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Minimalist Objet and Nonhuman Things: Focusing on Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontologist Aesthetics

  • The Journal of Aesthetics and Science of Art
  • Abbr : JASA
  • 2025, 76(), pp.6~23
  • Publisher : 한국미학예술학회
  • Research Area : Arts and Kinesiology > Other Arts and Kinesiology
  • Received : August 15, 2025
  • Accepted : September 11, 2025
  • Published : October 31, 2025

Mijung Park 1 Jae-Joon Lee 2

1숙명여자대학교
2숙명여자대학교 인문학 연구소

Accredited

ABSTRACT

The Anthropocene crisis demands a reevaluation of the ontology and aesthetics of nonhuman objects. object-oriented ontology (OOO) offers a crucial framework that advocates for objects or “things” as central to rethinking human-nonhuman coexistence. This paper reinterprets the avant-garde concept of the objet, objects given to a subject, through the lens of OOO. The study reexamines Minimalist aesthetics and Michael Fried’s critique of it. Fried dismissed the objet as mere “objecthood” lacking aesthetic experience, a critique limited by its anthropocentric modernist framework. In contrast, Graham Harman reconstructs Fried's critique in OOO to address the question of reality. His realist stance explains the tense relationship between the objet and the viewer using the concept of “allure,” which accounts for objects as a reality independent of cognition. “Allure” provides a pathway to access the real through aesthetic contact between objects, representing a nonhuman relationality distinct from the traditional aesthetic concept of “absorption.” Ultimately, Harman’s OOO affirms a symmetrical positioning of objects and seeks to demonstrate their reality through the objet in Minimalist aesthetics. It demands further discussion on the “aesthetics of objects” or “aesthetics of things.”

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2024 are currently being built.

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.