1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910791596803321

Autore

Day Gail

Titolo

Dialectical passions [[electronic resource] ] : negation in postwar art theory / / Gail Day

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New York, : Columbia University Press, c2011

ISBN

1-283-00882-3

9786613008824

0-231-52062-X

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (321 p.)

Collana

Columbia themes in philosophy, social criticism, and the arts

Disciplina

701/.18

Soggetti

Art, Modern - 20th century - Philosophy

Art, Modern - 21st century - Philosophy

Negation (Logic)

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

T.J. Clark and the pain of the unattainable beyond -- Looking the negative in the face : Manfredo Tafuri and the Venice school of architecture -- Absolute dialectical unrest, or, The dizziness of a perpetually self-engendered disorder -- The immobilization of "social abstraction" -- Afterword : hotel utopia.

Sommario/riassunto

Representing a new generation of theorists reaffirming the radical dimensions of art, Gail Day launches a bold critique of late twentieth-century art theory and its often reductive analysis of cultural objects. Exploring core debates in discourses on art, from the New Left to theories of "critical postmodernism" and beyond, Day counters the belief that recent tendencies in art fail to be adequately critical. She also challenges the political inertia that results from these conclusions. Day organizes her defense around critics who have engaged substantively with emancipatory thought and social process: T. J. Clark, Manfredo Tafuri, Fredric Jameson, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, and Hal Foster, among others. She maps the tension between radical dialectics and left nihilism and assesses the interpretation and internalization of negation in art theory. Chapters confront the claim that exchange and equivalence have subsumed the use value of cultural objects and with it



critical distance and interrogate the proposition of completed nihilism and the metropolis put forward in the politics of Italian operaismo. Day covers the debates on symbol and allegory waged within the context of 1980's art and their relation to the writings of Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man. She also examines common conceptions of mediation, totality, negation, and the politics of anticipation. A necessary unsettling of received wisdoms, Dialectical Passions recasts emancipatory reflection in aesthetics, art, and architecture.