Art and Desire

Art and Desire is the book version of a seminar series given by Ulus Baker at METU Visual-Audio Systems Research and Production Center in 1998, which develops a critique of social sciences together with a proposal for a new social science. Ulus Baker examines the fundamental modern subjectification processes, starting from the 17th century and continuing with Kant, under the guidance of Deleuze. He looks at the philosophies of Spinoza, Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant, always considering their connection to art, and questioning whether an aesthetic can be derived from them. Then, he discusses the transformations in painting that began at the end of the 19th century; he turns to cinema in terms of image production; he focuses on cinema's ways of producing meaning. With the concept of affect (emotion) that permeates the Art and Desire seminar from beginning to end, a journey of discovery full of inspiring examples awaits us into the worlds of painting and film. You know, ideas easily slip out of people's hands, they are open-access objects, they are free above all. A viewpoint cannot be created with a purchased idea. And we all know that ideas are marketed. Nowadays, advertisers create 'concepts', as Deleuze said. The question is how we will take this away from them. How will an artist save a work of art from being an advertisement? Or how will political spheres be rescued and rebuilt from certain ethical and political discussions carried out at the level of newspaper columns? Or how will the salvation of thought be rebuilt in this environment? Ulus Baker Cover: From Dziga Vertov's "The Eleventh Year" (From the Promotion Bulletin)