara Falls, the Gordale Scar, the Grand Canyon. Yves Klein (1961) refers to the moons of Mars and the Southern Cross.Facts are either recollected or summarized sloppily and often inaccurately. On the first page of the first essay, Newman equates the Greek obsession with the Platonic to "the fetish of quality". The Greek (and medieval) ideas regarding the ideal were about what classes one should make art about (the noble, the young, the beautiful, the male, the powerful), who specifically (no one; only idealized abstractions), how they should be depicted (calm, not active), and other ideological issues. This had nothing to do with skill, technique, or any other obvious components of quality. Newman equates them because, like all modern artists, he wishes to dismiss quality as a criterion for judgement. Later on the same page, he speaks of the Renaissance revival of the ideals of Greek beauty, when the ideological structure of Greek beauty was held quite strictly all through the Middle Ages by the Christian church, simply replacing the Greek ideals and power hierarchy with the Christian ones. The Renaissance was in fact the very destruction, not the revival, of those ideals, as people began to paint ordinary people engaged in ordinary actions, and thinkers began to question the hierarchy justified by the art. (And Yves Klein’s “facts” about Mars are simply delusions.)II. Refer only to theories and art works. Robert Smithson (1973) discusses the influences on the aesthetic theories of Frederick Law Olmstead, designer of Central Park, and introduces the 'picturesque' as a synthesis between beauty and the sublime. (This was the only interesting theoretical point I found in the book, and it’s from the 18th century.) Fredric Jameson (1991) cites some movies and novels in his desperate attempt to make Marxism relevant to post-modernism.III. Refer only to theories. The theorist's "reality" has shrunk to acknowledge only the language game about art, and the theorist seems uninterested in art itself. Derrida (1978) and Lyotard (1988), who believe linguistic puns are more reliable sources of validation than external reality, are the pioneers of this approach. Lyotard attempted to use information theory (p. 40), but got it hopelessly wrong. Most of the essays after 1990 fit this pattern.IV. Refer to nothing at all. This logical conclusion to the progression is seen in Dorret LeVitte Harten’s 1999 essay, which rambles on for pages making claims that appear to be about real, historical items and events, but in such vague terms that I can’t tell what is being claimed. References to specific artists or exhibitions occur, but only to reference their sociological status, not any of their properties. For example: “Depth is to be regarded with a suspicious eye because it is in the process of losing its absolute hegemony over the concept of value. Rhetorical depth gives way to works of art which either use recognizable icons and words, or in the case of a religious manifestation bring the sublime, in all its transformations, to the surface. A revival of iconic figures, by means of different media, and whose eternal state is sustained through their capacity to sell and to be sold, is almost equivalent to the revival of mythological images in the Renaissance. The laconic, pure attitude of the modern sublime, mistakenly considered as a monotheistic dictum and therefore a step further in the evolutionary ladder, is defeated by the return of a Pagan New, echoing a Weberian prophecy, an iconodule state which comes to its maturity, graced by its Elysian opportunities. Some may say that the sublime is being sold too cheaply, for it can be bestowed upon just about anything that moves, or anything which is popular. It becomes a household artefact, a quality whose visibility is enhanced because of its adaptation to the mundane.” Every clause in that paragraph makes a claim about the real world, yet without any specific examples it’s impossible to tell what she’s talking about. What iconic figures? What is their “eternal state”? Who is selling what--surely it’s not, as she’s stated, the figures doing the selling? In what way does the modern sublime have a laconic, pure attitude, and on whose evolutionary ladder would monotheism be a step further, and from what? I don’t believe this essay was written as a good faith effort to communicate.2. HEGEL. The entire volume contains only continental philosophy, which has all been poisoned by Hegel. The problem isn’t Hegel’s views on the sublime, which are actually pretty interesting. The problem is that Hegel had no understanding of epistemology, and people who take Hegel seriously never learn how to justify their reasoning. Sloppy reasoning with no consideration of probabilities, empirical validation, or even whether the words being uttered have a possible interpretation in the real world, are the hallmarks of continental philosophy, and this book is no exception. The BS ratio is high. About a third of the essays I read (Yves Klein, Shirazeh Houshiary, Dorret LeVitte Harten, Bill Viola, Olafur Eliasson, John Berger, & Roy Ascott) were meaningless ravings, or merely stupid.3. TRANSCENDENCE. Transcendent is the word used for human nature by people who have never been fully human. They enslaved themselves to tradition, religion, or mysticism, or shrank from rationality and mathematics, until their own agency, moral compass, or rationality have atrophied from disuse. They sense their own emptiness, but attribute it to being human rather than to not being fully human. So they search for the reality of being human by looking everywhere except within the human experience. This always produces bad philosophy and bad art.4. IGNORANCE OF THE MIDDLE AGES. The writers in this book would do well to read Pitirim Sorokin's repugnant but well-informed book _Social & Cultural Dynamics_, so that they'd know what they're talking about when they talk about Greece, Plato, and absolutism. That wasn't an aesthetic unique to Greece; it was mandatory across most of Europe until the late 14th century, and was favored Louis XIV, Hitler, Stalin, and anybody else who wanted absolute power. "Art", until 1400, was synonymous with "propaganda". The sublime is art which is emotionally conflicting, and hence difficult to use as propaganda. This is a crucial point, yet one consistently gotten backwards by the essayists in this book, who call Hitler's propaganda "sublime", including Lyotard (p. 39). Hitler’s propaganda arts were pure classicism, but with the /volk/ instead of the nobility as normative.The authors are also all ignorant of the relationship between reason, empiricism, and science. They assume reason and rationality are problematic. Modern art is assumed to take as its problem creating art in a world that rationality and technology have, somehow, drained of meaning and art.No one in this volume can express their objections to technology clearly, because none of them understand the distinction between rationality and empiricism. Rationality, or reason, are not modern, but medieval, and its exemplars are Aristotle and Aquinas. Hegel and Kant, whose footsteps these people all follow in, tried to be rational. The problems that post-modernism perceives are the result of reason, but not of science or technology. Science is the optimal blend between rationality and empiricism, and unlike unguided reason, reliably converges on correct answers. Meanwhile Kant, Hegel, Quine, Derrida, etc., wandered off into the weeds not because they used science, but because they used reason without empiricism.5. HATRED OF KNOWLEDGE. The book’s essays repeatedly single out reason as the source of modernity’s ills. Marina Abramovic accidentally gives a plausible explanation for the increasing stupidity of aesthetic theory: As science increases our understanding of the world, all the people who don’t /want/ to understand things are drawn to art. After mourning modern society’s “rationality”, including skepticism about telepathy, astrology, and magic, she observes that “Art is a field in which the non-rational may sometimes be tolerated.” She doesn’t want to make people think with her art; she wants just the opposite: to “lead people to a point… where the brain has to give up.” Lest we think she is being metaphoric, she says she would like to have a shaman “demonstrate that it is possible to spend three days and three nights under water”, to prove that science is wrong.6. PHILOSOPHICAL IDEALISM. Some essays unabashedly endorse philosophical idealism, for realsies. “In fact there is nothing ‘real’ outside us, only cultural constructs,” Olafur Eliasson says (p. 123). Yves Klein says that Dante and Swift gave accurate astronomical information in their fiction, which proves the “extradimensional power” of human sensitivity. The practice noted above, of treating only statements by other theorists as reality, may be a result of philosophical idealism here as it is in the writings of George Steiner.In short, this is a terrible book. Derrida’s essay manages to be one of the best in the book merely by restating what Kant said in a more confusing way. I liked Robert Smithson’s essay on landscape, and Robert Rosenblum's "The Abstract Sublime”, a nice study of the recognition of existing concepts of the sublime in 20th century painting. Walter De Maria’s piece on “The Lightning Field” made me want to see it. Everything else I read was either nonsense, coherent but sloppy, or just not very interesting.Physically, the book had very thick, stiff pages to disguise that it’s only 234 pages long. It was difficult to hold open and difficult to flip through. The index included only names of people, not artworks or art movements. I could also have used a glossary for all of the post-modernist jargon.