Publication details
Estetika, její pojmy a zhoubnost úvodů
| Title in English | Aesthetics, its Concepts and viciousness of Introductions |
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| Authors | |
| Year of publication | 2013 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | Visual studies are interdisciplinary; hence in the area of theory and methodology they often refer to other fields. Therefore, the effort to create a synthetizing introduction to visual studies is attempting the impossible. The originating works may seemingly fascinate by the richness of their scope; yet taking a closer look, one discovers their desperate superficiality, insufficiency and confusion. Moreover, these readers are always compiled according to a certain idea, an ideological line that will ultimately do an unskilled reader (i.e. the ideal reader of these works) more harm than good. An illustrative example – pars pro toto – can be represented by the Czech edition of the substantial volume by Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright Introduction to Visual Culture. It can be certainly criticised from many various aspects. This contribution will concentrate on two of them: First, it is an oversimplification of complex fields. It is clearly evident e.g. in aesthetics when the two authors reduce contemporary aesthetics exclusively to aesthetic judgements in the case of the criteria of beauty and ugliness, and they attach too much importance to Bourdieu's theory of distinction. The second aspect of criticism goes hand in hand with the afore-mentioned reduction – limitations given by the regional specificity of the orientation of the "home field". This is the only way how we can explain that Sturken and Cartwright can fill up the entire short chapter, dedicated to two thousand years of aesthetic reasoning, by two aesthetic notions and one sociologist. Just as every larger company has its own "philosophy" today, in nearly all media and industrial products we can find "aesthetics". And this is exactly the same in social sciences. It would be very unfortunate if visual studies, just due to deforming introductions, remained in the position of instructions, and not research. |
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