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Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic

Start Time:	Sunday, July 18, 2010 at 1:00pm
End Time:	Saturday, July 24, 2010 at 3:00pm
Location:	School of the Art Institute of Chicago

The Stone Summer Theory Institute is an intensive week of seminars, lectures, and panel discussions. World famous faculty will be on hand, including Hal Foster (one of the architects of postmodernism), Jay Bernstein (the leading scholar on Adorno and theories of the avant-garde), Eve Meltzer, Diarmuid Costello, and James Elkins.

This year’s event addresses one of the central puzzles of contemporary art practice: the choice between continuations of modernism (with its aesthetic values) and the many kinds of postmodernism (which privilege politics, gender, identity, and many issues outside of aesthetics). The choice remains a formative one for young artists, and it creates deep divisions in the teaching and practice of art. The postmodern stance of the anti-aesthetic was first defined by Hal Foster in 1980. Despite many challenges and thirty years of new art, the pairing of the aesthetic and the anti-aesthetic continues to offer no viable alternative except for adventitious and local experiments. The impasse is made more difficult by the proliferation of identity politics, which obscure other theories of meaning (for instance Slavoj Žižek and Gilles Deleuze), and it is made less negotiable by the hegemony of anti-aesthetics in academic discourse on art. This event, and the book we will produce, will be the first to discuss possible reformulations of the problem.

There will also be fifteen seminar participants, chosen in a worldwide competition; they include some senior scholars such as Michael Kelly, editor of the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics; Joaquín Barriendos, one of the foremost scholars of postcolonial studies; and Joana Cunha Leal, a leading modernist scholar in Lisbon; and twelve others.

The following events are free and open to everyone:

• An informal introductory lecture by James Elkins, in the Morton auditorium in the Art Institute of Chicago, Sunday, July 18, 1 PM.
• The opening roundtable discussion, with the faculty of the Summer Theory Institute, Monday, July 19, in the Ballroom, 112 South Michigan Avenue, starting at 9 AMm ending at noon. Audience participation is encouraged; some audience questions will be included in the book we produce.
• The closing roundtable discussion, in which the faculty will discuss the results of the week of seminars. Saturday, July 23, Morton Auditorium, Art Institute, from 10:30 AM to 4:30 PM. Audience participation is encouraged; some audience questions will be included in the book we produce.
• An evening lecture by Hal Foster, “In the Toils of the (Anti)Aesthetic with Gerhard Richter.” Monday, July 19, 7:30. Ballroom, 112 South Michigan Avenue.
• An evening lecture by Eve Meltzer, “By Turns: Antihumanism, the Anti-Aesthetic, and the Expanded Field.” Tuesday, July 20, 7:30. Ballroom, 112 South Michigan Avenue.
• An evening lecture by Diarmuid Costello, on the new “superstar” photography and its historical and philosophic roots. The lecture is titled “By Turns: Antihumanism, the Anti-Aesthetic, and the Expanded Field,” and it will be given Wednesday, July 21, at 7:30, in the Ballroom, 112 South Michigan Avenue.

More information, and a full schedule of events, is on the website:
http://www.stonesummertheoryinstitute.org/