Iris Vidmar Jovanović: Dangers of Art. Plato’s Call to Censorship in Contemporary Aesthetics

Iris Vidmar Jovanovič (Rijeka University), researcher specialized in literary philosophy and Kant’s aesthetics, secretary of the European Society for Aesthetics. She will give a lecture as part of the lecture series Contemporary European Aesthetics organized by the Department of Aesthetics at CU FA in cooperation with the Czech Society for Aesthetics (Czech Academy of Sciences).

The lecture series is supported with the project European Aesthetics in the 21^st Century and it is an addition to a course of the same name. The lectures are held every Thursday in May 2021. Everyone is welcome.

Annotation of the lecture

Over the last few years, several prominent philosophers of art have written extensively on the ‘ethics of engagement’ with art (Plantinga). Some have considered the possibility of sanctioning the artists for the immoral dimension of their works or of their deeds in creating the works (Nannicelli), while others have defended the art’s autonomy and insisted on separating it from their creators (Harold). All the while, the artists themselves keep offering us new challenges regarding the ethical evaluation and criticism of their creations. Whether it is their character or that of their work that is morally contentious, or both, it seems that Plato’s worries regarding the capacity of art to morally corrupt us have never been more plausible. My aim in this talk is to examine some of the current proposals regarding the ethical criticism of art. I will argue that to face Plato’s challenges, we need to understand better the imaginative, affective, and cognitive dimension of our art experiences. My proposal is to approach the challenge of the ethical criticism of art from an informed perspective, one which takes into consideration the context of art-creation and what exactly goes on in our minds and bodies as we engage with an artwork.