Diarmuid Costello
Biographic Data
| ID | 295504 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Diarmuid Costello |
| GIVEN NAMES | Diarmuid |
| FAMILY NAME | Costello |
| SIGNATURE | COSTELLO D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Warwick |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 23 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 13 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Die Schönheit des Mittelmenschen: Stephan Balkenhol’s ‘Everyday Beauty’
This essay considers Stephan Balkenhol’s ‘everyman and woman’ sculptures through the optic of Kant’s ‘ideal of beauty’ (§17, Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, 1790). I take a pair of miniature figures as my test case. Despite minor variations, all these sculptures depict the same generic man and woman, a man or woman who average or middling in every way. What could make depictions of average everydayness so compelling? For a clue, I turn to Kant’s…
Conceptual Art and Aesthetic Ideas
This paper considers whether Kant’s aesthetics withstands the challenge of conceptual art. I begin by looking at two competing views of conceptual art by recent philosophers, before settling on an ‘inclusive’ view of the form: conceptual art includes both ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ non-perceptual art (NPA). I then set out two kinds of conceptual complexity that I argue are implicated by all aesthetic judgements of art (as art) on Kant’s view: the concep…
On the Very Idea of a “Political” Work of Art
Art can be “political” in a variety of ways. Mobilizing these differences offers correspondingly many ways for artists producing “political art” to understand themselves, and the activity in which they are engaged. To demonstrate this, the present article focuses on a particular work of art (The Battle of Orgreave, 2001), by a particular contemporary artist (Jeremy Deller), seeking to locate it within this broader possibility space. The work cons…
Spontaneity and Materiality: What Photography is in the Photography of James Welling
Images are double agents. They receive information from the world, while also projecting visual imagination onto the world. As a result, mind and world tug our thinking about images, or particular kinds of images, in contrary directions. On one common division, world traces itself mechanically in photographs, whereas mind expresses itself through painting.1 Scholars of photography disavow such crude distinctions: much recent writing attends in de…
What is Abstraction in Photography
There is confusion about what counts as abstraction in photography: art theorists class very different kinds of photographs as abstract, and common philosophical views of photography, if true, should cause us to doubt their very possibility. I address two questions here: ‘What is Abstraction?’ and ‘What is Abstraction in Photography?’ To the answer the second, I briefly consider a third: ‘What is Photography?’ so that the resulting account is not…
III“But I Am Killing Them!” Reply to Charles Palermo and Jan Baetens on Agency and Automatism
Automat, Automatic, Automatism: Rosalind Krauss and Stanley Cavell on Photography and the Photographically Dependent Arts
Introduction: Photography between Art History and Philosophy
Introduction: Photography After Conceptual Art
This special issue of Art History aims to open up a debate about what is at stake in contemporary photographic art. It forms part of a large AHRC funded research project, ‘Aesthetics after Photography’, which focuses on the challenges that recent art photography poses for aesthetic theory. A collaborative and cross-disciplinary endeavour, the research project is directed by Margaret Iversen of the Department of Art History and Theory at the Unive…
Automatism, Causality and Realism: Foundational Problems in the Philosophy of Photography
This article contains a survey of recent debates in the philosophy of photography, focusing on aesthetic and epistemic issues in particular. Starting from widespread notions about automatism, causality and realism in the theory of photography, the authors ask whether the prima facie tension between the epistemic and aesthetic embodied in oppositions such as automaticism and agency, causality and intentionality, realism and fictional competence is…
On the Very Idea of a 'Specific' Medium: Michael Fried and Stanley Cavell on Painting and Photography as Arts
Whatever happened to "embodiment"? the eclipse of materiality in danto's ontology of art
Lyotard's Modernism
Automatism, Causality and Realism: Foundational Problems in the Philosophy of Photography
This article contains a survey of recent debates in the philosophy of photography, focusing on aesthetic and epistemic issues in particular. Starting from widespread notions about automatism, causality and realism in the theory of photography, the authors ask whether the prima facie tension between the epistemic and aesthetic embodied in oppositions such as automaticism and agency, causality and intentionality, realism and fictional competence is…
On the Very Idea of a 'Specific' Medium: Michael Fried and Stanley Cavell on Painting and Photography as Arts
What is Abstraction in Photography
There is confusion about what counts as abstraction in photography: art theorists class very different kinds of photographs as abstract, and common philosophical views of photography, if true, should cause us to doubt their very possibility. I address two questions here: ‘What is Abstraction?’ and ‘What is Abstraction in Photography?’ To the answer the second, I briefly consider a third: ‘What is Photography?’ so that the resulting account is not…
III“But I Am Killing Them!” Reply to Charles Palermo and Jan Baetens on Agency and Automatism
Automat, Automatic, Automatism: Rosalind Krauss and Stanley Cavell on Photography and the Photographically Dependent Arts
Introduction: Photography between Art History and Philosophy
Whatever happened to "embodiment"? the eclipse of materiality in danto's ontology of art
Lyotard's Modernism
Whatever happened to "embodiment"? the eclipse of materiality in danto's ontology of art
On the Very Idea of a 'Specific' Medium: Michael Fried and Stanley Cavell on Painting and Photography as Arts
Introduction: Photography After Conceptual Art
This special issue of Art History aims to open up a debate about what is at stake in contemporary photographic art. It forms part of a large AHRC funded research project, ‘Aesthetics after Photography’, which focuses on the challenges that recent art photography poses for aesthetic theory. A collaborative and cross-disciplinary endeavour, the research project is directed by Margaret Iversen of the Department of Art History and Theory at the Unive…
Automatism, Causality and Realism: Foundational Problems in the Philosophy of Photography
This article contains a survey of recent debates in the philosophy of photography, focusing on aesthetic and epistemic issues in particular. Starting from widespread notions about automatism, causality and realism in the theory of photography, the authors ask whether the prima facie tension between the epistemic and aesthetic embodied in oppositions such as automaticism and agency, causality and intentionality, realism and fictional competence is…
Automat, Automatic, Automatism: Rosalind Krauss and Stanley Cavell on Photography and the Photographically Dependent Arts
Introduction: Photography between Art History and Philosophy
III“But I Am Killing Them!” Reply to Charles Palermo and Jan Baetens on Agency and Automatism
What is Abstraction in Photography
There is confusion about what counts as abstraction in photography: art theorists class very different kinds of photographs as abstract, and common philosophical views of photography, if true, should cause us to doubt their very possibility. I address two questions here: ‘What is Abstraction?’ and ‘What is Abstraction in Photography?’ To the answer the second, I briefly consider a third: ‘What is Photography?’ so that the resulting account is not…
Spontaneity and Materiality: What Photography is in the Photography of James Welling
Images are double agents. They receive information from the world, while also projecting visual imagination onto the world. As a result, mind and world tug our thinking about images, or particular kinds of images, in contrary directions. On one common division, world traces itself mechanically in photographs, whereas mind expresses itself through painting.1 Scholars of photography disavow such crude distinctions: much recent writing attends in de…
On the Very Idea of a “Political” Work of Art
Art can be “political” in a variety of ways. Mobilizing these differences offers correspondingly many ways for artists producing “political art” to understand themselves, and the activity in which they are engaged. To demonstrate this, the present article focuses on a particular work of art (The Battle of Orgreave, 2001), by a particular contemporary artist (Jeremy Deller), seeking to locate it within this broader possibility space. The work cons…
Conceptual Art and Aesthetic Ideas
This paper considers whether Kant’s aesthetics withstands the challenge of conceptual art. I begin by looking at two competing views of conceptual art by recent philosophers, before settling on an ‘inclusive’ view of the form: conceptual art includes both ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ non-perceptual art (NPA). I then set out two kinds of conceptual complexity that I argue are implicated by all aesthetic judgements of art (as art) on Kant’s view: the concep…
Die Schönheit des Mittelmenschen: Stephan Balkenhol’s ‘Everyday Beauty’
This essay considers Stephan Balkenhol’s ‘everyman and woman’ sculptures through the optic of Kant’s ‘ideal of beauty’ (§17, Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, 1790). I take a pair of miniature figures as my test case. Despite minor variations, all these sculptures depict the same generic man and woman, a man or woman who average or middling in every way. What could make depictions of average everydayness so compelling? For a clue, I turn to Kant’s…
Art (12 works) · Aesthetics (8 works) · Visual Culture and Art Theory (8 works) · Art history (7 works) · Photography and Visual Culture (7 works) · Photography (6 works) · Visual arts (6 works) · Epistemology (5 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · Computer Science (4 works)