Margins
What Art Is Like, In Constant Reference to the Alice Books book cover
What Art Is Like, In Constant Reference to the Alice Books
2012
First Published
3.08
Average Rating
128
Number of Pages

What Art Is Like is a comic, serious inquiry into the nature of art. It provides welcome relief from prevailing modes of explaining art that involve definitions, philosophical claims, and critical judgments put forth by third parties. Scrapping all such chatter, Miguel Tamen’s aphoristic lark with aesthetic questions proceeds by taking its technical vocabulary only from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass . According to Tamen, it would be ridiculous to think of poems or paintings or films or any variety of artistic production as distinct from other things in the world, including people. Talking about art should be contiguous with talking about many other relevant and important matters. Tamen offers a series of analogies and similes to help us imagine these connected experiences. One, taken from the analytical table of contents where the book is writ small, suggests that “understanding a poem is like understanding a cat; neither ever says anything back and you can’t keep a conversation with them. All art is like this, but not only art is like this; nature, the past, numbers are also like this.” Tamen takes up many central issues in aesthetics and the philosophy of art, including the connection between art and having fuzzy ideas about art, the mistake of imagining that art-decisions are put forth by art-courts where you are both judge and jury, and the notion that what happens with art also happens to you.

Avg Rating
3.08
Number of Ratings
12
5 STARS
17%
4 STARS
8%
3 STARS
42%
2 STARS
33%
1 STARS
0%
goodreads

Author

Miguel Tamen
Miguel Tamen
Author · 3 books
MIGUEL TAMEN é professor (e director do Programa em Teoria da Literatura) na Universidade de Lisboa. Deu aulas em várias universidades americanas, nomeadamente, desde 2000 como visitante, na Universidade de Chicago. Foi senior fellow no Stanford Humanities Center e Rockefeller Fellow no National Humanities Center. Escreveu vários livros, o último dos quais What Art Is Like.
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