Living in an Artworld

This book contains a collection of fifty-nine essays of varying lengths, dating mostly from early in his career, long before Noël Carroll became one of the leading figures in aesthetics of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Some of the essays appeared in academic journals of the kind with which many readers of this journal will be familiar. But most did not. Most, in fact, and especially those on dance, theatre, and performance, were short reviews written for popular arts and news publications between 1973 and 1985. Some of those publications may no longer exist. The rarity of these essays alone does not make them valuable. Nor does the fact they are early writings of someone who has since carved out a set of views that have been deeply influential in aesthetics and philosophy of art. But they are valuable. Part of that value derives from the fact that a fair number of the performers whose work Carroll reviewed at the time—from the mid-1970s through the early 1990s—have disappeared, even though their influence has remained. The influence, however, was not always direct, nor was it always apparent. Recapturing, recollecting, that work at the moment it appeared, so to speak, would thus be salutary, even if only for securing the historical record and giving us a record to use in tracing the influence of that incredibly creative and disruptive period in the artworld

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Dance · Literature · Period (music · The arts · Value (mathematics · Visual arts · Art History and Market Analysis · History · Law in Society and Culture · Theatre and Performance Studies