Mr Simon Josebury

Research project: Re-routing Disinterest

Abstract

This research asks how the notion of aesthetic distance conditions the production of meaning, and the act of looking. With the beauty–utility distinction within aesthetic theory as a framework, it examines the 18th century ‘culture of taste', the conception of disinterested contemplation within it, and then employs distance as a device, to examine the formal and material representation of aesthetic categories through printed matter and moving image.

This research will ask:

• What is the relationship between the philosophical construction of an autonomous aesthetic realm and the idea of distance from utility?
• How does this 18th century autonomous space of contemplation correlate to the conditions of existence of a contemporaneous emerging mercantile class?
• How does the requirement for universally valid aesthetic judgments correspond to modern conceptions of critical distance? 
• Can investigation of the formal representation of theoretical categories serve to usefully interrogate those propositions?