The Mask of Art: Breaking the Aesthetic Contract--film and LiteratureClyde Taylor exposes the concept of "art" as a tool of ethnocentricity and racial ideology. He challenges the history of aesthetics as a recent invention of privileged Western consumerism, questioning the myth of its ancient Greek origin."The aesthetic experience", he suggests, is a device employed by Euro-American culture to dominate historical interpretation. Areas such as cinema studies, the avant garde, and Marxist and feminist criticism are compromised by this aesthetic reasoning. Examining various texts including The Birth of a Nation, Taylor demonstrates how rationales of "art" are used to Mask personal, class, and cultural biases. |
Contents
CHAPTER | 8 |
Figureground vasefaces per Rubin | 32 |
The Control of Cultural Meaning | 53 |
Copyright | |
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The Mask of Art: Breaking the Aesthetic Contract—Film and Literature Clyde Taylor Limited preview - 1998 |
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Aesopian aesthetic discourse aesthetic reasoning aestheticism African American ancient Greek art-culture system artists beauty Black Aesthetic Black women bourgeois century character Chesnutt cinema civilization classical colonized color concept critical critique cultural Despotic discursive irony dominant entelechial Ethiopicism Ethiopicist Euro-enlightenment European feminism feminist aesthetic film film's frames function gaze genre Griffith's hero Hollywood human idea ideal identity ideology imperfect intellectual interpretation irony issue knowledge Laura Kipnis liberal literary literature male manichean Marxist mask master narrative meaning minstrel show modern modernist moral myth narrator Negro novel painting perception philosophy politics of representation position production Pudd'nhead Wilson question racial racism radical Red Sorghum repressed resistance rhetorical ritual role sculpture self-authenticating significance slave slavery social society story Sylvia Wynter symbolic thetic third cinema thought tion tive Toni Morrison tradition tural ture University values Western White Winckelmann writing Yeelen