Author: Michael Kelly

I am a Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and Editor-in-Chief of the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (Oxford UP, 1998). A new expanded, revised, second edition of the Encyclopedia is forthcoming, and will include entries on aesthetic computing.

I organized and participated in a panel discussion on information aesthetics at SIGGRAPH in 2009. And I organized a two-day symposium on aesthetic computing at UNC Charlotte in 2010 (with funding from the National Science Foundation). I also initiated a symposium on aesthetic computing and neuroaesthetics at UC Berkeley while I was a fellow at the Arts Research Center on campus.

My most recent publication is A Hunger for Aesthetics: Enacting the Demands of Art (Columbia UP, 2012), which is a critique of the anti-aesthetic stance in contemporary art theory and a defense of the relevance of aesthetics to moral-political art. My earlier book, Iconoclasm in Aesthetics (Cambridge UP, 2003), is a critique of contemporary philosophical aesthetics for not addressing the particularity and historicity of art. I'm currently writing on the migration of artistic (and other forms of) agency from the individual to the collective, especially in connection with participatory art and computing.

I'm also the Editor of Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate (MIT, 1994); and Co-Editor with Daniel Herwitz of Action, Art, History: Engagement with Arthur C. Danto (Columbia UP, 2007).


Formerly, I served as the Executive Director of the American Philosophical Association, and as Managing Editor of the Journal of Philosophy at Columbia University. And I've also taught philosophy at Columbia and the University of Delaware.