Aesthetic Subjects:
Pleasures, Ideologies, and Ethics
26-29 March 1998

Conference Director: Mary Ann O'Farrell

"Aesthetic Subjects" explored the construction of the aesthetic as a category for organizing experience and knowledge. The conference considered the complex negotations that, as subjects of ideology, we inevitably perform in understanding the place of art and pleasure not only in those domains explicitly designated as the aesthetic, but also in the everyday.

Leo Bersani, University of California at Berkeley, "Caravaggio's Secrets"
Susan Bordo, University of Kentucky, "Recollecting Beauty"
Beatriz Colomina, Princeton University, "The Gift: Reflections on the Eames House"
Martin Jay, University of California at Berkeley, "Drifting Into Dangerous Waters: Aesthetic Experience and the Loss of the Art Object"
Michael Taussig, Columbia University, "The Adult's Imagination of the Child's Body"

Bill Brown, University of Chicago, "The Secret Life of Things"
Tracy C. Davis, Northwestern University, "Theatricality"
Kay Bea Jones, Ohio State University, "Body, Building, and Sense of Place"
Joseph Litvak, Bowdoin College, "Baby Face: Jews, Comic Pleasure,and the Culture of Industry"