商品詳細

This book develops a postformalist aesthetics and explains its relevance to art history, the archaeology and anthropology of art, and philosophical aesthetics. It represents a rare effort at bringing together methods and concepts that are often addressed by separate disciplines.

Drawing on postformalist art history, the book applies the philosophical idiom of contemporary analytic aesthetics to a problem formulated and discussed in art history, archaeology, and anthropology: how to go about the aesthetic relevance of artefacts from temporally and culturally distant contexts. The author argues from the position that when art historians, anthropologists, or archaeologists position themselves as remote observers involved in an aesthetic analysis of artefacts, they make themselves part of a broader endeavour, one of discovering reasons for the artefacts' appearance. The author claims that crucial for this endeavour as well as the narrower goal of aesthetic analysis is the central postformalist notion of format, locating its points of contact and friction with the more traditional concepts of design, form, and medium. He rehabilitates the largely abandoned project of analysing universal styles and provides tools for a better grasp of the central role visual conspicuousness of artefacts plays in public life. In the process, he assesses famous cases of ascribing or denying aesthetic status to remote objects, including Cycladic marble figures, Papuan headhunters' shields, and Late Gothic monochrome wooden sculptures.

Objects of Authority will appeal to scholars and advanced students working on philosophical, art-historical, and anthropological theories of visual art and material culture.