Call for Papers: TRAC2014

Preferential scheduling Deadline: November 31, 2013

Focus on the Aesthetic Principles and Values
 
TRAC2014 will focus on the aesthetic principles and values implicit in the representational art of the 21st Century. Having established at TRAC2012 that the representational art community has an important voice, it is timely to explore and articulate its distinctive aesthetic values, vision and philosophical outlook. Our purpose is not to establish a single monolithic aesthetic for representational art, but to identify commonalities, understand the unique possibilities of representational art, and perhaps provide some illumination about future directions.

One of the features of representational art, for example, is attentiveness to the data revealed to our visual sense. The goal of contemporary representational art is not merely to replicate visual data: cameras can do this much more effectively. On the other hand, visuality is important to the representational aesthetic.

What relationship to the world is the artist striving for?
What values guide the hand?
What is the place of the beautiful and the sublime in the process?
Are political, moral, or metaphysical goals at work?
What is the relationship of the artist to reality?

The conference is planned as a focused but non-doctrinaire event, of serious academic standards. Papers of high quality on a variety of topics in the aesthetics of contemporary representational art are invited and welcomed.

We are particularly interested in papers about:

• The Impact of Roger Scruton’s “Why Beauty Matters” and “Beauty”.
• The Life and Work of Odd Nerdrum.
• How 21st Century representational art differs from earlier representational art.
• The role of beauty and/or the sublime.
• What might be the aesthetics of 21st Century representational art.
• Are there common principles shared by representational artists?
• Does the democratic popularity of representational art confer on it any unique value or potentiality?
• The possibility of cross-cultural aesthetics in representational art.
• Do globalization and rapid cultural change provide uniquely relevant material for representational artists?
• The internet and contemporary representational art.
• The 21st Century representational art movement as a renaissance.
• The aesthetic contribution of the craft aspect of representational art.
• Can representational art convey truth? If so, how, and of what kind?
• Allegorical symbolism in the new millennium.
• Idealism, imagination and representation.
• Morality and politics in 21^st century representational art.
• What is the relation to reality of the authentic representational artist?
• Aesthetic analyses (not autobiographical) of significant contemporary works of representational art.

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