The Polish Journal of Aesthetics
63 (4/2021)

Editors: Thorsten Botz-Bornstein (Gulf University for Science & Technology, Kuwait), Adrian Mróz (The Jagiellonian University in Kraków, PL)

Bullshit Studies is a developing scholarly discipline that emerged in the late 20th century. Prominent contemporary researchers include Harry G. Frankfurt, David Graeber, Eva M. Dadlez, André Spicer, EldarSarajlic, JörgMeibauer, Craig Dalton, Martin Harry Turpin, Vladimir Alexeev, and many others. We are witnessing a rise of interest in earlier concepts such as fakery, inauthenticity, Deepities(as defined by Daniel Dennett), fake news, and post-truth.

Art works with illusions, which is why philosophers, such as Plato, evaluated artists and their artworks as both therapeutic and dangerous(as a pharmakon). The status of the artist or any other creator is ambiguous by definition. Philosophers have praised artists for disseminating artistic truths but also accused them of deforming truths or even fabricating untruths. Notwithstanding, knowledge about processes such as bullshiting as well as its products (bullshit) is still very much lacking in philosophy of art and in aesthetics.

The editors of this upcoming volume of The Polish Journal of Aesthetics invite researchers to submit relevant articles onbullshit within the domains of artand aesthetics.Its theoretical framework consists in reworking philosophical assumptions about truth and fiction. The main questions of this issue concern the role of nonsense or deception within the domain of the arts, in addition to itstechniques and media. The volume also focuses on the ways in which falsehood, unfalsifiable claims, or nonsense are agential and give a voice to creative and fictive processes, which may then be elaborated by art workers and craftspeople, and exploited by others. The planned volume provides an opportunity for expressing new modes of artistic truth and imagination through in-depth reflections on and interpretations of faux materials, objects, human instruments, relationships, and organizations.

We invite authors to reflect on themes that may include questions about transgression and transcendence, themeaning or legitimacy ofart in culture, art theory and practice, the deceptive role of artists, bullshit artists and techniques, the category of “pseudo-profound bullshit”, the art market and profitability, industrialization and media theory, skepticism, the sacred and the profane, acceptability, performance, entertainment, magic, emotion, feeling, judgement, kitsch, camp, and any other area that can be argued to be manipulative of feeling, emotion, or cognition. This list is not exhaustive and other submissions that are relevant to the title Bullshit Art will also be considered.

Submission deadline: June 30, 2021.

Deadline extension to August 6, 2021 for papers on Bullshit Art PJA vol. 63 (4/2021).


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