Art's Realism in the Post-Truth Era
Edited by Maryse Ouellet, Amanda Boetzkes
How does art transform our understanding of realism in the post-truth era?
- Focuses on contemporary realism from the perspective of the arts
- Situates artistic realism in the politics and philosophy of the post-truth era
- Defines the specificity of artistic realism from ontological, epistemological, political and mediatic perspectives
- Discusses a broad range of case studies dealing with climate change, the economy of surveillance, apocalypse narratives, sound ontology, Inuit realism and scientific imaging
- Challenges the dominance of speculative realism by engaging alternative theoretical genealogies of realism
- Brings together leading researchers from art history, aesthetics, media studies, literary studies and the visual arts
Arguing for the necessity of taking art’s contribution to contemporary realism seriously, this edited collection intervenes in contemporary debates about realism by demonstrating that the arts do not simply illustrate philosophical theories. The significance of art’s realism in times characterised by the normalisation of fake, manipulated and distorted representations of reality can only be fully understood by attending to the ways that the arts mediate, visualise and even shape reality. Drawing on a range of disciplinary perspectives, the authors interrogate realism across media, from sound art, film, literature, and painting to video installation and scientific imaging.
Introduction: Mediating Reality: Art’s Riposte to the Post-Truth Era - Maryse Ouellet and Amanda Boetzkes
Part I. Typologies of Realism
Chapter 1. Novel Realism as Speculative Verisimilitude in Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Fiction - Monika Kaup
Chapter 2. Cavell’s Realism. Toward a Theory of the Type - Markus Klammer
Chapter 3. ‘Real Life Was the Better Director’: Arnheim, Chaplin and the Productive Limits of Satire - Ian Verstegen
Chapter 4. The Real Sound of Music - Jocelyn Benoist
Part II. Realist Intimacies
Chapter 5. The Instant of Death, Site of the Real? The Thanatological Realism of Caravaggio - Itay Sapir
Chapter 6. Carried by Currents: Intimate Beings Between First and Second Nature - Jeff Diamanti
Chapter 7. Sounding the World: Three Perspectives on Sound Art and Realism - Pauline Nadrigny
Part III. Remediations of the Real
Chapter 8. Reoriginations of Realism in Contemporary Inuit Art - Amanda Boetzkes
Chapter 9. Pattern Recognition: Art and Forms of Visualisation in Particle Physics - Jens Schröter
Chapter 10. The Shape of the Blind Spot: Making the Frame of Reality - Dagmara Genda
Chapter 11. Revealing Through Opacity, or How to Expose Truth in the Post-Truth Era - Maryse Ouellet
Art’s Realism in the Post-Truth Era insists on art’s power to recapture the political and agentic potential of realism. Rather than promote realism as a mode of representing reality, the authors compellingly position art at the vanguard for realism’s potential to mediate new relationships to what reality conceals.
