Art of the Ordinary: The Everyday Domain of Art, Film, Philosophy, and Poetry

by Richard Deming

Overview

Cutting across literature, film, art, and philosophy, Art of the Ordinary is a trailblazing, cross-disciplinary engagement with the ordinary and the everyday. Because, writes Richard Deming, the ordinary is always at hand, it is, in fact, too familiar for us to perceive it and become fully aware of it. The ordinary he argues, is what most needs to be discovered and yet is something that can never be approached, since to do so is to immediately change it.

Art of the Ordinary explores how philosophical questions can be revealed in surprising places—as in a stand-up comic’s routine, for instance, or a Brillo box, or a Hollywood movie. From negotiations with the primary materials of culture and community, ways of reading "self" and "other" are made available, deepening one’s ability to respond to ethical, social, and political dilemmas. Deming picks out key figures, such as the philosophers Stanley Cavell, Arthur Danto, and Richard Wollheim; poet John Ashbery; artist Andy Warhol; and comedian Steven Wright, to showcase the foundational concepts of language, ethics, and society. Deming interrogates how acts of the imagination by these people, and others, become the means for transforming the alienated ordinary into a presence of the everyday that constantly and continually creates opportunities of investment in its calls on interpretive faculties.

In Art of the Ordinary, Deming brings together the arts, philosophy, and psychology in new and compelling ways so as to offer generative, provocative insights into how we think and represent the world to others as well as to ourselves.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501720147
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	05/15/2018
Pages:	222
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.88(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Richard Deming teaches in the Department of English at Yale University, where he is Director of Creative Writing. He is the author of Day for Night, Let’s Not Call It Consequence, and Listening on All Sides: Toward an Emersonian Ethics of Reading.

Table of Contents

Introduction: In Respect of the Ordinary
1. Leading an Ordinary Life: Philosophy and the Ordinary
2. Something Completely Different: Steven Wright, Comedy, and the Uncanny Ordinary
3. How to Dwell: John Ashbery and the Poetics of the Ordinary
4. Artful Things: Looking at Warhol, Looking at the Everyday

What People are Saying About This

Joan Richardson

Reading Art of the Ordinary reanimates what Ralph Waldo Emerson set as the sign of 'The Poet,' that he 'turns the world to glass, and shows us all things in their right series and procession.' Deming teaches his readers how to regard the ordinary, the everyday, as though—or, better—in his phrasing, 'because it is full of the meaning that we give it.' We learn with and through Deming to make the everyday, in the words of Wallace Stevens,'a sacrament of praise' to and for 'mere being'—an astonishing achievement!

Marjorie Perloff

‘The ordinary is that which is most mysterious.’ It is, Richard Deming posits in this subtle, profound, and erudite book, this Heracleitian paradox, as put forward in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, and refined upon by Stanley Cavell, Arthur Danto, and Richard Wollheim, that animates such seemingly diverse artworks of the later twentieth century as the elliptical poems of John Ashbery, the ’realist’ paintings of Fairfield Porter and Alex Katz, and, perhaps surprisingly, the paintings and films of Andy Warhol. Art of the Ordinary charts the process whereby the artists and poets of our own Emersonian tradition conduct their complex encounters with the ordinary. Indeed, it is the ordinary, Deming argues, that is ‘the site that engenders a confluence of loss and presence, distance and proximity’ in these artists’ work. The dialectic in question, as Deming convincingly and passionately argues, is one that has, to date, been only dimly understood.

Editorial Reviews

A trailblazing, cross-disciplinary engagement with the ordinary and the everyday.

Critics at Large

"ReadingArt of the Ordinaryreanimates what Ralph Waldo Emerson set as the sign of 'The Poet,' that he 'turns the world to glass, and shows us all things in their right series and procession.' Deming teaches his readers how to regard the ordinary, the everyday, as though—or, better—in his phrasing, 'becauseit is full of the meaning that we give it.' We learn with and through Deming to make the everyday, in the words of Wallace Stevens,'a sacrament of praise' to and for 'mere being'—an astonishing achievement!"

Joan Richardson

"‘The ordinary is that which is most mysterious.’ It is, Richard Deming posits in this subtle, profound, and erudite book, this Heracleitian paradox, as put forward in Wittgenstein’sPhilosophical Investigations, and refined upon by Stanley Cavell, Arthur Danto, and Richard Wollheim, that animates such seemingly diverse artworks of the later twentieth century as the elliptical poems of John Ashbery, the ’realist’ paintings of Fairfield Porter and Alex Katz, and, perhaps surprisingly, the paintings and films of Andy Warhol.Art of the Ordinary charts the process whereby the artists and poets of our own Emersonian tradition conduct their complex encounters with the ordinary. Indeed, it is the ordinary, Deming argues, that is ‘the site that engenders a confluence of loss and presence, distance and proximity’ in these artists’ work. The dialectic in question, as Deming convincingly and passionately argues, is one that has, to date, been only dimly understood."

Marjorie Perloff