پژوهشنامه فرهنگستان هنر
پیاپی 5 (مهر و آبان 1386)

In the history of Islamic- Iranian culture there are some texts and treaties which bear the name of critique on; some of them are as follows:Naghd o’ sher by Ibne Ghatibeh Ayyar o’ Shoara by Ibne Taba Taba Naghd o’ Sher by Abol Kharaj GHodameh Ibne Jafar Naghd o’ Sher by Nashi We can add to this list the sophisticated and artistic critique by Aboo Hayyan Tohidi in the works such as “Almata and Almavanese” and “Alhavamel and Alshamavel” and also the careful critique by Jahez on poetry and literature as a whole. Although these works are concerned with the criticism of poetry and literature of those eras, the researches done on them, the definitions, and approaches display the concept of criticism in the early years of Islamic Iranian culture. It is the strong and deep bond between poetry and music and the key position of music in philosophy that inevitably stretches the discussion into the area of art. This article studies Ibn Ghatibeh’s, Ghodameh Ibne Jafar’s, Jahez’s, and Aboo Hayyan Tohidi’s ideas on the concept and meaning of criticism

This article aspires to survey the nature of art criticism in the ancients’ view, especially in the view of the tenth century’s authors. Since our ancestors treated criticism in two ways: directly (in the critical treaties) and indirectly (in the books of art history, biographies, introductions and in the specialized art books such as calligraphy and painting treaties) and created valuable works, I will try in this article to open a door to the ancients’ method of criticism and also to explain and analyze some sample works. To do so, I will survey works such as Golestan-e Honar, Shams o’ Din Mohammad Vasfi’s introduction, and Mir Seyed Ahmad’s introduction.

Observing the previous centuries’ books, even in brief, will demonstrate the importance and the position of comparative art studies for their authors. In order to know and to make known, to study and sometimes to judge, these authors carried out comparative studies on the works of the artists. In other words, comparative studies had been one of the most major approaches of Iranian traditional criticism. This approach is sometimes so highlighted and accentuated that is seemingly impossible to get to know the artist and the artistic works without it. This article is to study the position and the importance of comparative studies in the body of the following research and to classify these comparisons. By this classification, the article tries to study the different kinds of comparisons such as comparatives, definite superlatives, and conditional superlatives and to answer the related raised questions such as: are these comparisons text based, author based or a combination of both?

This article studies and analyzes theoretically and conceptually two major paradigmatic movements in philosophy and social theory: deconstructionism and aesthetics. Both movements whether in origin or formation are rooted in philosophy; functionally and structurally both originate from social theory and social criticism, and particulary in the realm of art (from a practical point of view) survey and study practices of art and aesthetics. The article firstly puts forward the discussion to introduce, elucidate and exemplify these two movements and then studies the application of deconstructionism to art and aesthetics. In order to introduce these two concepts or paradigmatic movements, the article first elucidates and illuminates them from an etymological and semantic point of view and then from a conceptual and epistemological view.

Considering and contemplating the concept of truth and its relation with art from Plato up to now, this article is to study Deridda’s approach to art and art criticism relying on the beliefs of the thinkers such as Kant, Heidegger, and Nietzsche. Surveying the correlations between the scope of art and extra-art, the article additionally clarifies Kant’s theory of paragon in the Critique of Judgment. Besides, the article analyzes some artistic works in order to prove Derrida’s deconstructive approach to art.

This paper consists of two parts. First, I will propose certain assumptions regarding semiotics in order to introduce it as a reading method within the structuralist approach. Then, after explaining two distinct types of photography and different “looks” in photography, the main reading strategies of semiotics such as paradigmatic/syntagmatic, binary opposition, narrative, movement, and denotation/connotation will be put forward. In the second part, with certain references to Roland Barthes’s theories, it will be explained how deconstructive reading has certain affinities with poststructuralist semiotics. Through readings of Barthes’s writings on photography, I will explain a shift from the structuralist approach to a deconstructive one in his very last work, Camera Lucida. In this part, the notions of absence, death, indeterminacy, parergon, intertextuality, counter-narrative, polysemy, and finally Barthes’s notions of studium and punctum will be explained. The pictures used for analysis are all taken by Iranian photographers who participated in a photography exhibition at Tehran Museum of Contemporary Arts in June 2006 entitled Silver Windows: Iranian Contemporary Photographers (A Selection of 17 Visions).

While J. Derrida in the course of his post-modern activity, had proposed the idea of deconstruction, he believed that deconstruction occurs automatically and can not be considered as a method offered by him. In this article, I am going to re-read and formulate the idea of deconstruction as reflected in the theoretical and literary works of Tolstoy, the Russian thinker of 19th century. The rising-ground of deconstruction for Tolstoy is meaningfulness crisis which is evident in all his writings. Although this crisis had a social ground, it led him to pass through the surface meaning to a deep and wider moreover, system of meaningfulness. He was dealing with promotion of ideas such as unconcreteness of meaning, fluidity of meaning and critics of logocentrism. Meaningfulness crisis is followed in Tolstoy’s works by tracing of meaning and devices through which more understandable meaning could be provided. The most important device in this concern is Ostranenie or defamiliarization which is later formulated by Russian formalists. Analysis of the meaning and referring to the precedents, seeking differences between issues seemingly similar, seeking similarities between issues seemingly different are other devices used by Tolstoy. The result of Tolstoy’s deconstructive approach is his attention to the variety of systems and the transmission from one system to another. Devices such as reversion of dominant- dominated poles, alteration in evaluation systems, critics of underestimations in evaluation, are very close to the recent ideas in deconstruction.

This article, which draws on my book-length study The Critical Idiom: The Sublime (London: Routledge, 2006), focusses on Derrida’s treatment of the Kantian sublime. Looking specifically at Derrida’s discussion in The Truth in Painting of the distinction between ergon (work) and parergon (frame), the article endeavours to show how the Kantian sublime is produced as a structural effect within the main body of the Critique of Judgement. It concludes with a discussion of Frances Ferguson’s claim that deconstruction repeats the errors of empiricism insofar as it denies the theoretical necessity of the noumena. Against Ferguson, the article claims that Derrida’s reading of the sublime is in fact wholly in tune with Kant’s own insistence on the sublime as neither wholly materialist nor wholly idealist in orientation. Rather, the sublime is produced within the Kantian text as a structural necessity, a supplement belonging neither to the realms of pure or practical reason, which yet must be assumed for either to cohere.