“This book asks how one can reconcile the universalizing theories of post-Enlightenment aesthetics with the current realities of a globalized economy. Herwitz's answer, in short: cosmopolitanism, a dialectic of homogenization and diversity. [He] reconsiders the relationship of contemporary art to sociopolitical events and institutions by circling back to the 18th and 19th centuries of Kant and Hegel and then to Danto in the 20th century. These philosophical inquiries are interleaved with case studies of specific artists, many of whom hail from the Global South and thus provide welcome counterbalance to the still-dominant First World narrative. In Herwitz’s telling, 21st-century artistic cosmopolitanism also sheds new light on historical aesthetics, providing a means for reevaluating how the personal and the universal were reconciled in aesthetic theory. These are big, unwieldy topics and Herwitz's clear, conversational style makes the material accessible. That said, it is inevitable that a subject of such scope leaves much territory unexamined and a great deal of art unaccounted for … The book provides a useful introduction to issues of globalization as it pertains to art. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates; graduate students.

CHOICE

This book far extends the usual scope of aesthetic enquiry. It is written with a challenge, to open up the political and social imaginary through the historical and contemporary media of the arts. Its flair and wit, its insight and extensive range raises the stakes in a world market whose design threatens to close down and restrict the promise of the cosmopolitan who refuses any longer to be a colonialist.

Lydia Goehr, Professor of Philosophy, Columbia University, USA

Daniel Herwitz, one of our great authorities on the discipline of Aesthetics, here turns his attention to the ways the question of cosmopolitanism, first put forward by Kant and then called into question by Hegel and others, can—indeed must-- be adapted today if we are to make sense of art practice and reception as these intersect with the global art market. Designed for the general reader as well as for art historians and critics, <i>Cosmopolitan Aesthetics </i>is that rare thing—a truly <i>necessary</i> book.

Marjorie Perloff, Sadie D. Patek Professor of Humanities Emerita, Stanford University, USA