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Claire Anscomb awarded John Fisher Memorial Prize 2021 by American Society for Aesthetics

The Aesthetics Research Centre is excited to announce that associate member and Kent alumna Dr. Claire Anscomb has been awarded the John Fisher Memorial prize by the American Society for Aesthetics.

Dr. Anscomb received her PhD. from the University of Kent in the History and Philosophy of Art in 2019. Her winning paper entitled “Creative Agency as Executive Agency: Grounding the Artistic Significance of Automatic Images,” selected by the JAAC editorial board review committee from eight nominations, will be published in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism and will be presented at the ASA Annual Meeting in Montreal November 17-20, 2021.

Abstract
This article examines the artistic potential of forms of image-making that involve registering the features of real objects using mind-independent processes. According to skeptics, these processes limit an agent’s intentional control over the features of the resultant “automatic images”, which in turn limits the artistic potential of the work, and the form as a whole. I argue that this is true only if intentional control is understood to mean that an agent produces the features of the work by their own bodily movements alone. Not only is this an unrealistic standard to uphold, but I show that a definition of intentional control based on the skeptic’s position does not prohibit an agent from realizing the features of a work by means beyond their own actions. An agent can exercise intentional control over the features of a work if they successfully anticipate the effect that the remote consequences of their actions will have on these. This, I argue, entails that to exert intentional control over the features of a work is to exercise “creative agency”, which is a species of executive agency. Consequently, I defend the idea that the origins of automatic images in creative agency grounds their artistic significance.

The Fisher Prize is awarded by the American Society for Aesthetics in alternating years to an original essay to foster the development of new voices and talent in the field of aesthetics.
The next prize will be awarded in 2023. The deadline for submission is January 15, 2023.

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De Gustibus: Arguing about Taste with Peter Kivy

 

Speakers:
•    Professor Peter Kivy (Rutgers) 
 
•    Professor Emily Brady (Edinburgh)
 
•    Assoc. Professor Eileen John (Warwick)
 
•    Professor Peter Lamarque (York)

With the support of: The British Society of Aesthetics

Emily Brady, Peter Lamarque, Peter Kivy, Eileen John: our esteemed panel discussing De Gustibus.

This one-day symposium focuses on (and takes its title from) Peter Kivy’s new book De Gustibus: Arguing About Taste and Why We Do It (Oct 2015, OUP). Kivy will be joined by Emily Brady, Eileen John, and Peter Lamarque, who will respond to Kivy’s book in an ‘author meets critics’ format.
Peter Kivy is a pre-eminent figure in Anglo-American philosophy of art. His numerous monographs and essays constitute a sustained and significant contribution to aesthetics, and in particular to the fields of aesthetics of music and literature. Kivy’s new book, De Gustibus, turns to meta-aesthetic issues about the assumptions and purposes underlying disputes about matters of taste.
In it he casts light on a new problem in aesthetics: who do we dispute about taste when there are no ’actions’ we wish to motivate? He asks, “whether I think Bach is greater than Beethoven and you think the opposite, why should it matter to either of us to convince the other?” Kivy’s claim is that we argue over taste because we think, mistakenly or not, that we are arguing over matters of fact.

 

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Dominic Topp – Nouveau cinéma: from fragmentation to unity, or What Cahiers du cinéma did next…

Wednesday 9th December, 5pm – 7pm. in GLT3

Dr Dominic Topp, School of Arts, University of Kent

In the mid-1960s a new generation of critics at Cahiers du cinéma, who had taken over from the ‘young Turks’ of the 1950s, moved the journal away from the veneration of Hollywood auteurs and the exploration of mise en scène for which it is still best known. Instead, they began to write about and to actively promote what they dubbednouveau cinéma (new cinema). This term was applied to the work of a wide variety of filmmakers from many different countries, but broadly speaking it can be seen as designating a modernist film practice. Drawing on examples from films by, among others, Věra Chytilová, Agnès Varda and Jerzy Skolimowski, this paper will describe some of the features of nouveau cinéma as they were outlined by Cahiers critics such as Jean-Louis Comolli, Noël Burch and Serge Daney: discontinuity and ambiguity at the levels of both subject matter and form, a creative tension between fragmentation and unity, and a reflexivity that could be understood as self-critical, and even oppositional, in nature. It will suggest that the concept of nouveau cinéma can be understood as an interpretative schema that allowed Cahiers readers to make sense of a diverse range of challenging new films by considering their formal and stylistic practices as their true subject matter, and offered a set of viewing strategies by which formal experimentation and political engagement could be seen not as mutually exclusive but as profoundly interrelated.