This article explores the visual friction between the concealment of technology and the need to stage mimetic scenes in Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen. The article relies on the critical reception of the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk in musicology, as well as in media, performance, and theatre studies. Drawing on productions and commentaries critical of the iconic Gesamtkunstwerk's attempted retrieval of a lost natural state, the article examines correlations between phantasmagoria, special effects, movement detection technology, and the interactive devices of multimedia and digital scenography. These correlations are framed within a theoretical methodology of historical discourse and media archaeologies. Three specific productions of the Ring are discussed, namely the inaugural and centenary productions at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, as well as Robert Lepage's production for the Metropolitan Opera of New York in 2010–2012.

The article explores the main cases of Hungarian neo-avant-garde cinema in terms of re-emergence of visual material and the introduction of electronic innovations resulting in the transformation of reality. Among the research conducted in Béla Balázs Studio based on reframing the perception limits in the 1960s and the 1970s, the most innovative were Gábor Bódy's intermedia experiments. Along with launching K/3 subgroup within BBS, Bódy directed its objectives to reduce the material derived from reality and to visually intervene into media image electronically transforming the landscape of his films. Innovatively adapting the Sándor Weöres's verse, the film Narcissus and Psyche (1983) aimed at using hyper-real aesthetics to reframe the film reality. Starting from 1980, Bódy founded an international magazine Infermental to disseminate the advent of the video and electronics by creating a community drew on sharing news about emerging media image.

Traditionally, beauty is understood as an ability of some objects (artworks included) to occasion in viewers a distinctive type of unmediated/pure pleasure—aesthetic pleasure. According to this common understanding of beauty, political–critical art does not seem to raise in viewers the feeling of aesthetic pleasure. Many contemporary critical artists and politically engaged artists deliberately produce an art as unappealing to the senses as possible (their attitude could be called, following Arthur Danto, kalliphobia—“beauty phobia”). Critical art is a type of art which usually does not strike us with beauty at first sight because this “political art” usually deals with issues of social injustice and political struggles, rendering contemplation and aesthetic pure pleasure unachievable. Yet, even if beauty, in critical art's case, seems to be a difficult, demanding, and not an immediately recognisable one (mostly because of its unappealing, unsettling look), this does not mean that it lacks or is at odds with critical engagement (as some critical artists and theorists have argued). The argument of this paper is that not every beautiful thing looks good at first sight. By the same token, not everything that looks beautiful is in fact beautiful. Drawing on Immanuel Kant's neglected pulchritude adhaerens (dependent beauty), I argue that political–critical art is characterised by a dependent type of beauty (beauty a thing has as a thing of a certain kind and with a certain function) as opposed to free beauty (as something we like it freely on its own account, independent of what it is and what it does). Political–critical art can claim a dependent beauty (an impure, “difficult” and not straightforward pleasurable type of beauty) without being compelled to submit itself, at the same time, to the free beauty.

This article provides a case study of decolonial counter-memory in contemporary indigenous artist Alan Michelson's 2009 Third Bank of the River. Installed inside the lobby of the tri-national border station between the Akwesasne Mohawk Nation, Canada, and the United States—the most legally disputed territory in North America—Michelson's artwork recovers the seventeenth-century Two Row wampum belt as model for reforming relationships at the border. This wampum belt memorializes a commitment between the Haudenosaunee and European settlers to co-exist in balanced interdependence and remains a key touchstone in indigenous political philosophy and activism. Interpreted in the post-9/11 build-up of state power at the disputed border zone, Third Bank proposes a model of international dialogue and nation-to-nation diplomacy that contrasts with the ongoing conditions of settler colonialism. It thus stands out as an important indigenous perspective on the widespread interest in memory in global contemporary art, in which artists are recovering a new viewpoint on contemporaneity through the reconceptualization of historical pasts.Mark Watson is an assistant professor of Art History at Clayton State University in Atlanta. He received his PhD in modern American art history from Columbia University in New York in 2012. His research interests include contemporary art and theory, modern American art, Native North American art, and the relationship of art to countercultural social movements. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in American Art, Art History, Third Text, and the edited volume, West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965–1977 (University of Minnesota, 2011).

Having been the most widespread practice of photography since the late 19th century, it is only in the recent few decades that family photography has come into focus of academic attention. Scholars working with family albums have mainly come from anthropology, whereas scholars from the aesthetical fields, art history, photography studies, and cultural studies have been more hesitant about how to approach such a material. Using three family photo albums from the late 1960s and onwards as examples, the goal of this paper is to underline that family photos contain emotional, psychological, and affective qualities that reach further than the individual owner and that should be put forward, also within the fields of aesthetics and humanities. Family photo albums are about social and emotional communication, they can be interpreted as ways of understanding and coming to terms with life, and at the same time they document more sociological aspects of daily lives, that we do not have access to from other historical sources. The paper suggests a theoretical framing as a combination of now “classical” photography theory and more recent cultural theory in order to highlight the possible interpretative findings in an analysis of family photography drawing on cultural theory, social-cultural anthropology, material culture studies, affect theory, and phenomenology.

The Bay Area's Center for Tactical Magic has been performing “magical” art interventions since 2000. The Center's work augments traditional activist techniques by offering new conceptions of what art and activism can entail in a contemporary urban context. This article explores how Jacques Rancière's reconfigured relationship between art and politics can be applied to the Center's work, providing new distributions of the sensible for participants.

Both the veil and sunglasses aim to disrupt gazes. Marshal McLuhan has analysed sunglasses and their relationship with his system of hot and cool media. The attractive eyes of the veiled woman invite the gaze to further scrutiny. A general but relatively profound attraction is effectuated first, which will then create the desire to discover the rest of the face. The perceptual mechanics of dark glasses works the other way. Here the official part of the face is freely exposed, but it loses a part of its attractiveness because the deeper or “real” meaning of the features cannot be fully construed and, in many cases, is not supposed to be construed at all. By hiding in an apparently “cool” way one's official facial expressions, the resulting play with desire and attraction makes the veil rather hot in the McLuhanian sense. Further, the article examines if the veiling of women prevents or fosters fetishisation and compares the veil to the technique of cropping.Thorsten Botz-Bornstein was born in Germany, did his undergraduate studies in Paris, and received a Ph.D. in philosophy from Oxford University in 1993. As a postdoctoral researcher based in Finland he undertook research for four years on Russian formalism in Russia and the Baltic countries. He received a “habilitation” from the EHESS in Paris in 2000. He has also been researching for three years in Japan on the Kyoto School, and worked for the Center of Cognition of Hangzhou University (China) as well as a at Tuskegee University in Alabama. He is now Associate Professor of philosophy at the Gulf University for Science and Technology in Kuwait.

This article investigates how cultural circulation of art may be considered from two different perspectives: one sees the circulation of art within a globalization paradigm according to which contemporary art has become increasingly global by circulating among and transgressing different geographical and national borders, whereas the other focuses on the circulation of art across different epistemological borders. Thus, the first is an intra-discursive circulation of art insofar as the epistemological discourse of art itself is not transgressed despite the focus on cultural transgression within the globalization paradigm. The latter, on the other hand, is an inter-discursive circulation of art, since it focuses on art's ability to work, simultaneously, within different epistemological discourses. By analysing the artwork Free Universal Construction Kit, the article critically investigates the aesthetic potentials of these two different paradigms. The analysis is carried out by considering how Kantian subject positions regarding the aesthetic can be taken on within each paradigm. The author demonstrates that, paradoxically, the inter-discursive circulation of art prompts for greater aesthetic potentials than the intra-discursive circulation of the globalization paradigm.

I found myself in a peculiar place where I questioned the very foundations of my belief in the art of film. This was not an ideal situation, especially since I had started working in a new way. I had felt that the essay film form was an oasis of possibilities, and I wanted to see how it related to my idea of ‘‘film as thinking,’’ which is also the title of my doctoral project in artistic research. The critical spirit of essayism had got me in its hold before I had come very far, or was this merely a phase common to any kind of creative process, or maybe just the consequence of having time to doubt? I do not know really, but I think I came out on the other side*at least for a moment anyway. (Published: 19 March 2013) Citation: Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, Vol. 5 , 2013 http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/jac.v5i0.20625

In order to understand globalization, we need to consider what globalization is not. That is, in order to understand the mechanisms and elements that work toward globalization, we must, in a sense,...