philosophy and art new essays at the intersection

Enter the characters you see below

Sorry, we just need to make sure you're not a robot. For best results, please make sure your browser is accepting cookies.

Type the characters you see in this image:

(Stanford users can avoid this Captcha by logging in.)

Stanford Libraries will be undergoing a system upgrade beginning Friday, June 21 at 5pm through Sunday, June 23.

During the upgrade, libraries will be open regular hours and eligible materials may be checked out. Item status and availability information may not be up to date. Requests cannot be submitted and My Library Account will not be available during the upgrade.

• Send to text email RefWorks EndNote printer

Aesthetics and ethics : essays at the intersection

Available online, at the library.

Green Library

More options

• Find it at other libraries via WorldCat
• Contributors

Description

Creators/contributors, contents/summary.

• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• 1. Introduction: aesthetics and ethics Jerrold Levinson
• 2. Three versions of objectivity: moral, aesthetic, and scientific Richard W. Miller
• 3. Aesthetic value, moral value, and the ambitions of naturalism Peter Railton
• 4. About consistency in one's personal aesthetics Ted Cohen
• 5. Art, narrative, and moral understanding Noel Carroll
• 6. Realism of character and the value of fiction Gregory Currie
• 7. The ethical criticism of art Berys Gaut
• 8. How bad can good art be? Karen Hanson
• 9. Beauty and evil: the case of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will Mary Devereaux
• 10. The naked truth Arthur C. Danto
• 11. Aesthetic derogation: hate speech, pornography, and the aesthetic contexts Lynne Tirrell
• Bibliography
• Index of names and titles.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

Bibliographic information

Acquired with support from.

The Milton M. and Olga A. Maharam Memorial Book Fund

Browse related items

• Stanford Home
• Maps & Directions
• Search Stanford
• Emergency Info
• Terms of Use
• Non-Discrimination
• Accessibility

© Stanford University , Stanford , California 94305 .

• Try the new Google Books
• Advanced Book Search
• Barnes&Noble.com
• Books-A-Million
• Find in a library
• All sellers  »

Get Textbooks on Google Play

Rent and save from the world's largest eBookstore. Read, highlight, and take notes, across web, tablet, and phone.

Go to Google Play Now »

Other editions - View all

Bibliographic information

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to  upgrade your browser .

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

• We're Hiring!
• Help Center

Jerrold Levinson, Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection

2001, J Value Inquiry

Related Papers

Aaron Meskin

Ordinary discourse about film is pervasively ethical. From our casual conversations about the moral status of cinematic villains and heroines, through debates about the effects of the portrayal of violence by Hollywood International, to arguments about the portrayal of sex and sexuality, film talk is intimately tied up with ethical concerns and evaluations. It seems to me that the philosophy of film should take this discourse seriously, and attempt to offer an account of the importance of the ethical to the cinematic.

Abigail Kinsey

This essay looks at the Orientalist paintings of Gérôme alongside the philosophical debate on art and morality. In light of Said's Orientalism, and a more acute understanding of the problems surrounding representations of the near and middle East, these works have been deemed morally problematic for various reasons. However, does this diminish the aesthetic value of the work of art? Can we and should we, as modern viewers, separate moral and aesthetic judgement in order to appreciate the artistic value of a work of art?

Svetlana Yefimenko

This thesis examines the instrumentalist critique of the Kantian notion of aesthetic autonomy as exemplified in Marxist and feminist thought and suggests a resolution through recourse to an existentialist aesthetics which combines the aesthetic theories of Friedrich Nietzsche and Theodor Adorno.

Philosophy Compass

Art and pornography are often thought to be mutually exclusive. The present article argues that this popular view is without adequate support. Section 1 looks at some of the classic ways of drawing the distinction between these two domains of representation. In Section 2, it is argued that the classic dichotomies (subjectivity versus objectification, the beautiful versus the smutty, contemplation versus arousal, the complex versus the one-dimensional, the original versus the formulaic, imagination versus fantasy) may help to illuminate the differences between certain prototypical instances of pornography and art, but will not serve to justify the claim that pornography and art are fundamentally incompatible. Section 3 considers those definitions of pornography that make an a priori distinction between pornographic and artistic representations. The difference between the ‘merely’ erotic and the pornographic is also discussed in this context. Section 4 provides a critical assessment of the most recent and elaborate arguments against the compatibility of pornography and art. Finally, in Section 5, a case is made for the existence of pornographic art, as a subcategory of erotic art.

The British Journal of Aesthetics 51.2 (April 2011): 137-147

James Harold

This paper has three aims: to define autonomism clearly and charitably, to offer a positive argument in its favor, and to defend a larger view about what is at stake in the debate between autonomism and its critics. Autonomism is here understood as the claim that a valuer does not make an error in failing to bring her moral and aesthetic judgments together, unless she herself does values doing so. The paper goes on to argue that reason does not require the valuer to make coherent her aesthetic and moral evaluations. Finally, the paper shows that the denial of autonomism has realist commitments that autonomism does not have, and concludes that issues of value realism and irrealism are relevant to the debates about autonomism in ways that have not hitherto been recognized.

The Journal of Value Inquiry

Elizabeth B Coleman

Ross Jacobs

Adriana Clavel-Vázquez

Advocates of the ethical criticism of art claim that works’ ethical defects or merits have an impact on their aesthetic value. Against ethical critics, autonomists claim that moral criteria should not be part of the considerations when evaluating works of art as art. Autonomism refers to the view that an artwork’s aesthetic value is independent from its ethical value. The purpose of this paper is to examine how autonomism has been defended in the contemporary discussion in analytic aesthetics. I present three versions of autonomism: Richard Posner’s radical autonomism, James C. Anderson and Jeffrey T. Dean, and James Harold’s moderate autonomism, and Francisca Pérez Carreño’s robust autonomism. I argue that robust autonomism offers a stronger argument against the ethical critic. However, I point to some difficulties for Pérez Carreño’s account, and conclude by suggesting how further work in autonomism might go around them.

Andrew Woodhall

The debate about whether ethics relates to aesthetics, and if so, how, has been of importance for both philosophers and society, with far-reaching effects on several important issues, such as whether ethics affects aesthetic value, what works should be enjoyed, censorship, the ethical effects of art, and the permissibility of pornography. The problem is that the main positions within the debate, Moralism (i.e. ethics can affect aesthetics) and Autonomism (i.e. ethics can not affect aesthetics), seem inadequate and have led to an apparently irresolvable impasse, as both of their apparently mutually-exclusive intuitions seem required for any adequate theory. As this relationship is important, in itself and for these philosophical and social debates to get off the ground, resolving this impasse seems imperative. In this paper I argue that this impasse arises by failing to consider the nature of aesthetics and ethics before positing a theory based solely on intuitions. By understanding these natures first, I argue that a theory that combines both the Moralist and Autonomist intuitions can be plausibly put forward. I do this by showing that aesthetic value is based on subjective and relative taste, and thus what constitutes aesthetic value is as Autonomism claims. Despite this, I argue that ethics often impacts value from outside a domain’s independent evaluative standard, such as occurs with the value of scientific research, and thus perhaps ethics can affect our overall taste (and thus aesthetic value) without being a part of aesthetic value. I argue that this new theory resolves the impasse, captures all intuitions, resolves several problems and avoids others that Moralism and Autonomism encounter, has beneficial social consequences, and enables (and provides insight into) the philosophical and social debates. I conclude that understanding the nature of aesthetics and ethics therefore leads to this more plausible theory within the debate.

Loading Preview

Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.

RELATED PAPERS

Jenefer Robinson

Philosophia

Alessandro Giovannelli

Lynne Tirrell

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research

Keren Gorodeisky

Oxford University Press

Andrea Sauchelli

Stephen Davies

Journal of Applied Philosophy

Raja Halwani

Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature

Jukka Mikkonen

Alvaro González Franco

BRENDA ZOAR LARA

Narrative Art, Knowledge and Ethics

Iris Vidmar Jovanović

Veronika Fedorova

The British Journal of Aesthetics 48.1 (January 2008): 45-64

Midwest Studies in Philosophy XXXIV (2010): 278-292

in: Huemer, Wolfgang and Vendrell Ferran, Íngrid (eds) Beauty. New Essays in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, Philosophia Verlag, München

Ingrid Vendrell-Ferran , Wolfgang Huemer

Sarah Stewart-Kroeker

British Journal of Aesthetics

Eli I Lichtenstein

The Journal of aesthetics and art criticism

Caroline (Carol) S gould

Christoph Baumberger

Maryam Koleini

The British Journal of Aesthetics

Studies in American Humor

Phillip Deen

Philosophy and Literature

Jeanette Bicknell

Stephanie Patridge

The Cambridge Handbook of Philosophy of Language

Laura T. Di Summa

Elise Ashby

Centre for Cultural Policy Studies Research Papers. O. …

Eleonora Belfiore

Ulrich de Balbian

The British Journal of Aesthetics 52.3, pp. 287-300.

RELATED TOPICS

•   We're Hiring!
•   Help Center
• Find new research papers in:
• Health Sciences
• Earth Sciences
• Cognitive Science
• Mathematics
• Computer Science
• Academia ©2024

• Search Menu

Sign in through your institution

• Advance articles
• Author Guidelines
• Submission Site
• Order Offprints
• Open Access Options
• Self-Archiving Policy
• Why Publish with JAAC?
• About Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
• About American Society for Aesthetics
• Editorial Board
• Advertising & Corporate Services
• Journals on Oxford Academic
• Books on Oxford Academic

• < Previous

Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection by Jerrold Levinson

• Article contents
• Figures & tables
• Supplementary Data

Marcia Muelder Eaton, Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection by Jerrold Levinson, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism , Volume 58, Issue 1, Winter 2000, Pages 73–74, https://doi.org/10.2307/432351

• Permissions Icon Permissions

Article PDF first page preview

American society for aesthetics members, personal account.

• Sign in with email/username & password
• Get email alerts
• Save searches
• Purchase content
• Activate your purchase/trial code
• Add your ORCID iD

Institutional access

Sign in with a library card.

• Sign in with username/password
• Recommend to your librarian
• Institutional account management
• Get help with access

Access to content on Oxford Academic is often provided through institutional subscriptions and purchases. If you are a member of an institution with an active account, you may be able to access content in one of the following ways:

IP based access

Typically, access is provided across an institutional network to a range of IP addresses. This authentication occurs automatically, and it is not possible to sign out of an IP authenticated account.

Choose this option to get remote access when outside your institution. Shibboleth/Open Athens technology is used to provide single sign-on between your institution’s website and Oxford Academic.

• Click Sign in through your institution.
• Select your institution from the list provided, which will take you to your institution's website to sign in.
• When on the institution site, please use the credentials provided by your institution. Do not use an Oxford Academic personal account.
• Following successful sign in, you will be returned to Oxford Academic.

If your institution is not listed or you cannot sign in to your institution’s website, please contact your librarian or administrator.

Enter your library card number to sign in. If you cannot sign in, please contact your librarian.

Society Members

Society member access to a journal is achieved in one of the following ways:

Sign in through society site

Many societies offer single sign-on between the society website and Oxford Academic. If you see ‘Sign in through society site’ in the sign in pane within a journal:

• Click Sign in through society site.
• When on the society site, please use the credentials provided by that society. Do not use an Oxford Academic personal account.

If you do not have a society account or have forgotten your username or password, please contact your society.

Sign in using a personal account

Some societies use Oxford Academic personal accounts to provide access to their members. See below.

A personal account can be used to get email alerts, save searches, purchase content, and activate subscriptions.

Some societies use Oxford Academic personal accounts to provide access to their members.

Viewing your signed in accounts

Click the account icon in the top right to:

• View your signed in personal account and access account management features.
• View the institutional accounts that are providing access.

Signed in but can't access content

Oxford Academic is home to a wide variety of products. The institutional subscription may not cover the content that you are trying to access. If you believe you should have access to that content, please contact your librarian.

For librarians and administrators, your personal account also provides access to institutional account management. Here you will find options to view and activate subscriptions, manage institutional settings and access options, access usage statistics, and more.

Short-term Access

To purchase short-term access, please sign in to your personal account above.

Don't already have a personal account? Register

Email alerts

Citing articles via.

• Recommend to Your Librarian
• Advertising and Corporate Services
• Journals Career Network

Affiliations

• Online ISSN 1540-6245
• Print ISSN 0021-8529
• Copyright © 2024 American Society for Aesthetics
• About Oxford Academic
• Publish journals with us
• University press partners
• What we publish
• New features  
• Open access
• Rights and permissions
• Accessibility
• Advertising
• Media enquiries
• Oxford University Press
• Oxford Languages
• University of Oxford

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide

• Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
• Cookie settings
• Cookie policy
• Privacy policy
• Legal notice

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

• Daily Deals
• Brand Outlet
• Help & Contact
• Watchlist Expand Watch List Loading... Sign in to see your user information
• Recently Viewed
• Bids/Offers
• Purchase History
• Saved Searches
• Saved Sellers
• Collection beta
• Notification
• Expand Cart Loading... Something went wrong. View cart for details.

Picture 1 of 1

Aesthetics and ethics: essays at the intersection by jerrold levinson **mint**.

• 98.1% positive
• Seller's other items Seller's other items
• Contact seller
• Add to cart
• Add to watchlist

Oops! Looks like we're having trouble connecting to our server.

Refresh your browser window to try again.

Shop with confidence

Item specifics, about this product, product information, product identifiers, product key features, additional product features, item description from the seller, shipping and handling.

Sales Tax for an item #226202331124

Return policy

Payment details

Detailed seller ratings, average for the last 12 months, popular categories from this store, seller feedback (265,354), product ratings and reviews, more to explore :.

• Ethics Textbooks ,
• Ethics Textbook Textbooks ,
• Ethics Textbooks in English ,
• Ethics Paperback Textbooks ,
• Ethics Hardcover Textbooks ,
• Essays & Speeches Antiquarian & Collectible Books ,
• Essays & Speeches Antiquarian & Collectible Books in Russian ,
• Ralph Waldo Emerson Essays & Speeches Antiquarian & Collectible Books ,
• Essays & Speeches Pre - 1700 Antiquarian & Collectible Books ,
• Essays & Speeches 1950-Now Antiquarian & Collectible Books

Items related to Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection (Cambridge...

Aesthetics and ethics: essays at the intersection (cambridge studies in philosophy and the arts) - softcover.

• 4.24 21 ratings by Goodreads

• About this title
• About this edition

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.

• Publisher Cambridge University Press
• Publication date 2001
• ISBN 10  0521788056
• ISBN 13  9780521788052
• Binding Paperback
• Number of pages 340
• Editor Levinson Jerrold

Convert currency

Shipping: US$ 3.75 Within U.S.A.

Add to Basket

Shipping: US$ 4.00 Within U.S.A.

Other Popular Editions of the Same Title

Featured edition.

ISBN 10:  0521585139 ISBN 13:  9780521585132 Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 1998 Hardcover

Top Search Results from the AbeBooks Marketplace

Aesthetics and ethics: essays at the intersection (cambridge studies in philosophy and the arts).

Book Description paperback. Condition: Good. Connecting readers with great books since 1972! Used textbooks may not include companion materials such as access codes, etc. May have some wear or writing/highlighting. We ship orders daily and Customer Service is our top priority!. Seller Inventory # S_377420915

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Book Description paperback. Condition: Acceptable. Connecting readers with great books since 1972. Used textbooks may not include companion materials such as access codes, etc. May have condition issues including wear and notes/highlighting. We ship orders daily and Customer Service is our top priority!. Seller Inventory # S_363797712

Book Description Condition: Good. Condition Good: Book is used and in good condition with some wear from use. This may include stickers on cover, wear to dustcover/missing dustcover, inside cover, spine, slight curled corners, stains, and wear to the fore edge. All orders ship via UPS Mail Innovations. Shipping can take up to 14 business days from first scan to be delivered. Seller Inventory # 4J2HM0005H4Q

Book Description Softcover. Condition: Good. This major collection of essays stands at the border of aesthetics and ethics and deals with charged issues of practical import: art and morality, the ethics of taste, and censorship. As such its potential interest is by no means confined to professional philosophers; it should also appeal to art historians and critics, literary theorists, and students of film. Prominent philosophers in both aesthetics and ethics tackle a wide array of issues. Some of the questions explored in the volume include: Can art be morally enlightening and, if so, how? If a work of art is morally better does that make it better as art? Is morally deficient art to be shunned, or even censored? Do subjects of artworks have rights as to how they are represented? Do artists have duties as artists and duties as human beings, and if so, to whom? How much tension is there between the demands of art and the demands of life?. Seller Inventory # SONG0521788056

Book Description Paperback. Condition: Very Good. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged. Seller Inventory # GOR004653355

Book Description Condition: Good. Book is in Used-Good condition. Pages and cover are clean and intact. Used items may not include supplementary materials such as CDs or access codes. May show signs of minor shelf wear and contain limited notes and highlighting. 1.28. Seller Inventory # 0521788056-2-4

Book Description Condition: Fair. Acceptable/Fair condition. Book is worn, but the pages are complete, and the text is legible. Has wear to binding and pages, may be ex-library. 1.28. Seller Inventory # 353-0521788056-acp

Book Description Condition: Fair. Buy with confidence! Book is in acceptable condition with wear to the pages, binding, and some marks within 1.28. Seller Inventory # bk0521788056xvz189zvxacp

Book Description Paperback. Condition: very good. Very Good Copy. Customer Service Guaranteed. Seller Inventory # think_very_0521788056

Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. New. Fast Shipping and good customer service. Seller Inventory # Holz_New_0521788056

There are 18 more copies of this book

Last updated 20/06/24: Online ordering is currently unavailable due to technical issues. We apologise for any delays responding to customers while we resolve this. For further updates please visit our website: https://www.cambridge.org/news-and-insights/technical-incident

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings .

Login Alert

• > Journals
• > Canadian Journal of Philosophy
• > Volume 50 Issue 2
• > Two Dogmas of the Artistic-Ethical Interaction Debate

Article contents

Two dogmas of the artistic-ethical interaction debate.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2019

Can artworks be morally good or bad? Many philosophers have thought so. Does this moral goodness or badness bear on how good or bad a work is as art? This is very much a live debate. Autonomists argue that moral value is not relevant to artistic value; interactionists argue that it is. In this paper, I argue that the debate between interactionists and autonomists has been conducted unfairly: all parties to the debate have tacitly accepted a set of constraints which prejudices the issue against the interactionist. I identify two demands which are routinely placed on arguments seeking to establish interaction and argue that they are, in fact, mutually conflicting.

There are two upshots. First, in light of this, it is unsurprising that arguments for interaction have failed to meet with everybody’s satisfaction. The constraints are such that no argument can meet them. Second, recognizing this helps us uncover a new, promising, but hitherto overlooked strategy for establishing artistic-ethical interaction.

Access options

A correction has been issued for this article:.

Two Dogmas of the Artistic-Ethical Interaction Debate – Erratum

Linked content

Please note a correction has been issued for this article.

This article has been cited by the following publications. This list is generated based on data provided by Crossref .

• Google Scholar

View all Google Scholar citations for this article.

Save article to Kindle

To save this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle .

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

• Volume 50, Issue 2
• Louise Hanson (a1)
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/can.2019.13

Save article to Dropbox

To save this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Dropbox account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox .

Save article to Google Drive

To save this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Google Drive account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive .

Reply to: Submit a response

- No HTML tags allowed - Web page URLs will display as text only - Lines and paragraphs break automatically - Attachments, images or tables are not permitted

Your details

Your email address will be used in order to notify you when your comment has been reviewed by the moderator and in case the author(s) of the article or the moderator need to contact you directly.

You have entered the maximum number of contributors

Conflicting interests.

Please list any fees and grants from, employment by, consultancy for, shared ownership in or any close relationship with, at any time over the preceding 36 months, any organisation whose interests may be affected by the publication of the response. Please also list any non-financial associations or interests (personal, professional, political, institutional, religious or other) that a reasonable reader would want to know about in relation to the submitted work. This pertains to all the authors of the piece, their spouses or partners.

This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Without cookies your experience may not be seamless.

• MFS Modern Fiction Studies

• Contributors
• Johns Hopkins University Press
• Volume 70, Number 2, Summer 2024
• pp. 361-362
• 10.1353/mfs.2024.a928349
• View Citation

Additional Information

ELIZABETH S. ANKER <[email protected]> is Professor of Law and Professor of English at Cornell University. Her books include On Paradox: The Claims of Theory (2022), Fictions of Dignity: Embodying Human Rights in World Literature (2017), and the essay collections Critique and Postcritique (2017, with Rita Felski) and New Directions in Law and Literature (2017, with Bernadette Meyler). Her current research concerns the “anti-liberal” jurisprudence of the Roberts Court. She also edits the book series “Corpus Juris: The Humanities in Politics and Law” for Cornell UP.

MICHAEL W. CLUNE <[email protected]> is Samuel B. and Virginia C. Knight Professor of Humanities at Case Western Reserve University. Clune’s most recent critical book is A Defense of Judgment . The tenth anniversary edition of his first creative work, White Out , appeared in 2023. His novel, Pan , is forthcoming from Penguin in 2025. Clune’s essays have appeared in Critical Inquiry , PMLA , Harper’s , The Atlantic , and elsewhere.

TODD CRONAN <[email protected]> is the author of Against Affective Formalism: Matisse, Bergson, Modernism (2013), Red Aesthetics: Rodchenko, Brecht, Eisenstein (2021), and Nothing Permanent: Modern Architecture in California (2023). He is the editor of Minor White’s Memorable Fancies (forthcoming in 2025). He is a founder and editor-in-chief of nonsite.org . He is Professor of Art History at Emory University.

THEO DAVIS <[email protected]> is the author of Ornamental Aesthetics: The Poetry of Attending in Thoreau, Dickinson, and Whitman (2016) and Formalism, Experience, and the Making of American Literature in the Nineteenth Century (2007). Her current project, Attachment Styles , is an exploration of attachment theory and of how attachment inflects nineteenth-century American literature. She is Professor and Chair of English at Northeastern University.

SIMON DURING <[email protected]> is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne. He is the author of Foucault and Literature: Towards a Genealogy of Writing (1992), Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic (2004), and Against Democracy: Literary Experience in the Era of Emancipations (2012), among other books. He is currently writing about the theory of the humanities.

ALEX KING <[email protected]> teaches in the Department of Philosophy at Simon Fraser University. Her article “Universalism and the Problem of Aesthetic Diversity” recently appeared in the Journal of the American Philosophical Association . She is the author of What We Ought and What We Can (2019) and the editor of a forthcoming collection of essays, Philosophy and Art: New Essays at the Intersection .

ROBERT S. LEHMAN <[email protected]> is an associate professor of English at Boston College, as well as Co-Chair of the Mahindra Humanities Center’s Seminar in Dialectical Thinking in the Humanities at Harvard University. He is the author of Impossible Modernism: T. S. Eliot, Walter Benjamin, and the Critique of Historical Reason (2016), and he is currently completing a book on the transformation of traditional aesthetic categories in the context of literary and visual modernism.

RICHARD MORAN <[email protected]> is Brian D. Young Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. He is the author of Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self-Knowledge (2001), The Philosophical Imagination: Selected Essays , and The Exchange of Words: Speech, Testimony and Intersubjectivity (2018).

YI-PING ONG <[email protected]> is Associate Professor of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University. Her book The Art of Being: Poetics of the Novel and Existentialist Philosophy (2018) brings the history and theory of the novel together with existentialist thought. Other work on nineteenth- and twentieth- century philosophy and literature has appeared in PMLA , Philosophy and Literature , Comparative Literature , Twentieth-Century Literature , Post45 , and nonsite.org . Her current project explores authenticity and the public sphere.

C. NAMWALI SERPELL <[email protected]> is a Zambian writer and Professor of English at Harvard. She’s the author of Seven Modes of Uncertainty (2014), The Old Drift: A Novel (2019), Stranger Faces (2020), and The Furrows: An Elegy (2022). She is currently writing a collection of essays on Toni Morrison.

Project MUSE Mission

Project MUSE promotes the creation and dissemination of essential humanities and social science resources through collaboration with libraries, publishers, and scholars worldwide. Forged from a partnership between a university press and a library, Project MUSE is a trusted part of the academic and scholarly community it serves.

2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland, USA 21218

+1 (410) 516-6989 [email protected]

©2024 Project MUSE. Produced by Johns Hopkins University Press in collaboration with The Sheridan Libraries.

Now and Always, The Trusted Content Your Research Requires

Built on the Johns Hopkins University Campus

• Advanced Search
• All Categories
• Metaphysics and Epistemology
• Epistemology
• Metaphilosophy
• Metaphysics
• Philosophy of Action
• Philosophy of Language
• Philosophy of Mind
• Philosophy of Religion
• Value Theory
• Applied Ethics
• Meta-Ethics
• Normative Ethics
• Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality
• Philosophy of Law
• Social and Political Philosophy
• Value Theory, Miscellaneous
• Science, Logic, and Mathematics
• Logic and Philosophy of Logic
• Philosophy of Biology
• Philosophy of Cognitive Science
• Philosophy of Computing and Information
• Philosophy of Mathematics
• Philosophy of Physical Science
• Philosophy of Social Science
• Philosophy of Probability
• General Philosophy of Science
• Philosophy of Science, Misc
• History of Western Philosophy
• Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy
• Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy
• 17th/18th Century Philosophy
• 19th Century Philosophy
• 20th Century Philosophy
• History of Western Philosophy, Misc
• Philosophical Traditions
• African/Africana Philosophy
• Asian Philosophy
• Continental Philosophy
• European Philosophy
• Philosophy of the Americas
• Philosophical Traditions, Miscellaneous
• Philosophy, Misc
• Philosophy, Introductions and Anthologies
• Philosophy, General Works
• Teaching Philosophy
• Philosophy, Miscellaneous
• Other Academic Areas
• Natural Sciences
• Social Sciences
• Cognitive Sciences
• Formal Sciences
• Arts and Humanities
• Professional Areas
• Other Academic Areas, Misc
• About PhilArchive
• Frequently Asked Questions
• OAI Handler
• Journal policies
• Code of conduct
• Create an account

Creativity, Spontaneity, and Merit

Author's profile.

Archival history

Reprint years.

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

In New York City’s Subway System, There’s Beauty in the Mundane

“Contemporary Art Underground” showcases hundreds of artworks commissioned by the M.T.A., by artists like Alex Katz, Kiki Smith and Vik Muniz.

By Erica Ackerberg

The New York City subway commute can be unpleasant: the rats, the packed cars, the schedule changes, the smells. But CONTEMPORARY ART UNDERGROUND: MTA Arts & Design New York (The Monacelli Press, $60) , by Sandra Bloodworth and Cheryl Hageman, invites us to see extraordinary beauty in the mundane.

Showcasing the more than 100 site-specific projects that have been commissioned by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority for the city’s subway platforms, overpasses and tunnels since 2015, this book also documents the artists’ creative processes in drawings, models and photographs.

Along the walls of the B/D train station on 167th Street, Rico Gatson created “Beacons,” eight portraits of Black and Latino leaders with connections to the Bronx. He modeled each mosaic on black-and-white photographs, adding bright rays “coming out of a Pan-African sensibility of black, red and green,” Gatson has said, “but expanding with yellow and orange and sometimes evolving into silver and gold.”

Ann Hamilton’s “CHORUS” (2018) is a white marble mosaic of words taken from the preamble of the Declaration of Independence and the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, “a song stitched step by step” along a wall of the No. 1 train platform at the World Trade Center Cortlandt station.

In the Q train station on 72nd Street, Vik Muniz created “Perfect Strangers” (2017) — life-size depictions of dozens of his fellow riders in colorful mosaics. “People come to New York to see the attractions,” Muniz wrote in his proposal for the project. “But one of the city’s main attractions is its people: diverse, absurdly casual and original.”

The multidisciplinary artist Kiki Smith created her first-ever mosaic, a five-part project in 2022, for the new Long Island Rail Road station at Grand Central Madison. Underground, between entrances to the tracks, Smith’s intricate, large-scale works depict natural scenes in the world outside: sunlight hitting the East River, a deer among reeds, turkeys in a forest.

In his signature style of large, close-up faces (including that of his wife, Ada) against bright-hued backgrounds, the New York native Alex Katz’s 2019 series “Metropolitan Faces” decorates the mezzanine of the 57th Street F station with colorful glass paintings.

The book travels aboveground to show work on a number of Metro-North and L.I.R.R. lines, including the kaleidoscopic laminated glass panels based on watercolors by Mary Judge along an overpass at the Wyandanch station.

The stunning works documented in the book almost make you wish for a train delay.