Projects

I would welcome any comments or suggestions with respect to the projects below. (lshin1@uis.edu)

The Aesthetics of Touch

Work on Art Scents: Exploring the Aesthetics of Smell and the Olfactory Arts has made me think of exploring the sense of touch in a similar manner, although the subject is equally vast and some of the putative “arts” of touch such as massage raise particularly complex problems and the issue of unwanted touch has become particularly freighted since the “Me Too” movement. Of course, some of the most interesting aspects of touch as a subject of philosophical reflection go well beyond aesthetic and moral issues, e.g. to issues in the philosophy of perception such as the unity of touch as a sense modality, issues in social philosophy such as the role of touch in human relationships and social symbolism from the handshake to nurturing infants and finding one’s way. Carolyn Korsmeyer’s Things: In Touch with the Past (2019) has already begun a thought provoking exploration of touch aesthetics with respect to the issue of the genuineness of our encounter with artifacts, sites and memorials from the past. At this point the project is still at the broad reading and exploratory stage.

The Artist as Curator

I am currently working with Jeff Robinson formerly of the Visual Art Gallery Director at the University of Illinois at Springfield and currently Exhibition Manager and Preparator at the Hyde Part Art Center in Chicago, on the issues surrounding artists taking on the role of curator and the claim of some curators that certain curatorial projects should themselves be considered works of art. Although the profession of art curator had received little attention until recent decades, the last few years have seen a spate of books devoted to curation. The rise in prominence of the art curator has also led to a co-option of the idea of “curating” by people in all sorts of domains who evidently find it a more prestigious term for what is simply the act of selection, and speak of “curating” everything from beer to socks. Despite this degrading of the concept, the phenomenon of the artist-curator and the curator-artist reflects an important aspect of contemporary art practice and raises a number of intellectual issues worthy of reflection.

Art, Craft and Design

I have a couple of additional ideas on the interrelationship of art, craft, and design that I want to explore.

One concerns showing that Aristotle’s view of techne (often translated “art,” but sometimes “craft”) is more positive than the interpretation and use of it by philosophers like Collingwood and Gadamer in their art vs. craft polarities that make craftsmanship a rule-bound carrying out of a pre-ordained plan, a view still widely held, but true of only one narrow kind of craft.

The other idea concerns the historical project of tracing the process whereby the old “mechanical arts” category was gradually replaced in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by a series of terms such as decorative arts, applied arts, crafts, and design, each which has a different extension and meaning. As noted in the introduction to my paper “Hi, Low, Folk, Outsider, Kitsch,” a full account of the emergences of the decorative arts, applied arts, etc. would have to include their relationship and function vis a vis the rubrics of concepts such as mass art, folk art, outsider art and kitsch. This would make a good doctoral dissertation project for a younger scholar and I may rest content waiting for someone else to pursue it.