English | 224 pages | Bloomsbury Acad (29 Nov. 2018) | 1350008338 | PDF | 17.72 Mb

What does it mean to be creative? Is there such a thing as an art -life union or are the productive and aesthetic mutually exclusive? Andrew McNamara seeks to widen the understanding of aesthetic inquiry in terms of issues relating to the cultural legacy of modernity, a period characterised by an emphasis on expanded fields of creativity and the expedient expansion of what we call art. When the art-world claimed to abandon this idea of the aesthetic and productive operating in a harmonious union, it did so only partially. He claims we have an ambivalent attitude towards the characteristics of modernism, one which seeks to reclaim the animating principles without assenting to all-encompassing metanarratives. As he puts it, very succinctly, in his proposal, The ambivalence that art has faced up to is that our critical language is invested in this effort to depart modernity, while simultaneously indulging in its guilty pleasures. This book posits and attempts to answer the question: is there another trajectory for contemporary art theory other than one of confused ambivalence?