Browse

In early eighteenth-century Britain, writers asked after the nature and causes of the pleasure we feel when we encounter beauty. It took a painter, however, to steer the nascent field of philosophical aesthetics toward questions of spatial form. Drawing inspiration from William Hogarth’s 1753 treatise on beauty, this book traces the development of form as a concept in and for aesthetics. Hogarth’s experience as a draftsman and printmaker guided his dissent from the developing consensus on aesthetic pleasure and standards of taste. The immediate cause of aesthetic pleasure, he argues, is beautiful form, which is detected through the activity of formal abstraction. The insight that formal abstraction has heuristic value in judging beauty emerges from the way practitioners think about skill across the domains of art and craft. Zitin’s account of the history of form in eighteenth-century thought substitutes women and artisans, as virtuosos of aesthetic judgment, for the proverbial man of taste, a substitution with the power to reshape our understanding of canonical statements on aesthetics from the writings of Shaftesbury to Kant’s Third Critique.

The writers and artists described in this book are joined by a desire to embrace “Eastern” aesthetics as a means of redeeming “Western” technoculture. The assumption they all share is that at the core of Western culture since at least the Enlightenment there lies an originary and all-encompassing philosophical error, manifested most immediately in the perils of modern technology—and that Asian art offers a way out of that awful matrix. That desire, this book attempts to demonstrate, has informed Anglo- and even Asian-American debates about technology and art since the late nineteenth century and continues to skew our responses to our own technocultural environment. Although the “machine” has for over a hundred years functioned as an almost religious object of enthusiasm and veneration, American art and literature have been shaped as much by resistance to technology as by submission to it—and, with startling frequency, that resistance has taken the form of an investment this book identifies as Asia-as-technê: a compelling fantasy that would posit Eastern aesthetics as both the antidote to and the perfection of machine culture.