Beautiful, Bright, and Blinding : Phenomenological Aesthetics and the Life of Art

Phenomenological analysis of beauty and art across various aspects of lived experience and culture. 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. H. Peter Steeves is Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University. He is the author of The Things Themselves: Phenomenology and the Return to the Everyday and the editor of Animal Others: On Ethics, Ontology, and Animal Life, both also published by SUNY Press. Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Section 1: Painting, Seeing, Concepts 1 Gone, Missing 2 Arshile’s Heel, Gorky’s Line 3 “You Are Here” and Not Here: The Concept of Conceptual Art First Installation You Are Here: An Olfactory Map of Life, 2008 (Chicago) Second Installation You Are Here: The Human Genome Projection, 2008 (Chicago) Third Installation You Are Here: The Map Precedes the Territory—Live Satellite Feed from Iraq, 2008 (Chicago) Fourth Installation You Are Here: The Lab Is Dystopia, 2008 (Chicago) Section 2: Moving Pictures and Memory 4 The Doubling of Death in the Films of Michael Haneke 5 Yep, Gaston’s Gay: Disney and the Beauty of a Beastly Love A Beast Is a Beast of Curse of Curse Beauty Is Proof, Proof Beauty Lefou I’m Afraid I’ve Been Thinking Mounting the Beast Tale as Old as Time 6 And Say the Zombie Responded? or, How I Learned to Stop Living and Unlove the Undead Section 3: Other Animal Others 7 The Man Who Mistook His Meal for a Hot Dog 8 Rachel Rosenthal Was an Animal Section 4: Laughing Beyond Modernity 9 “It’s Just a Bunch of Stuff that Happened”: The Simpsons and the Possibility of Postmodern Comedy 10 Quantum Andy Notes Index 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 Hie 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. Book jacket