NDPR Andy Hamilton Art and Entertainment: A Philosophical Exploration

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Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2026.05.6 View this Review Online View Other NDPR Reviews

Andy Hamilton, Art and Entertainment: A Philosophical Exploration, Routledge, 2024, 294pp., $54.99 (pbk) ISBN 9781138599949.

Reviewed by Joshua Heter, Jefferson College

What is the relationship (or distinction) between art and entertainment? In this monograph, Andy Hamilton attempts to carve out a “middle way” between the modernist view, that art and entertainment are mutually exclusive, and the post-modernist view, that they are indistinguishable. On Hamilton’s view, art and entertainment are complementary and interpenetrating concepts and practices where entertainment is audience-centered, aiming to delight, amuse, excite, etc., while art maintains a more complex relation to the audience with a “conscious aesthetic end, that in central cases, richly rewards aesthetic attention, in virtue of its inseparable form and content” (12). Chapter 1 proceeds with...