• The Journal of Art Theory & Practice
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• no.16
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• pp.257-272
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• 2013

This paper analyzes six different ways of articulating the relationship between art and politics. It calls attention to the differences that lurk behind the seemingly simple phrase-everywhere in vogue today-the "politics of aesthetics." Five of these models are drawn from contemporary discussions regarding the politics of art. The last model is the attempt to develop an account of the politics of aesthetics that is faithful to the difficult and ambiguous dimensions of the aesthetic experience that were hinted at by the texts of classical philosophical aesthetics. Most notably, this paper is concerned with the idea that the aesthetic experience can be understood as a form of disinterested contemplation-one that is not reducible to cognitive or moral considerations-and with some of the consequences that this entails. It explores some of the political significance that can be attributed to this idea of disinterested contemplation, arguing that the aesthetic should be understood as a withdrawal from the world's pre-established meanings. Unlike some of the other thinkers discussed in this paper, this author doubts that a single, uniform meaning can be ascribed to the aesthetic experience. I thus argue that we need to approach the aesthetic through the networks of textual significance that have been built up around it. Throughout this paper, I attempt to explain how the efforts to link art and aesthetics to politics simultaneously give rise to ideas about the nature of the human community. In looking at the sixth and final model, what I have called the "anarchical politics of aesthetic ambiguity," I argue that the aesthetic tradition offers a rather unique way of understanding the relationship between the individual and the community. Here, we see that the aesthetic is prone to a number of paradoxes, central among them the one that makes art the bearer of a solipsistic pleasure in which we nevertheless discover our capacity for genuinely communicating with others, outside of cliches and banalities.

• American Studies
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• v.42 no.2
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• pp.79-107
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• 2019

This article explores the photographic work of North American artist Jeff Wall. While his photographic work has been much discussed in terms of aesthetics and composition highlighting his methodological appropriation of modernist painters such as Eduard Manet and Piet Mondrian, the political aspect of his work remains to be investigated. This article especially unpacks the complicated dialectical relationship between the formal aesthetics and the political nature of his works by visiting his photographic work in the context of contemporary debates on the contradiction and conflicts between aesthetics and politics in photographic form. Ultimately, this article argues that Wall's photograph acquires its political meaning by problematizing the reified social representation of the other in a way in which the materiality and/or otherness of the photographic object is registered within the photographic frame and by representing the violence of the social representation and the un-representability of the object/other.

• Journal of Fashion Business
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.23-40
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• 2010

The purpose of this study is to explore the aesthetic characteristics of outerization phenomenon of contemporary fashion. Outerization, transforming underwear as outerwear, is one of the most dominant and widespread fashion trends in the dawning of new millenium. Fashion always exists for living body and tributes to express idealized beauty of human body and aesthetics of the era. If so, exploring the formative expressions and aesthetic characteristics of outerization would be an meaningful guideline to deduce changed relationship between fashion and body of the 21st century. The methodology of this study is to research of fashion collections such as Paris, Milan and New York which were held the first decade of new millenium, from 2000 Spring/Summer to 2009 Spring/Summer. The styles expressing outerization were selected and assorted based on the main formative expression. Then the aesthetic characteristics were classified. The way of expression of outerization is categorized into 4 parts ; Transition, Exposure, Transparency, and Deconstruction. Aesthetic Characters of outerization is classified 4 assortments as well ; Eroticism, Fun with parody and kitch, cyber culture, Gender politics, and Power fetish. Eroticism is the most clearly identified one. Coming out of underwear imply naked body itself, so it has erotic appeal. Fun is the second character. A pleasant sensation from the outerization of undergarments maximizes a disposition of play from parody, kitch, and cyber culture. The third is Gender Politics and it introspects how the society consumes woman body in history and modern times. Power Fetish, the last one, speaks for the female body with changed vision for femininity underneath the sphere of influence of feminism and post modernism, then emphasizes the subjectivity and independence of woman. From the research above, this study will help to understand the overwhelming outerization phenomenon and contribute to expansion of the horizon of the study of fashion aesthetics. It will serve fashion creative source through various outerization cases as well.

• American Studies
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• v.44 no.2
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• pp.159-191
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• 2021

"In the United States, you almost never say that virtue is beautiful," Alexis de Tocqueville reports in Democracy in America. Yet Ralph Waldo Emerson, arguably the most prominent American moralist in the nineteenth century, stands as an exception to Tocqueville's generalization. This article explores Emerson's perspective on beauty in the moral education of democratic citizens. His interest in this aesthetic category partly stemmed from his deep concern about both the moral inaction and interest politics in commercial culture. As a response to the crisis, Emerson conceived ethical beauty as a key promoter of public-minded democratic citizenship as exemplified by the American abolitionists, and his own practice as a poetic moralist further illustrates this belief. Emerson's aesthetic approach to the cultivation of public virtue in liberal democracy offers a meaningful comparison to contemporary neo-Tocquevillian emphasis on the language of interest or duty.

• Korean Institute of Interior Design Journal
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• v.21 no.6
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• pp.147-157
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• 2012

This paper aims to examine the fundamental relationship of what principles cause the aesthetic shapes in Korean sarangbang furniture of the $19^{th}$ century. Focusing on the Greimas' isotopic and semantic structure analysis, this research analyzed the traditional Korean men's furniture in four steps; signifier analysis, isotopic analysis, semantic structure analysis, and comprehensive interpretation. The results show that the expressive qualities of sarangbang furniture included visual symmetric aesthetics, and the hues of natural materials with dark tones. The manufacturing process emphasized the characteristics of natural materials; while diversity was respected in decorations, function as restrained form was also important with a concise image. Through these characteristics, sarangbang furniture revealed a balance, a harmony of contrastive elements, and a restrained aesthetics. Within these qualities, it was seen that aesthetic principles, such as "severance and communication," "artifice and nature," "restraint and manifestation," "toughness and softness," "filling and emptying" and "decoration and utility" were in a mutually supplementary relationship. At the basis of this aesthetic thought appears to be Confucianism, which had been the model for seonbi politics and scholarship.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.5
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• pp.975-999
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• 2012

This paper interrogates what a new point Schmitt shows concerning the problem of sovereignty in Hamlet or Hecuba in comparison with his Political Theology. Schmitt reveals his political stand on sovereignty through ‘political representation’ that connects the politics to the aesthetics in Hamlet or Hecuba since Hamlet is above all aesthetic work as play. He stresses the determining effect of political reality over the play as he links the story of Hamlet to the tragic family of James I and the religious conflicts of the Stuart dynasty. This leads to, on the one hand, supporting the myth of absolute sovereignty by elevating Hamlet to the transcendental and the exceptional status of sovereign. However, Schmitt’s intent over the absolute sovereignty is, on the other hand, demolished with the two shadows that he scrutinized through the couple of Hamlet and James I: first, the suspect that Gertrude(Mary Stuart) was involved in the murder of Hamlet(James I)’s father, and second, the century’s conflicts with religious reformation and civil war. The perils of sovereignty are manifested not only in these two, “the taboo of the Queen,” and “the Hamletization of the avenger.” It is most of all evidenced in Hamlet itself that subverts the unconditional sovereignty consistently. Hamlet’s selfreflective remarks likening the king to the beggar and the reality of Denmark succession prove that Hamlet’s political discourse is totally different from the politics that accentuates the divine sovereignty.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.64 no.3
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• pp.469-481
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• 2018

When literatures and cultures encounter their counterparts in terms of the big data or statistics of a new reconfiguration in the cognitive map, the tangential points of the borderland will be reduced to what Mitchell calls "a mere abstraction on a map," which nevertheless will provide a vast interstitial zone of "intersections, competition, and exclusions." This zone will be the dynamic vortex for the aesthetics, politics, and ethics of cultural translation. The translated discourse will engage in carrying across the disturbing region of untranslatability and demonstrate how the literary texts of world literature reveal enriching but threatening human experience. This dynamic border of vortex will construct the translational space of world literature, transcending the fragmentary untranslatable nature of the hybrid convergence of the ethnic, racial, cultural and national intermixtures and constructing what Pascal Casanova terms "The World Republic of Letters." In this paper, I will demonstrate how the very concept of scale is related to literary space as well as how distance creates a poetics of literary landscapes which looks ahead of world literature. Also, I will attempt to find the possibility to relate the "micro-scale" with the "macro-scale," and to construct the scale politics of representation. "Glocalization" is a convenient theoretical tool for the double movement of the up-scale and down-scale.

• Fashion & Textile Research Journal
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• v.5 no.5
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• pp.453-464
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• 2003

This study is to analyze that the pluralism is the main aspect of the modem fashion which examines the definition and the character of the pluralism. This will also consider the pluralism that appeared on the modern fashion which is based on them. The main point of pluralism is that the world is necessarily aware of plural and difference. Also many values which is focused on the previous generation, for instance disorganize of westernism, androcentrictrism, christianism and powerful nationalism, what is called unfamiliar, heterogeneous, the others and the circumference things. As these were rehabilitated, morality, ethics, religion or politics were all became possible to choose for one's taste. The pluralism expressed in modern fashion can be divided as collapse of genre, grafting the lower and higher orders cultivation, variety way of approaching in time, internationalism. The result for the consideration is that the pluralism has candid attitude for everything so that in the modern fashion is importing variety range of artistic definition. Namely, it is not only containing previous pure art, elegance art and element of artistic sublime beauty, but also has aesthetics of ugliness, deconstructive art and anti-fashion so that the definition of the art is getting vagueness and diverse.

• Korean journal of communication and information
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• v.48
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• pp.109-134
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• 2009

This study explores the political parody, which has become an active art form in order to express Korean Internet users' political practices, especially, during the politically turbulent periods from the presidential election of 2003 to the recent candlelight vigil protest of 2008. This study investigates the rise and fall of a parody culture by online users from the mid-2000s, and also examines aesthetical aspects of parodic artworks relying on amateurism culminated in 2004. Specifically, the current study questions an aesthetical lack shown in 'appropriation', by which most of the online users simply produce imitations of original image. This study rather notes 'photomontage' as an aesthetic prototype, the political aesthetics made by John Heartfield, through which this study intends to observe how his aesthetical legacy of political art could be realized in the contemporary form of political parodies produced by online users. The present paper concludes that online users' political participations in producing critical works of art could allow us to negate the dichotomy between the elite and the mass, professional artists and amateur parodists, and a radical politics and the politics of style.

• The Journal of Art Theory & Practice
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• no.13
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• pp.185-213
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• 2012

Charles Stankievech's 2011 installation LOVELAND includes a wall-sized screen depicting video footage of a barren arctic landscape in an enclosed room, painted and bathed in white light, that appears as an extension of the imaged environment. A melodic and industrial musical score emanates from multiple sound panels and as the music increases a cloud of purple smoke becomes visible on the horizon line in the distance and gradually advances toward the viewer until it completely fills the screen. The smoke then remains, rushing about madly and lapping at the border between the screen and the room before it suddenly subsides and the spectator is again left with the desolate landscape. The entire process takes a mere five minutes and then, fixed on an endless loop, begins again. This paper positions LOVELAND as an attempt to simulate a sublime experience of the end of the world through a transposition of the Arctic atmosphere into the gallery space. Encompassing a discussion of the historical and contemporary significance of the Arctic in popular culture, aesthetics and environmental politics, it is suggested that Stankievech employs an apocalyptic trope in reference to the unstable position of the North in the current political and ecological climate. Revisiting critiques of modernist exhibition practices and investigating the perceptual and temporal dimensions of the work, this analysis focuses primarily on the experience of the installation's spectator. Visually, aurally and phenomenologically immersed, the viewer is made subject to, and implicated in, the events unfolding on the screen and within the space. Due to the looping of the video footage, this paper argues that the apocalypse imaged in LOVELAND is presented as an endless event - incessantly enacted, yet infinitely deferred - and that the spectator is enveloped in an uncertain and unceasingly extended present moment.