The aesthetic dimension of visual culture

How can aesthetic enquiry contribute to the study of visual culture? There seems to be little doubt that aesthetic theory ought to be of interest to the study of visual culture. For one thing, aesthetic vocabulary has far from vanished from contemporary debates on the nature of our visual experiences and its various shapes, a fact especially pertinent where dissatisfaction with vulgar value relativism prevails. Besides, the very question - ubiquitous in the debates on visual culture - of what is natural and what is acquired in our visual experiences has been a topic in aesthetics at least since the Enlightenment. And last but not least, despite attempts to study visual culture without employing the concept of art, there is no prospect of this central subject of aesthetic theory ebbing away from visual studies. The essays compiled in this volume show a variety of points of intersection and involvement between aesthetics and visual studies; some consider the future of visual art, some the conditions and characteristics of contemporary visual aesthetic experience, while others take on the difficult question of the relation between visual representation and reality. What unites them is their authors' willingness to think about contemporary visual culture in the conceptual frame of aesthetics. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of philosophical aesthetics, art history, and cultural studies Content: Table of contents list of illustrations acknowledgements introduction part i in defence of sociology neuroaesthetics on bildwissenschaft part ii aesthetics in the expanded field of culture hidden aesthetics in referential images why the verbal may be experienced as visual aesthetics based on a perceptual model haptic visuality and neuroscience part iii danto's narrative notion of history and the future of art the aesthetic dimension of žižek's conception of cinema cavell on film and scepticism photographic images in the digital age a change in essence? contributors index.