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Friends of Interpretable Objects Paperback – March 1, 2004

by Miguel Tamen (Author)

4.4 4 ratings

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A strikingly original work, Friends of Interpretable Objects re-anchors aesthetics in the object of attention even as it redefines the practice, processes, meaning, and uses of interpretation.

Miguel Tamen's concern is to show how inanimate objects take on life through their interpretation--notably, in our own culture, as they are collected and housed in museums. It is his claim that an object becomes interpretable only in the context of a "society of friends." Thus, Tamen suggests, our inveterate tendency as human beings to interpret the phenomenal world gives objects not only a life but also a society. As his work unfolds, "friends" also takes on a legal sense, as advocates, introduced to advance the argument that the social life of interpreted and interpretable objects engenders a related web of social obligations.

Focusing on those who, through interpretation, make objects "speak" in settings as different as churches, museums, forests, and distant galaxies--those who know the best interests of corporations, endangered species, and works of art--Tamen exposes the common ground shared by art criticism, political science, tort law, and science. Learned and witty, with much to teach art historians, environmentalists, anthropologists, curators, and literary critics, his book utterly reorients our understanding of how we make sense of our world.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Because Tamen is willing to go out on various disciplinary and logical limbs, this is a book like no other. It will appeal to students of literature and the visual arts, it will be debated by the more humanistic of philosophers, and it will perform noble cross-over activity between those disciplines and material from theories of law, science, and ecology. The book will work in this admirable way for those who are open-minded, inquisitive, and seducible by some lovely instances of intellectual wit.”―Leonard Barkan, Princeton University

“Friends of Interpretable Objects is an idiosyncratic, breath-taking inquiry into the human capacity to cherish the material object world and to hate it, to hold it responsible, and to grant it its own humanity...This book should be read by art historians, anthropologists, curators, literary critics, and anyone who has ever shouted at a car or kicked a door.”―Bill Brown, author of A Sense of Things

“As its wacky title might indicate, this is a book of striking originality. Its subject, broadly speaking, is art, whose works are the interpretable objects of the title. In another sense, however, Tamen's concern is to show how inanimate objects take on life through their interpretation...There is quite simply nothing like it...The learning is real...Written in a highly idiosyncratic style, learned but not hermetically so, Friends of Interpretable Objects takes wide aim at an audience that could conceivably come from many walks of life: from the museum world, from art history, law, philosophy, not to mention that educated general reader whose voracious habits take in a far richer banquet of ideas than we can ever imagine.”―Ingrid Rowland, Professor of Art History, University of Chicago

“The art world and interpreting institutions of museums can learn from Tamen's artful journey across disciplines and ways of knowing and experiencing the world around us. Friends of Interpretable Objects opens up the museum and places artworks into networks of interpretation that make them part of the cognitive worlds we share with diverse animate and inanimate bodies and objects.”―John G. Hanhardt, Senior Curator of Film and Media Arts, Guggenheim Museum

“In an exquisitely idiosyncratic book of enormous intellectual ambition crammed into a tiny space...Tamen wants to redefine aesthetics, by way of intently focused chapters on, inter alia, Byzantine theology and image-smashing, human rights, and bodies (of corporations and of babies). In his scheme, the interpretable object (which might be what we recognize as an artwork, but does not need to be) exists by virtue of its 'friends'--those people who gather round it and, so to speak, talk to it, as we might do with a statue or painting. How do objects 'talk back' from within a museum or a church? Suavely Wittgensteinian and insatiably curious, Tamen's arguments are hardly devalued by the lack of any earth-shattering conclusion.”―Stephen Poole, The Guardian

About the Author

Miguel Tamen is Professor at the University of Lisbon and regular visiting professor at the University of Chicago.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harvard University Press (March 1, 2004)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 208 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0674013689
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0674013681
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 8.5 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 4.86 x 0.59 x 7.58 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #4,577,808 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #3,238 in Philosophy Aesthetics
- #19,726 in Arts & Photography Criticism

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Alvaro Lewis

Lex, legis?

Reviewed in the United States on January 14, 2002

Within this tiny volume of lecture-length chapters bravely stares a provocation to reconsider both why and how (also a little on what) we pursue interpretation. A couple of the chapters serve mealy reading (e.g., Byzantine law and Iconostasis), but the overall argument pleasingly confounds the mellow and perhaps mindless reception of analyses of objects whose interpretations may be completely unnecessary beyond their value as ways of thinking that create like-minded societies. The perspectives of legal scholars, tree-lovers, art historians, and others, who make sense of parts of the world and its culture for the many of us who grow weary of the incessant, silly sallies required to be comprehensively aware, receive attention. Despite a recondite divagation here and there, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this sharp and playful book.