These are reference works on ideas about art. Two are Wikipedia articles and one is a philosophy encyclopedia entry. This page lists three sources, oldest first where dated.
The Concept of the Aesthetic
James Shelley traces the aesthetic from 18th-century taste to current debates on aesthetic value. The entry is an argued survey with its own critical judgments. It closes by contrasting Euthyphronic and Socratic theories of aesthetic value.
Hauntology
This overview runs from Derrida's coinage to use in music criticism and anthropology. It collects definitions and names of writers who used the word. It offers citations to other works but no original argument.
Vorticism
The article gives a dated history of Vorticism, from its origins to later exhibitions. It names many artists and venues with dates. It rests on notes citing exhibition catalogues, chiefly Richard Cork's.
Connections to other subjects
These links are this wiki's own reading, not claims the sources make.
- The Concept of the Aesthetic and Developing Taste, from Review, taste and expertise. Kowalski calls taste a trained instinct, and also asks you to explain why things work. Shelley traces the older thesis that aesthetic judgment is immediate. So software's talk about taste inherits a problem. Can an instinct stay immediate once it must give reasons?
- The Concept of the Aesthetic and The Resonant Computing Manifesto, from Society and technology. The manifesto borrows Alexander's quality without a name and calls it resonance. Shelley's entry traces how hard such value has been to define. New theories either reduce it to something else or treat it as basic. The manifesto's five principles seem to take the first route.
Glossary
- BLAST
- The Vorticists' magazine, which carried their manifesto.
- Dazzle camouflage
- Bold geometric ship paint meant to confuse enemy range estimates.
- Deconstruction
- A style of philosophical reading, tied to Derrida, that questions fixed origins and meanings.
- Disinterest
- Taking pleasure in something without wanting to use it or possess it.
- Ethnography
- Research that studies a culture by close observation of its people.
- Euthyphro dilemma
- A puzzle about whether goodness or pleasure comes first.
- Formalism
- The view that only an artwork's perceptible form matters artistically.
- Futurism
- An Italian avant-garde movement, led by Marinetti, that celebrated speed and machines.
- Hedonism
- The view that aesthetic value is value because things give pleasure.
- Immediacy thesis
- The claim that judging beauty is like sensing, not reasoning from principles.
- Ontology
- The branch of philosophy that studies what exists and what it means to be.
- Retrofuturism
- Art that imagines the future as people of the past pictured it.
- Vorticism
- A 1914 British avant-garde movement favoring hard-edged, geometric near-abstraction.