Michael Fried and Philosophy

Modernism, Intention, and Theatricality

Mathew Abbott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138679801
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317191841
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

This volume brings philosophers, art historians, intellectual historians, and literary scholars together to argue for the philosophical significance of Michael Fried's art history and criticism. It demonstrates that Fried's work on modernism, artistic intention, the ontology of art, theatricality, and anti-theatricality can throw new light on problems in and beyond philosophical aesthetics. Featuring an essay by Fried and articles from world-leading scholars, this collection engages with philosophical themes from Fried's texts, and clarifies the relevance to his work of philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, Morris Weitz, Elizabeth Anscombe, Arthur Danto, George Dickie, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schiller, G. W. F. Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Denis Diderot, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Roland Barthes, Jacques Rancière, and Søren Kierkegaard. As it makes a case for the importance of Fried for philosophy, this volume contributes to current debates in analytic and continental aesthetics, philosophy of action, philosophy of history, political philosophy, modernism studies, literary studies, and art theory.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Abbreviations of Works
• Michael Fried and Philosophy
• 1 Modernism and the Discovery of Finitude
• 2 “When I Raise My Arm”: Michael Fried’s Theory of Action
• 3 Why Does Photography Matter as Art Now, as Never Before? On Fried and Intention
• 4 Schiller, Schopenhauer, Fried
• 5 Deep Relationality and the Hinge-like Structure of History: Michael Fried’s Photographs
• 6 Becoming Medium
• 7 Formalism and the Appearance of Nature
• 8 Michael Fried, Theatricality, and the Threat of Skepticism
• 9 Michael Fried’s Intentionality
• 10 On the (So-Called) Problem of Detail: Michael Fried, Roland Barthes, and Roger Scruton on Photography and Intentionality
• 11 The Aesthetics of Absorption
• 12 Grace and Equality, Fried and Rancière (and Kant)
• 13 Diderot’s Conception of Aesthetic Subjectivity and the Possibility of Art
• 14 The Promise of the Present: Michael Fried’s Poetry Now
• 15 Constantin Constantius Goes to the Theater
• Contributors
• Index