Philosophy of Art & Aesthetics

Practice in Everyday Life

Yuriko Saito, Rhode Island School of Design, USA From fussing over your personal appearance to digging in the garden, Yuriko Saito shows us how we can improve the quality of everyday life by sharpening our aesthetic sensibility. Introducing us to the unseen assumptions and ideals guiding our daily actions and routines, Saito redirects our aesthetic focus back on objects, environments, and activities and away from the fine arts that have dominated Western discussions, opening the door to Chinese and Japanese ways of thinking about aesthetics.

UK July 2022 • US July 2022 • 256 pages • 15 bw illus PB 9781350134201 • £19.99 / $26.95 • HB 9781350134195 • £65.00 / $90.00 ePub 9781350134188 • £17.99 / $23.44 ePdf 9781350134218 • £17.99 / $23.44 Series: Bloomsbury Aesthetics • Bloomsbury Academic

Adorning Bodies

Meaning, Evolution, and Beauty in Humans and Animals

Marilynn Johnson, University of San Diego, USA Drawing on evolutionary theory and philosophy to think about art, beauty, and aesthetics, Marilynn Johnson explores first how the ways we use our bodies are similar — yet at other times different — to animals. She then examines the work of evolutionary theorists, philosophers of language, and cultural theorists to explore both natural and non-natural meanings of bodies and clothes, and how both systems of meaning signify relevant information to other humans. As well as considering how the body can express natural meanings, Johnson shows that how we dress could negatively influence the way our bodies are read.

UK April 2022 • US April 2022 • 240 pages HB 9781350104259 • £85.00 / $115.00 ePub 9781350104273 • £76.50 / $100.32 ePdf 9781350104266 • £76.50 / $100.32 Bloomsbury Academic

Therapeutic Aesthetics

Performative Encounters in Moving Image Artworks

Maria Walsh, Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London, UK Using the concept of the pharmakon, the Greek term for drug which means both remedy and poison, Walsh examines the conflict between the curative and the harmful in relation to moving image artworks by artists such as Omer Fast, Liz Magic Laser, Leigh Ledare and Gillian Wearing. Engaging with a range of thinkers, including Bernard Stiegler, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Félix Guattari and Eva Illouz, she argues that artworks act as transitional spaces enabling the toleration of anxiety and conflict that may offer another kind of aesthetic selfcultivation than the subjection to biopolitical governance in cognitive capitalism.

UK June 2022 • US June 2022 • 240 pages PB 9781350189430 • £28.99 / $39.95 Previously published in HB 9781350093157 ePub 9781350093140 • £76.50 / $100.32 ePdf 9781350093133 • £76.50 / $100.32 Series: Radical Aesthetics-Radical Art • Bloomsbury Academic Edited by Elisabeth Schellekens Dammann, Uppsala University, Sweden & Davide Dal Sasso, University of Turin, Italy What is the future of conceptualism? What expressions can it take in the 21st century? Is there a new role for aesthetic experience in art and, if so, what is that role exactly? A team of international philosophers, curators and art historians illustrates how one of this generation’s most important and influential artists epitomizes the very best that the art world has to offer today and provides a glimpse of the future both of art and aesthetic discourse.

UK June 2022 • US June 2022 • 208 pages HB 9781350009257 • £85.00 / $115.00 ePub 9781350009240 • £76.50 / $100.32 ePdf 9781350009264 • £76.50 / $100.32 Series: Aesthetics and Contemporary Art • Bloomsbury Academic

Scandalous Times

Contemporary Creativity and the Rise of State-Sanctioned Controversy

Alex Ling, Western Sydney University, Australia We live in scandalous times. Every day new scandals demand our attention. Some people see them in revelatory terms, whilst others regard them as the strategic face of contemporary capitalism. Yet there exists today another, more insidious form of scandal, which mimics the disruptive effects of radical creation, to produce its very opposite: stasis. What we are now experiencing is the simulacrum of novelty, which aims to replace – and neutralise – the threat of real creation. From Trump to Kanye West, Scandalous Times explores how art, advertising, and social media contribute to this ‘static’ fabrication of controversy.

UK April 2022 • US April 2022 • 208 pages PB 9781350068568 • £19.99 / $26.95 Previously published in HB 9781350068551 ePub 9781350068575 • £76.50 / $100.32 ePdf 9781350068544 • £76.50 / $100.32 Bloomsbury Academic

Practical Aesthetics

Edited by Bernd Herzogenrath, University of Frankfurt, Germany This collection brings together artists and theoreticians to provide the first anthology of a new field: practical aesthetics. It presents different ways of thinking with forms of art, as well as new types of aesthetic research such as media philosophy, the audiovisual essay, and fictocriticism. In doing so, it reveals how writing about art can itself become ‘artistic’ or ‘poetic’: not only writing about artistic effects, but producing them. This takes art not as an object of analysis, but as a subject with knowledge in its own right, creating a co-composing 'conceptual interference pattern' between theory and practice.

UK April 2022 • US April 2022 • 280 pages • 16 bw illus PB 9781350185524 • £28.99 / $39.95 Previously published in HB 9781350116108 ePub 9781350116122 • £76.50 / $100.32 ePdf 9781350116115 • £76.50 / $100.32 Series: Thinking in the World • Bloomsbury Academic World English