June 2023, Monday 5th, 3:00pm to 5:00pm
Venue: Institut Jean Nicod, Salle de réunion, 29 rue d’Ulm, 75005 Paris (you can enter also from 24 rue Lhomond)
Abstract: Contemporary debates between “removalists” and “preservationists” of monuments (Joanna Burch-Brown 2017 ; Helen Frowe 2019 ; Travis Timmerman 2020 ; T. H. Lai 2020 ; Benjamin Cohen Rossi 2020, among many others) tend to focus entirely on the moral and political-philosophical dimensions of these structures. And aestheticians who have turned their attention to these debates have largely treated monuments as akin to speech acts (Nguyen 2019, Liao and Friedell 2022). Thus, these discussions have tended to ignore their status as material works of public commemorative art. As seen through the lens of art, however, some crucial but neglected dimensions of value emerge : aesthetic, artistic, historical, age and sense of place value. In this paper I offer a values-balancing framework for adjudicating monumental controversies and suggest that in some cases these considerations about the works qua artworks are powerful enough to tip the balance toward preservation or removal.
SublimAE 