JAAC Announces CFP for Special Issue on The Art and Aesthetics of Capitalism

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism is please to announce a Call for submissions for a special issue on "The Art and Aesthetics of Capitalism." The Guest Editors are Brian Soucek and Melissa Zinkin. The Submission deadline is June 1, 2023, with publication in Spring 2024.

Submissions on any philosophically informed explorations of how issues connected to markets, appraisals, property, and labor relate to aesthetics and the philosophy of art. Topics and questions may include, but are not limited to:

• The value of artistic labor.
• The ethics of contemporary forms of artistic patronage.
• Is there an aesthetics of capital? An anti-capitalist aesthetics?
• Is art a special kind of property?
• The relationship between artistic value and market value. Kant writes that there are three kinds of value: what satisfies our needs and has a “market price,” what causes delight and has a “fancy price,” and what has an inner worth and “dignity.” Is it the case that art does not have dignity, but just a fancy price? What is the difference between a fancy price and a market price?
• Does the art market serve to make distinctions between different forms of art and their aesthetic value?  For example, between works that can be copied or forged (autographic works) and works that can have multiple instantiations, such as musical scores (allographic works); or, between fair use versus illegal copying?
• Art and capital in the history of aesthetics.
• The current state of critical theory: Do the classic critiques of art and capitalism from the 20th century still hold up today?

Submissions should not exceed 7,500 words and must comply with the general guidelines for submissions. See “Author Guidelines” on the JAAC page on the Oxford University Press website: https://academic.oup.com/jaac/pages/general-instructions. Upload submissions to the JAAC online submission website, http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jaac, making sure they are identified as submissions for the special issue.

If you have questions please contact:
Melissa Zinkin <mzinkin@binghamton.edu> and Brian Soucek <bsoucek@ucdavis.edu>

The full text of the CFP is also here.