Art and Its Significance — An Anthology of Aesthetic Theory (1994) — Stephen David Ross

SUNY Press | ISBN: 9780791418529 | Condition: Good | Sold by Crappy Old Books™

A book about why we care about art, assembled with the kind of seriousness that makes museum guards nod approvingly—and yet somehow it’s also a parade of gloriously incompatible opinions. Art and Its Significance corrals centuries of aesthetic hand-wringing into one volume: a salon where grand theories arrive overdressed, metaphors try to pay the bill, and Beauty keeps ghosting everyone’s texts.

Editor Stephen David Ross plays maître d’: he seats classic voices beside modern provocateurs, then lets the conversation clink along. You’ll pass through familiar galleries—form, expression, mimesis, the sublime, the everyday—while learning that the phrase “that’s not art” has been on repeat since roughly always. Expect judgy Platonists, eloquent Kantians, skeptical empiricists, romantics who feel a lot (professionally), pragmatists with rolled sleeves, and contemporary critics who can say “context” three times fast without spilling their espresso.

What’s inside (besides arguments):

• Beauty vs. Truth, round ∞: a title fight with no referee and excellent footwork.

• Form walks into a bar: Content is already there; they pretend they don’t know each other.

• The Work of Art™: object or event? aura or admin? Yes.

• Audience participation: interpretation as sport; spectators as co-authors; critics as weather systems.

• Museums & markets: the aura of the white cube and the price of having one.

Why you’ll actually read it (and not just display it near a plant):

• Snackable primary texts: short selections that give you the voice, not just a summary in sensible shoes.

• A map, not a maze: headnotes and framing that nudge you toward the quarrel at hand without taking sides.

• Argument ammo: perfect for winning dinner conversations you shouldn’t have started.

• Cross-training for the artsy brain: philosophy with friendly lighting; theory that remembers people make things.

House rules the anthology gently enforces:

1. Every bold claim about art has a footnote somewhere shaking its head.

2. If a theory explains everything, it probably explains nothing—but it will look terrific doing it.

3. Beauty and politics are not roommates; they are exes who keep meeting at openings.

4. The sentence “It depends” is not a cop-out; it’s the beginning of taste.

About this particular specimen: Condition: Good, via Crappy Old Books—the world’s most charmingly self-slandering purveyor. Expect the normal signs of a life lived on a desk: a touch of shelf-wear, a spine that knows what’s in it, pages intact and eager to disagree with you. In other words, the ideal state for a book about art: used, not used up.

Potential side effects:

• Unsolicited opinions about wall labels.

• Compulsive rearrangement of your bookshelf into movements.

• Saying “phenomenological” out loud and getting away with it.

• A mysterious inclination to defend both sides of an argument with equal passion.

Tiny, on-theme epigram:

Art: the shortest distance
between “look” and “think.”

If you want a single volume that lets you eavesdrop on the long, funny, exasperating quarrel about what art is, does, and costs—without making you choose a team—this is it. Pull up a chair; the symposium never ends, and the conversation is better than the canapés.

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