Beautiful, Bright, and Blinding

Phenomenological Aesthetics and the Life of Art

H. Peter Steeves
eISBN-13: 9781438466552

eBook Features

Rent or Buy from $ 34.95 USD
Note: We do not guarantee supplemental material with textbooks (e.g. CD's, Music, DVD's, Access Code, or Lab Manuals)

Additional Book Details

Through a careful analysis of concrete examples taken from everyday experience and culture, Beautiful, Bright, and Blinding develops a straightforward and powerful aesthetic methodology founded on a phenomenological approach to experience—one that investigates how consciousness engages with the world and thus what it means to take such things as tastes, images, sounds, and even a life itself as art. H. Peter Steeves begins by exploring what it means to see, and considers how disruptions of sight can help us rethink how perception works. Engaging the work of Derrida, Heidegger, and Husserl, he uses these insights about "seeing" to undertake a systematic phenomenological investigation of how we perceive and process a range of aesthetic objects, including the paintings of Arshile Gorky, the films of Michael Haneke, Disney's Beauty and the Beast, zombie films, The Simpsons, the performance art of Rachel Rosenthal and Andy Kaufman, and even vegan hot dogs. Refusing hierarchical distinctions between high and low art, Steeves argues that we must conceptualize the whole of human experience as aesthetic: art is lived, and living is an art.

ISBNs 1438466552, 9781438466545, 9781438466552
Language English