convocarte 18/19: arte e ética| art and ethics |art et étique – call for works

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION OF FINAL TEXT UNTIL OCTOBER 31, 2025

Art and Ethics

“(…): act so that thou canst will that thy maxim should be a universal law, be the end of thy action what it will.”

                                 (Kant, Perpetual Peace, Appendix I, p. 175)

“Artistic practices are ‘ways of doing and making’ that intervene in the general distribution of ways of doing and making as well as in the relationships they maintain to modes of being and forms of visibility.”

                                 (Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, p. 13)

“Art is autonomous and it is not; without what is heterogeneous to it, its autonomy eludes it.”

                                 (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 6)

The relationship of art with ethics is, one could say, as old as art itself — or at the very least as old as its consciousness and debate.

From the Ancient Greece, where an art full of gruesome acts of violence, morally dubious heroes, and vile words yet also a source of incomparable pleasure and enjoyment was deemed dangerous enough by Plato for the minds and hearts of those who indulged in the mimesis game, that the philosopher infamously called for the “banishment of the poets” from his ideal city (not before, however, Heraclitus urged that they bebeaten with a stick). And this because Plato understood the powerful influence of the arts which despite not affording knowledge, ethical or otherwise, could, and should be criticized morally for through their incantatory powers, they promoted immorality exploiting “the weaknesses in our nature”, deceiving us, and destroying the rational element of our soul.

Thus was born the ethical criticism of art — with censorship.

And questions were raised: how can art be both pleasurable and beneficial, and what benefice might that be? What is the relation, if any, of aesthetic and other values, namely ethical? Should one critique art based on its ethical implications? Can “immoral” or ethically problematic art be ethically valuable, and if so, how? Are there limits on what can or should be appreciated aesthetically or dealt with artistically? To what extent should artists be accountable for implicit messages or the effects of their works on audiences? How can violence be confronted without being glorified? — all of which have, in one way or another, dominated much of the aesthetic debate in Ancient Greece, remaining pressing in subsequent epochs, including our own.

So, however far removed we may feel from Plato and his counterparts, unless we take Plutarch’s wry retort to the platonic dilemma seriously, and “stop the ears of the young with a hard and impenetrable wax as the ears of the Ithacans were stopped, and compel them […] to flee past poetry under full sail” (tr. Padelford, 1902, 51), these are problematics we ought to confront.

Ours is a time when the (once) autonomous sphere of art seems to be slipping back dangerously into a moral terrain that the Greeks would find familiar; a time of preference for unambiguous and easily digestible narratives — a far cry from what Rancière described as “cuts that are always ambiguous, precarious, litigious” (2010, 202); a time when there seems to be an utter incapacity to think about art as anything other than a sort of mimesis of political, economic and social power; mimesis, whose logic, “in conferring on the artwork the power of the effects that it is supposed to elicit on the behavior of spectators,” (Rancière, 136) finds its natural alignment with a regime of consensus which undermines art’s political and ethical potential. Ours is a time when, “over and over, as NYTimes critic Jason Farago notes, art gets reduced to a symptom or a triviality” (Farago, 2024, par. 13).

But it is not only art that faces such a predicament; it’s ethics too.

Despite (or owing to) the growing popularity of the word “ethics” in the last decades (with the fad of ethics committees, bioethics, business ethics, and the like, which proliferate while its deeper philosophical discussion wanes), the contemporary configuration of ethics seems little more than a morality of easy exhortations, consensus, legalistic discourses, and regulatory frameworks, poorly repackaged as “ethics”; an “ethics” of simplistic moral binaries, that serving an essentially normative function, that whether corrective or preventive is repressive, takes on a thoroughly negative connotation and yields profoundly harmful results. Beyond the gross underestimation of the complexity of ethics, the usurpation of its place, the taming of its radicality, and the distortion of its meaning, the present configuration of ethics carries its very emptying.

How does the commodification of art intersect with the commodification of ethics, and what implications does this have for both fields? Can art serve as a space for the reimagining of ethics? How can we return both ethics and art each to their difference, to their singularity, and thus to their radicality? How can we think anew their problematic relationship?

In this thematic issue of the Convocarte journal, we invite contributions that tackle these challenges, exploring this rich and multifaceted field of inquiry which is also an historically variable relationship — that between art and ethics — a relationship that not raises a large number of questions, but in which each question allows for contradictory plausible answers. By launching Art and Ethics, we are aware that we are confronting a dilemma rather than merely addressing a theme — one that, in turn, can be situated on different levels of the artistic: in the work itself, in its production, in the artist, in the reception, in its theorization, in critical practice, in value judgment, in its legitimization process, among others, in addition to its connections with areas sensitive to ethical implications, such as politics, the market, ecology, pedagogy, and similar domains. We welcome historical, theoretical, speculative, and practical approaches; contributions may address recurring patterns in the interconnections between art and ethics, the ability of art to challenge, reshape or produce new ethical values, the task and modalities of art criticism, or the ethics of reception. Case studies, discussions of style and form in artworks are highly encouraged, as are proposals for formulating or reimagining an ethics of contemporary art.

If ethics today is as necessary as it is difficult to formulate — oscillating between what can be and what ought to be, between freedom and coercive obligation — its articulation with art, itself in a longstanding crisis of definitions and criteria, only makes this call more delicate (and therefore more challenging).

We can therefore put forward a number of topics, with the proviso that these are far from limiting the possibilities of approaching the subject:

-          The role of art in society and its ethical implications: from Plato to modernity

-          The ethics and politics of form: revisiting formalist and autonomist approaches

-          Confrontation between ethics and morality in the arts

-          The contemporary ethical criticism of art: new moralisms

-          Artistic freedom and censorship or the limits of the autonomy of art

-          The ethics of interpretation, the audience responsibility, and the task of art criticism

-          Aesthetic vs. Ethical value: metaesthetic and metaethic inquiries

-          The representation of violence and the ethics of documentary

-          The ethics of art preservation

-          The ethical dilemmas in the internet culture, new media, and AI

-          Copyright and authors’ rights vs. artistic gestures approaching plagiarism, such as appropriation, parody, and citation.

-          The ethics of artistic education

-          Bioart and bioethics and their intersections

-          Ethics in Arts Funding

-          Theoretical foundations for an ethics of contemporary art

Leonor Reis (Funchal, 1992) holds a PhD in Ethical and Political Philosophy from the Università degli studi di Roma – “La Sapienza” (2024) with a thesis titled “Art in spite of itself. The ambiguity of art in the work of Emmanuel Levinas,” for which she was awarded a research grant from FCT. She graduated in Sound and Image, with a major in video, from the School of Arts of the Universidade Católica Portuguesa (2013), where she also completed a post-graduate course in Photography in 2014. She later obtained her Master’s degree in Art Criticism, Theories and Curatorial Studies from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Universidade de Lisboa (2018), with a thesis titled “A experiência estética como abertura religada.” She is currently a researcher at CIEBA, and her main areas of research are Levinas, phenomenology, the ethics of representation, and the intersections between art and philosophy and ethics and aesthetics.