The Visible Surface: Painting, Photography, Cinema

Gregory Currie (University of York)

The lecture is free and open to all!

Abstract: “Pictures are surfaces with marks on them. Different kinds of pictures have different kinds of marks, produced in different ways. The marks themselves have an interest in painting and drawing which they do not have in photography and cinema. This difference enables us to identify and explain a feature of some pictures which I call "apparent transparency". This is not the same as Walton-style transparency and pictures which have apparent transparency need not be (and in my view are not) transparent. The interest that marks have in painting are of different kinds depending on whether those marks are co-incident. I explain the notion of co-incidence and use it to highlight some of the aesthetic differences between different kinds of paintings and to extend Wollheim's notion of twofoldness.”

About the speaker: Gregory Currie is Professor of Philosophy and Head of Department at the University of York, an editor of the journal Mind and Language, an editorial consultant to the British Journal of Aesthetics, and a member of the editorial board member of the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Storyworlds, and the book series Thinking Cinema (Continuum). His research interests and publications span aesthetics and the philosophy of mind, and the interaction between art and the mind. He has published widely in these areas, and has authored several monographs: And Ontology of Art (Macmillan, 1989); The Nature of Fiction (CUP, 1990); Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy and Cognitive Science (CUP, 1995); Recreative Minds: Imagination in Philosophy and Psychology (co-written with Ian Ravenscroft, OUP, 2002); Art and Minds (OUP, 2004); Narratives and Narrators: A Philosophy of Stories (OUP, 2010). 

Additional information: The lecture will be followed by a dinner with our speaker. 

*There are limited funds to cover dinner expenses for two students, offered on a first-come-first-served basis.* If you would like to attend the dinner, please contact the organisers by Monday, 7thDecember.

For more information, and to contact the organisers, please visit: http://www.saf.ppls.ed.ac.uk

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SAF is generously supported by the British Society of Aesthetics and the Scots Philosophical Association.