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Vid Simoniti

University of Liverpool, Philosophy, Faculty Member

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Fabrizio Trifiro

University of Tromsø

Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca

Symposion: Theoretical and Applied Inquiries in Philosophy and Social Sciences

Romanian Academy - Iasi Subsidiary

University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna

Helene Landemore

Yale University

Linda M G Zerilli

University of Chicago

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Papers by Vid Simoniti

Art as Political Discourse

British Journal of Aesthetics, 2021

Much art is committed to political causes. However, does art contribute something unique to polit... more Much art is committed to political causes. However, does art contribute something unique to political discourse, or does it merely reflect the insights of political science and political philosophy? Here I argue for indispensability of art to political discourse by building on the debate about artistic cognitivism, the view that art is a source of knowledge. Different artforms, I suggest, make available specific epistemic resources, which allow audiences to overcome epistemic obstacles that obtain in a given ideological situation. My goal is to offer a general model for identifying cognitive advantages for artworks belonging to distinct artforms and genres (e.g. satire, visibility-raising artworks, caricatures…), in a way that can account for each artwork's historical and cultural specificity. More speculatively, however, my account also comments on the ancient struggle between philosophy and the arts as competing modes of persuasion, and expands our notion of legitimate political discourse to include a greater plurality of discursive genres.

The Living Image in Bio-Art and in Philosophy

Oxford Art Journal, 2019

With the advent of bio-art in the 1990s a tantalizing new vista opened up for artists: the possib... more With the advent of bio-art in the 1990s a tantalizing new vista opened up for artists: the possibility of creating living artworks in laboratories, of incarnating images that were previously only represented. In the decades that followed, biotechnology became increasingly sensationalised through scandalous, freakish imagery propagated in mass media, and so the question arose whether bio-art would participate in the scandal or offer critical inquiry into it. Here, I test the critical intentions of bio-artists by setting up a comparison between bio-art and bioethics: a philosophical discipline, which developed contemporaneously with, but separately from, bio-art. How artists and philosophers treat the image in biotechnology, I claim, is the key to understanding the competing claims of each discipline. Iconological notions of the living presence, the viral image and the pensive image are central to my inquiry. I develop my argument by comparing the works of artists Eduardo Kac, Stelarc and Maja Smrekar, and the philosopher Julian Savulescu.

Dada Data, the Alt-Right and the Sacrifice of Scepticism

Reality Machines: An Art Exhibition on Post-Truth: Exhibition Catalogue

I compare the collaging technique in contemporary digital art and in alt-right videos. It is curi... more I compare the collaging technique in contemporary digital art and in alt-right videos. It is curious that these two forms, while standing for different political options, have a similarly relaxed attitude towards truth. I identify three regimes of "post-truth" possibly at work here: lies, bullshit and simulacra. I argue that a fourth regime, the sacrifice of truth, better captures what is going on in new alt-right propaganda.
This short catalogue essay was published in the catalogue of "Reality Machines: An Art Exhibition on Post-Truth", organized by Mara Polgovsky-Ezcurra at the University of Cambridge in 2018

Virginia Woolf, Literary Style and Aesthetic Education

Journal of Aesthetic Education, 2016

Works of literature represent stories, characters and events: these are the contents of a work. I... more Works of literature represent stories, characters and events: these are the contents of a work. It is characteristic of works of literature that these contents are narrated in a distinct style of writing, in an author’s distinct literary ‘voice’. In this paper, I consider whether works of literature might represent something over and above their fictional contents in virtue of their style alone, and what consequences this might have for our thinking about aesthetic education. Both of these concerns—with what works of art represent and what kind of knowledge they make available to us—have been central to recent analytic philosophy of art, however, while I will pay due attention to these debates, my main route into the question will not be through philosophy but by means of considering Virginia Woolf's essays on the modernist break with earlier stylistic conventions. I suggest we may read Woolf’s remarks on modernism in literary style as preliminary work for a theory of how innovations in style make new kinds of understanding available to the reader.
Journal of Aesthetic Education

Artistic Research at the Edge of Science

Oxford Artistic Research Platform, 2017

What is the relationship between artistic research and other academic fields? Due to its proximit... more What is the relationship between artistic research and other academic fields? Due to its proximity to bioengineering, bio-art is an especially telling case study for thinking about this issue. Here I outline ‘the problem of absorption’. An artistic practice (bio-art) attempts to incorporate methods of an academic field (bioengineering), but instead of securing critical distance, it becomes assimilated back into that field. I discuss how bio-artists have come to negotiate this problem, considering the work of pioneers such as Ionat Zurr and Oron Catts, as well as more recent work by Maja Smrekar.

Assessing Socially Engaged Art

Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 2018

The last twenty-five years have seen a radical shift in the work of politically committed artists... more The last twenty-five years have seen a radical shift in the work of politically committed artists. No longer content to merely represent social reality, a new generation of artists has sought to change it, blending art with activism, social regeneration projects, and even violent political action. I assess how this form of contemporary art should lead us to rethink theories of artistic value and argue that these works make a convincing case for an often-dismissed position, namely, the pragmatic view of artistic value. However, the pragmatic view, when properly applied, sets the bar high indeed—art that tries to change society should be considered good art only when it succeeds in making a tangible difference.

Adrian Piper and the Rhetoric of Conceptual Art

Adrian Piper : a reader, 2018

Two questions have occupied art historical writing on the post-Conceptual, discursive, politicall... more Two questions have occupied art historical writing on the post-Conceptual, discursive, politically engaged art practises of the 1970s and after. Art historians have queried, firstly, the development of such committed art from the politically taciturn Conceptual art of the 1960s. Was that development a matter of historical accident—a contingent confluence of late modernism and of ground-shifting political developments of the late 1960s—or was there something intrinsically emancipatory to that moment: an aesthetic revolution, which facilitated the political one? Secondly, once art enters overt political discourse, what role do these practices occupy vis-à-vis 'non-art' political discourse? Do new, emancipatory kinds of rhetoric become available when political debate takes place within the distinct sphere of art making? I revisit these questions through the work of Adrian Piper. I read two bodies of Piper's work alongside one other: her performance-based Conceptual pieces of 1968–1971, and her 1978–1992 anti-racist installation works. Drawing on this analysis and on the socio-political background of what social psychology has described as the rise of 'modern' or 'subtle' racism, I suggest that to assess the rhetorical effectiveness of Conceptual art we need to reconsider the identity of its viewers.

Aesthetic Properties as Powers

European Journal of Philosophy, 2017

European Journal of Philosophy Realist positions about aesthetic properties are few and far betwe... more European Journal of Philosophy
Realist positions about aesthetic properties are few and far between, though sometimes developed by analogy to realism about secondary properties such as colours. By contrast, I advance a novel realist position about aesthetic properties, which is based on a disanalogy between aesthetic properties and colours. Whereas colours are usually perceived as relatively steady features of external objects, aesthetic properties are perceived as unsteady properties: as powers that objects have to cause a certain experience in the observer. Following on from this observation, I develop a realist account of aesthetic properties as causally efficient powers. Beauty is not merely in the mind of the observer; it is a power of an object to bring about a certain effect, as much instantiated in the object as its fragility or poisonousness. To show how such a view can be made ontologically respectable, I draw on recent 'dispositionalist' accounts of powers in philosophical metaphysics. I then offer two arguments in favour of this view. First, the view matches the phenomenology of aesthetic judgement. Second, the view offers an explanation of how it is that critics can demand agreement with their aesthetic judgements. 1 Aesthetic Properties Consider the following properties: beautiful, dreamy, cute, sombre, lovely, dreadful, ugly, astounding, drab, elegant. What aesthetic properties such as these have in common is hard to define: they are often mentioned in critical discourse about art, though we also describe natural scenes, people, animals, and even scientific theories as having them.2 However we define the scope of the aesthetic, though, it has long been felt that such properties are rather curious. On the one hand, when we attribute an aesthetic property to an object, we seem to be merely saying how the object makes us feel. Praising a painting as dreamy, we seem to say that it makes us feel elated and lost in thought. And yet ascriptions of aesthetic properties are also ruled by palpable standards of correctness. To say that a funeral is cute or that Knut the Polar Bear is sombre would clearly miss the mark (Figure 1). In this paper, I will argue that developing a proper ontology of aesthetic properties is the key to elucidating this curious situation. The question we should ask is as follows: Do aesthetic properties exist, and if so, what kind of properties are they?

Books by Vid Simoniti

Reality Machines: An Art Exhibition on Post-Truth

by Mara Polgovsky and Vid Simoniti

Art as Political Discourse

British Journal of Aesthetics, 2021

Much art is committed to political causes. However, does art contribute something unique to polit... more Much art is committed to political causes. However, does art contribute something unique to political discourse, or does it merely reflect the insights of political science and political philosophy? Here I argue for indispensability of art to political discourse by building on the debate about artistic cognitivism, the view that art is a source of knowledge. Different artforms, I suggest, make available specific epistemic resources, which allow audiences to overcome epistemic obstacles that obtain in a given ideological situation. My goal is to offer a general model for identifying cognitive advantages for artworks belonging to distinct artforms and genres (e.g. satire, visibility-raising artworks, caricatures…), in a way that can account for each artwork's historical and cultural specificity. More speculatively, however, my account also comments on the ancient struggle between philosophy and the arts as competing modes of persuasion, and expands our notion of legitimate political discourse to include a greater plurality of discursive genres.

The Living Image in Bio-Art and in Philosophy

Oxford Art Journal, 2019

With the advent of bio-art in the 1990s a tantalizing new vista opened up for artists: the possib... more With the advent of bio-art in the 1990s a tantalizing new vista opened up for artists: the possibility of creating living artworks in laboratories, of incarnating images that were previously only represented. In the decades that followed, biotechnology became increasingly sensationalised through scandalous, freakish imagery propagated in mass media, and so the question arose whether bio-art would participate in the scandal or offer critical inquiry into it. Here, I test the critical intentions of bio-artists by setting up a comparison between bio-art and bioethics: a philosophical discipline, which developed contemporaneously with, but separately from, bio-art. How artists and philosophers treat the image in biotechnology, I claim, is the key to understanding the competing claims of each discipline. Iconological notions of the living presence, the viral image and the pensive image are central to my inquiry. I develop my argument by comparing the works of artists Eduardo Kac, Stelarc and Maja Smrekar, and the philosopher Julian Savulescu.

Dada Data, the Alt-Right and the Sacrifice of Scepticism

Reality Machines: An Art Exhibition on Post-Truth: Exhibition Catalogue

I compare the collaging technique in contemporary digital art and in alt-right videos. It is curi... more I compare the collaging technique in contemporary digital art and in alt-right videos. It is curious that these two forms, while standing for different political options, have a similarly relaxed attitude towards truth. I identify three regimes of "post-truth" possibly at work here: lies, bullshit and simulacra. I argue that a fourth regime, the sacrifice of truth, better captures what is going on in new alt-right propaganda.
This short catalogue essay was published in the catalogue of "Reality Machines: An Art Exhibition on Post-Truth", organized by Mara Polgovsky-Ezcurra at the University of Cambridge in 2018

Virginia Woolf, Literary Style and Aesthetic Education

Journal of Aesthetic Education, 2016

Works of literature represent stories, characters and events: these are the contents of a work. I... more Works of literature represent stories, characters and events: these are the contents of a work. It is characteristic of works of literature that these contents are narrated in a distinct style of writing, in an author’s distinct literary ‘voice’. In this paper, I consider whether works of literature might represent something over and above their fictional contents in virtue of their style alone, and what consequences this might have for our thinking about aesthetic education. Both of these concerns—with what works of art represent and what kind of knowledge they make available to us—have been central to recent analytic philosophy of art, however, while I will pay due attention to these debates, my main route into the question will not be through philosophy but by means of considering Virginia Woolf's essays on the modernist break with earlier stylistic conventions. I suggest we may read Woolf’s remarks on modernism in literary style as preliminary work for a theory of how innovations in style make new kinds of understanding available to the reader.
Journal of Aesthetic Education

Artistic Research at the Edge of Science

Oxford Artistic Research Platform, 2017

What is the relationship between artistic research and other academic fields? Due to its proximit... more What is the relationship between artistic research and other academic fields? Due to its proximity to bioengineering, bio-art is an especially telling case study for thinking about this issue. Here I outline ‘the problem of absorption’. An artistic practice (bio-art) attempts to incorporate methods of an academic field (bioengineering), but instead of securing critical distance, it becomes assimilated back into that field. I discuss how bio-artists have come to negotiate this problem, considering the work of pioneers such as Ionat Zurr and Oron Catts, as well as more recent work by Maja Smrekar.

Assessing Socially Engaged Art

Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 2018

The last twenty-five years have seen a radical shift in the work of politically committed artists... more The last twenty-five years have seen a radical shift in the work of politically committed artists. No longer content to merely represent social reality, a new generation of artists has sought to change it, blending art with activism, social regeneration projects, and even violent political action. I assess how this form of contemporary art should lead us to rethink theories of artistic value and argue that these works make a convincing case for an often-dismissed position, namely, the pragmatic view of artistic value. However, the pragmatic view, when properly applied, sets the bar high indeed—art that tries to change society should be considered good art only when it succeeds in making a tangible difference.

Adrian Piper and the Rhetoric of Conceptual Art

Adrian Piper : a reader, 2018

Two questions have occupied art historical writing on the post-Conceptual, discursive, politicall... more Two questions have occupied art historical writing on the post-Conceptual, discursive, politically engaged art practises of the 1970s and after. Art historians have queried, firstly, the development of such committed art from the politically taciturn Conceptual art of the 1960s. Was that development a matter of historical accident—a contingent confluence of late modernism and of ground-shifting political developments of the late 1960s—or was there something intrinsically emancipatory to that moment: an aesthetic revolution, which facilitated the political one? Secondly, once art enters overt political discourse, what role do these practices occupy vis-à-vis 'non-art' political discourse? Do new, emancipatory kinds of rhetoric become available when political debate takes place within the distinct sphere of art making? I revisit these questions through the work of Adrian Piper. I read two bodies of Piper's work alongside one other: her performance-based Conceptual pieces of 1968–1971, and her 1978–1992 anti-racist installation works. Drawing on this analysis and on the socio-political background of what social psychology has described as the rise of 'modern' or 'subtle' racism, I suggest that to assess the rhetorical effectiveness of Conceptual art we need to reconsider the identity of its viewers.

Aesthetic Properties as Powers

European Journal of Philosophy, 2017

European Journal of Philosophy Realist positions about aesthetic properties are few and far betwe... more European Journal of Philosophy
Realist positions about aesthetic properties are few and far between, though sometimes developed by analogy to realism about secondary properties such as colours. By contrast, I advance a novel realist position about aesthetic properties, which is based on a disanalogy between aesthetic properties and colours. Whereas colours are usually perceived as relatively steady features of external objects, aesthetic properties are perceived as unsteady properties: as powers that objects have to cause a certain experience in the observer. Following on from this observation, I develop a realist account of aesthetic properties as causally efficient powers. Beauty is not merely in the mind of the observer; it is a power of an object to bring about a certain effect, as much instantiated in the object as its fragility or poisonousness. To show how such a view can be made ontologically respectable, I draw on recent 'dispositionalist' accounts of powers in philosophical metaphysics. I then offer two arguments in favour of this view. First, the view matches the phenomenology of aesthetic judgement. Second, the view offers an explanation of how it is that critics can demand agreement with their aesthetic judgements. 1 Aesthetic Properties Consider the following properties: beautiful, dreamy, cute, sombre, lovely, dreadful, ugly, astounding, drab, elegant. What aesthetic properties such as these have in common is hard to define: they are often mentioned in critical discourse about art, though we also describe natural scenes, people, animals, and even scientific theories as having them.2 However we define the scope of the aesthetic, though, it has long been felt that such properties are rather curious. On the one hand, when we attribute an aesthetic property to an object, we seem to be merely saying how the object makes us feel. Praising a painting as dreamy, we seem to say that it makes us feel elated and lost in thought. And yet ascriptions of aesthetic properties are also ruled by palpable standards of correctness. To say that a funeral is cute or that Knut the Polar Bear is sombre would clearly miss the mark (Figure 1). In this paper, I will argue that developing a proper ontology of aesthetic properties is the key to elucidating this curious situation. The question we should ask is as follows: Do aesthetic properties exist, and if so, what kind of properties are they?

Reality Machines: An Art Exhibition on Post-Truth

by Mara Polgovsky and Vid Simoniti