Michael Fried and Philosophy

This book brings together philosophers, literary theorists, and art historians to argue for the philosophical significance of Michael Fried's art history and criticism. Fried's analyses of absorption and theatricality throw new light on problems in aesthetics, as well as questions surrounding authenticity, scepticism, modernity, and politics.

This volume brings philosophers, art historians, intellectual historians, and literary scholars together to argue for the philosophical significance of Michael Fried's art history and criticism. It demonstrates that Fried's work on modernism, artistic intention, the ontology of art, theatricality, and anti-theatricality can throw new light on problems in and beyond philosophical aesthetics. Featuring an essay by Fried and articles from world-leading scholars, this collection engages with philosophical themes from Fried's texts, and clarifies the relevance to his work of philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, Morris Weitz, Elizabeth Anscombe, Arthur Danto, George Dickie, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schiller, G. W. F. Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Denis Diderot, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Roland Barthes, Jacques Rancière, and Søren Kierkegaard. As it makes a case for the importance of Fried for philosophy, this volume contributes to current debates in analytic and continental aesthetics, philosophy of action, philosophy of history, political philosophy, modernism studies, literary studies, and art theory.

Introduction: Michael Fried and Philosophy

Mathew Abbott

1. Modernism and the Discovery of Finitude

Mathew Abbott

2. "When I raise my arm": Michael Fried's Theory of Action

Walter Benn Michaels

3. Why Does Photography Matter as Art Now, as Never Before? On Fried and Intention

Robert Pippin

4. Schiller, Schopenhauer, Fried

David Wellbery

5. Deep Relationality and the Hinge-like Structure of History: Michael Fried's Photographs

Stephen Mulhall

6. Becoming Medium

Stephen Melville

7. Formulism and the Appearance of Nature

Richard Moran

8. Michael Fried, Theatricality, and the Threat of Skepticism

Paul J. Gudel

9. Michael Fried's Intentionality

Rex Butler

10. On the (So-Called) Problem of Detail: Michael Fried, Roland Barthes, and Roger Scruton on Photography and Intentionality

Diarmuid Costello

11. The Aesthetics of Absorbtion

Magdalena Ostas

12. Grace and Equality, Fried and Rancière (and Kant)

Knox Peden

13. Diderot's Conception of Aesthetic Subjectivity and the Possibility of Art

Andrew Kern

14. The Promise of the Present: Michael Fried's Poetry Now

Jennifer Ashton

15. Constantin Constantius Goes to the Theater

Michael Fried