Beautiful, Bright, and Blinding, livre ebook

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.
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
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
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