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On Decadence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Jane Duran
Jane Duran
Affiliation:
University of California, Santa Barbara
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Extract

When one visits Thailand, one is struck by the enormous number of temples in the urban Bangkok area, many of which are conspicuously absent from the more cherished art historical works on the art and architecture of south-east Asia. The Wat Po complex and Wat Reitmit, one discovers, whatever their virtues for the Western tourist, are not among the temples and archaeological sites mentioned in the text of such an authority as Benjamin Rowland. Nor are these temples—when cited at all—discussed in the same vein as, for example, the Konarak temples of Orissa (India), where at least some veneration is paid to the plasticity of the carving in its depiction of sexual variety, even if the depictions themselves were at one time held to possess little or no intrinsic merit as pieces of sculpture.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 65 , Issue 254 , October 1990 , pp. 455 - 464
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1990

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References

1 Rowland, Benjamin, The Art and Architecture of India. Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1967, 254.Google Scholar

2 See my ‘Collingwood and Intentionality’, in British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 27., No. 1, 32–38.Google Scholar

3 Collingwood, R. G., The Principles of Art (Oxford University Press, 1972, 69).Google Scholar

4 Carroll, Noel, ‘The Nature of Horror’, in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism', Vol. LXVI, No. 1Google Scholar; the first two terms are found on p. 55, the last quotation on p. 52.

5 Ibid. 55. In Carroll's own notes, he cites Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger, London: 1966.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 For a fascinating account of the relevant literature and period, see Birkett, Jennifer's The Sins of the Fathers (London: Quartet Books, 1986).Google Scholar

7 See, for example, the debate on the notions of symbol and the symbolic as characterized in Dickie, George's text Aesthetics: An Introduction, Indianapolis, IN.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971Google Scholar. As Dickie reports, the debate carries over into criticism of Langer's work and the notion of the symbolic employed by Langerian theory.

8 See Dickie, , op. cit., esp. 123–124.Google Scholar

9 I have set out this argument carefully in ‘The Nagaraja: Symbol and Symbolism in Hindu Art and Iconography’, forthcoming in Journal of Aesthetics Education, 1990.Google Scholar

10 See Dickie, loc. cit.

11 Meeson, Philip, ‘Art as Symbol or Thing’, British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 21, No. 1, 25–26.Google Scholar

12 See Birkett, , passim.Google Scholar

13 Bordo, Susan, The Flight to Objectivity, Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1987.Google Scholar

14 Bordo specifically cites the Symposium, with its emphasis that ‘… the love of the body is the first, and necessary, step on the spiritual ladder which leads to the glimpsing of the eternal form of beauty.’ Bordo, , op. cit., 94.Google Scholar

15 Ibid., 81.

16 Ibid., 89. The phrases taken from Descartes are from Meditation III, the Haldane and Ross trans.

17 Ibid., 77.