Digital Commons@RISD Home > Division of Liberal Arts > Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive) > Vol. 20 (2022)
Abstract
I want to start by thanking my critics for reading my book and coming to so many insightful comments and challenging observations about it. I especially want to thank Deborah Knight for suggesting a panel to discuss the book and for doing so much to realize it. There is so much to say about the intelligent and generous commentary offered by Ivan Gaskell, Deborah Knight, and Sonia Sedivy. Put briefly, in the short space below, I say my book thinks mostly about how and that artworks mean rather than what they mean, as Gaskell recommends. Knight’s remarks prompt me to clarify how, in a world of cinema set on the Mediterranean Sea populated by Fritz Lang and Brigitte Bardot, Le Mépris is the enactment of Jean-Luc Godard’s moviemaking skills refined in the course of making that motion picture. Responding to Sedivy’s criticism, I give a fuller account of the enactivism guiding the treatment of artworks in my book. Overall, my critics have urged me to draw a more complete picture of what was, for them, only sketched in Thinking with Images.