About

Supported by the Royal Institute of Philosophy

Speaker: Daisy Dixon

An artist's immorality often affects how we appreciate and interpret their art. Daisy will show that 'virtue-based' approaches and 'empiricist' approaches to the relevance of the artist's immorality cannot accommodate less easy cases like Hitler's landscapes – and that they should. Second, after amending the virtue-based account to accommodate these cases, she will then show that this improved version still cannot deal with hard cases like Rolf Harris's paintings – but that it shouldn't.

Daisy Dixon is a philosopher of art and an artist. She is a lecturer in Philosophy at Cardiff University. Her research falls at the intersection of philosophy of art, philosophy of language, and political philosophy, and has been published in top-tier academic journals. In her work, she explores how visual art behaves like speech, and how curators can affect what an artwork communicates to its audience. Her current academic project concerns aesthetic injustice and unjust aesthetics: deception in art, artistic hate speech, and protest art.