Gadamers Hermeneutical Aesthetics

This book offers a sustained scholarly analysis of Gadamers reflections on art and our experience of art. It examines fundamental themes in Gadamers hermeneutical aesthetics such as play, festival, symbol, contemporaneity, enactment, arts performative ontology, and hermeneutical identity. The first two chapters focus on Gadamers critical appropriation and movement beyond Kantian and Hegelian aesthetics. (Chapter 2 also includes a coda on Heideggers influence.) The final three chapters argue for the continued relevance of Gadamers hermeneutical aesthetics by bringing his claims into conversation with contemporary art and music, as well as the ethical and sociopolitical dimensions of the Artworld and art praxis. The ethical and sociopolitical aspects of art- and music-making are given particular attention in chapters devoted to 20th-century African American artist Romare Bearden, Banksys street art, and a range of jazz expressions, from traditional jazz to the complex practice of free jazz. Gadamers Hermeneutical Aesthetics will appeal to researchers and advanced students working on Gadamer, philosophical hermeneutics, continental philosophy, aesthetics, and the philosophy of contemporary art and music.