The Frightening Moment of Approach to One's Latest Love

My hands are clammy, my head is dizzy… I feel like I could swoon from the excitement, and I would just die if they so no. No, I haven’t time travelled back to my lovelorn teenage years, I have just this second clicked ‘submit’ on an online form to upload my second submission to the British Journal of Aesthetics.

I had previously sent them a paper entitled “Am I Afraid of Daleks?”, which they rejected, but with the most wonderful peer review I have ever received – and the promptest. Whomever it was who reviewed my paper actually read and understood it, and was able to make judgements that showed a full understanding of my argument. That is incredibly rare! And I immediately vowed to myself to make a second attempt.

The new paper, entitled “Can a Rollercoaster Be Art?”, has the following abstract:

Given the permissive quality of institutional theories of art, is it possible to prevent rollercoasters from qualifying as artworks? By considering the aesthetics of both games and art as diverse (as hinted at by Wittgenstein) yet inevitably possessing a unity emerging from our own nature (as observed by Midgley), a sketch is given of the strong and weak conditions by which something can be asserted an artwork. This in turn allows for institutional theories to be supportively contrasted to Badiou's concept of the event in the context of art as a rupture in the conditions of practice, and Rancière's taking up of a similar thread that Foucault had left unwound. The result has bearing not only for which conventional artforms qualify as art in any strong sense, but for whether games (digital or otherwise) should be considered candidates for being judged artworks – not to mention the rollercoaster itself.

Will they take it? I don’t know. I feel faint at the possibility of rejection, and impossibly excited at even the remotest chance of being accepted. It is as if I were young once more. I shall have to treasure the uncertainty before future events trammel my besotted heart into submission once more.

Comments

[Mordechai Buxner]

Good luck. The topic sounds fascinating.

[Chris]

Thanks for the kind words! I really enjoyed writing this one... I waited a month to upload it after I finished, though, because of the trepidation I describe here!

[Nathan Frost]

Good luck, Chris! Sounds most interesting, and it is indeed rare to find truly excellent feedback. :)