{"id":112,"date":"2025-08-12T16:32:43","date_gmt":"2025-08-12T14:32:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/userblogs.fu-berlin.de\/remoteness\/?page_id=112"},"modified":"2026-02-01T11:37:15","modified_gmt":"2026-02-01T10:37:15","slug":"ii-social-imaginaries-and-the-history-of-aesthetics","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/userblogs.fu-berlin.de\/remoteness\/ii-social-imaginaries-and-the-history-of-aesthetics\/","title":{"rendered":"II. Social imaginaries and the history of aesthetics"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Studies in Remoteness<\/em> critically engages with aesthetic tastes and social imaginaries that have emerged through forms of exile, migration, and \u2018worldly exploration\u2019, exploring how these have conditioned regimes of artistic and scholarly attention. The project approaches histories of distanced relations as intersectional and thus informed not only by the contours of geography, temporality, and cultural difference, but by how these intermingle with power, class, privilege, and politics. While rooted in modernist studies, subaltern studies, and critical colonial studies, the project further contributes to the art historical fields of reception studies, attention studies, and research in infrastructural aesthetics \u2013 all of which variously investigate what it means to expose subterranean, concealed, and\/or unperceived lifeways, situations, and social processes to the witness of mass global publics. The project connects these nascent art historical subfields to Indigenous studies and the emerging field of rural studies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As well, Studies in Remoteness<\/em> identifies its topic as a powerful (if under-acknowledged) force driving aesthetic theory and modern taste. In the introduction to Theodor Adorno\u2019s seminal work on the topic (1970), Robert Hullot-Kentor argues that, for the German philosopher, \u201csociety is most intensely active in an artwork where it is most remote from society\u201d (1997 [1970], xvii). In an influential recent work of aesthetic theory, Sianne Ngai describes how the depiction of inaccessible peoples and places produces an aesthetic category she labels the \u2018interesting\u2019, which, \u201cmarks a tension between the unknown and the already known and is generally bound up with a desire to know and document reality\u201d (2012, 5). By inquiring how taste (aesthetics) has systematically informed historical discourses on the knowable (epistemology), the project Studies in Remoteness<\/em> addresses a history of complex aesthetic parasociality<\/em> in a globalized world and analyses epistemology and aesthetics as entangled conceptual relations in the history of ideas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1982, the Canadian art historian Francis Sparshott gave the presidential address of the American Society for Aesthetics on his concept of \u201cremote art\u201d, which was rooted in his great admiration for and collection of sculptural works of Indigenous Inuit carvers. Sparshott described how his experience of their work was conditioned by, \u201cthe complete strangeness of the culture from which the work stems, and its virtual inaccessibility\u201d (1982, 134). Sparshott\u2019s description of the remoteness of Inuit art, in this case, was shaped by gulfs of experience, geography, and privilege distancing \u2018settler\u2019 and \u2018native\u2019 in twentieth-century Canada. As Ngai argues, such settler desire to \u2018know\u2019 Indigenous art (which she places within her aesthetic category of \u2018the interesting\u2019), produces an \u201caffective interface between colonized and colonizer\u201d (2012, 282). Thus, Studies in Remoteness<\/em> critically examines how aesthetics of the unknown,<\/em> like Sparshott\u2019s \u2018remote art\u2019, emerge in dynamic, and often confrontational relations with political and economic histories of colonial and imperial occupation and extraction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Continue to III. The Circumpolar North<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Studies in Remoteness critically engages with aesthetic tastes and social imaginaries that have emerged through forms of exile, migration, and \u2018worldly exploration\u2019, exploring how these have conditioned regimes of artistic and scholarly attention. The project approaches histories of distanced relations as intersectional and thus informed not only by the contours of geography, temporality, and cultural … Continue reading II. Social imaginaries and the history of aesthetics<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5248,"featured_media":5,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-112","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.fu-berlin.de\/remoteness\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/112","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.fu-berlin.de\/remoteness\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.fu-berlin.de\/remoteness\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.fu-berlin.de\/remoteness\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5248"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.fu-berlin.de\/remoteness\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=112"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.fu-berlin.de\/remoteness\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/112\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":198,"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.fu-berlin.de\/remoteness\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/112\/revisions\/198"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.fu-berlin.de\/remoteness\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.fu-berlin.de\/remoteness\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}