Category: aesthetics

Reading Flusser

The article “The Protreptic Writer” is now available the special issue of Flusser Studies on the theme Flusser as a writer.  In it,  I try to share my own experience of reading Flusser — an experience...

Luxury

It has nothing to do with ostentation and need not be expensive. It has everything to do with inefficiency, wastefulness and impracticality. In this book, Lambert Wiesing sets out to simply describe luxury. Rather...

Art as Ritual

Flusser felt that the term “art”– in the West — was almost always understood either as “work”–intended to change the world—or as “communication”—intended to share something with another person.  He thought both were wrong....

Protreptic Writing

I am grateful to Lambert Wiesing for having described and named a form of writing that does not set out to demonstrate the truth or value of the author’s views as such, but provides...

Honeywell

At the September meeting of Telltales (writing group based in Falmouth), I read “Honeywell”, a short piece about the Minneapolis company now gone global.  It was a response to the theme chosen for that...

The Visibility of the Image

I am pleased to be the translator of this, the second edition of Lambert Wiesing’s Die Sichtbarkeit des Bildes.  The book, first published in 1996,  draws on the history of formal aesthetics to present an...