Practical Aesthetics

Jill Bennett is Professor and Director of the National Institute for Environmental Arts, and Associate Dean of the College of Fine Arts at the University of New South Wales. She is the author of Empathic Vision (2005), a study of art and traumatic events.

• 1. PRACTICAL AESTHETICS: BEYOND DISCIPLINES2. ONE EVENT AFTER ANOTHER 3. ATMOSPHERIC AFFECTS: PAST EVENTS AND PRESENT FEELING4 INTERMEDIA: FIELD AND DETAIL 5 THE PRESENCE OF POLITICIANS 6 UNIMAGINABLE EVENTS AND DISTANT DISASTERS 7 COMPASSION, RESENTMENT AND THE EMOTIONAL LIFE OF IMAGES

"Jill Bennett is one of the strongest as well as most subtle voices in contemporary art criticism and theory. Her work on affect has been widely recognized. Starting from the position of art as contemporary - defined as orientation to real-world experience - Bennett here develops a range of perspectives and concepts to understand how art can address world-shattering disasters as well as mundane but incisive developments in visual culture. Her approach vigorously refutes any attempt to lock art up in disciplines - be they art history of visual culture. Instead, she proposes "whole-field analysis" and, taking her cue from the art itself, she demonstrates the value of such an approach beyond disciplinary boundaries." Mieke Bal Cultural Theorist, Critic, Video Artist and Professor Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam '[the book] itself is a kind of encounter, inspiring further creative thinking...Practical Aesthetics will play a key role in re-attaching art to the social'. Amelia Jones, Professor and Grierson Chair in Visual Culture at McGill University, author of Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts 'In her remarkable new book Jill Bennett proposes a radical rethinking of aesthetics...indispensible and richly suggestive for cultural studies, critical theory and contemporary art.' Abigail Solomon-Godeau, critic, curator and Professor Emerita of History of Art at the University of California.