Vid Simoniti
Publications
You can also find my philosophical work at academia.edu and PhilPapers.
2021. "Art as Political Discourse" British Journal of Aesthetics
Political art, I argue in this paper, does not merely reflect political positions. It contributes uniquely to political discourse by correcting the vices of objective-style reasoning.
[published open access] [download copy]
2019. “The Living Image in Bio-Art and in Philosophy” Oxford Art Journal
I track the relationship between bio-art and bio-ethics, from the 1990s till today, and argue that these works of art offer insights that philosophers have overlooked.
[published] [penultimate draft]
2018. “Assessing Socially Engaged Art” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
In socially engaged artworks, artists implement solutions to concrete challenges. As I argue in this paper, we should assess these artworks pragmatically: such art is only good if it makes a difference.
[published] [penultimate draft]
2018. “Adrian Piper and the Rhetoric of Conceptual Art” in Connie Butler and David Platzker (eds.) Adrian Piper: A Reader (New York: MoMa Press)
How does political art affect the viewers' consciousness? I investigate this question through Adrian Piper's anti-racist Conceptual art, invoking the cultural context of modern racism in America of the 1970s and 80s.
2017. “Aesthetic Properties as Powers”, European Journal of Philosophy
A paper on the metaphysics of beauty. I argue for a hardcore objectivist view: aesthetic properties are powers possessed by objects, which we can directly perceive even when we are not in the throes of aesthetic delight.
[published] [penultimate draft]
2017. “Artistic Research at the Edge of Science”, OAR: Oxford Artistic and Practice Based Research Platform 1:1.
Contemporary bio-art has a problem: it has become almost indistinguishable from bio-engineering. To establish critical distance, bio-art needs to reintroduce an aesthetic dimension.
2016. “Virginia Woolf, Literary Style, and Aesthetic Education”, Journal of Aesthetic Education 50:1, 62-79.
I identify a new theory of literary style in Virginia Woolf's essays. Literary style is the ability of a text to shape our mental dispositions or our "mental geography", as Woolf puts it.
[published] [penultimate draft] [Chinese translation]
2008. "Schopenhauer on the Epistemological Value of Art", Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics 5: 3, 19-28.
Schopenhauer's view of the epistemic value of art is plausible, once we understand his crazy metaphysics metaphorically.
Selected reviews and essays
2021. Review of C. Thi Nguyen's Games. Times Literary Supplement. [link]
2019. "Low Blows: Martin Krpan, Top Lista Nadrealista and Equalising Satire." Crack up Crack Down, edited by Slavs and Tatars. On satire in the Balkans, written for the catalogue publication of the 2019 Ljubljana Biennial of the Graphic Arts. [link] [download]
2019. Review of Keith Haring at Tate Modern. The Museums Journal. [download]
2018. "Digital Art and the Alt Right" The Point. [read]
2018. "Dada Data, the Alt-Right and Scepticism", catalogue essay, Reality Machines exhibition, the University of Cambridge. [read]
2017. “Review of Robert Bailey’s Art & Language International”, Art History [link]
2016. Translation of Slavoj Žižek et al., “Art, Society/Text” (from Slovenian), Art Margins 5: 3, 102-114.
2013. "Beyond the Mainstream and Into the Digital", White Review [link]
In Slovenian
I have published essays and reviews in venues such as Delo, Pogledi and Razgledi. Here is a sample of some of my work in Slovenian.
“Človek človeku pes” (an essay on Maja Smrekar’s opus), Delo, 3 June 2017, 19. [download]
‘Faust ali optimizem’ [‘Faust or Optimism’, in Slovene] (theatre programme essay) in Tomaž Pandur, Faust, Ljubljana: SNG Drama Publications, 2018. [download]