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Art
History 500 |
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Over the last decade, scholars and critics have both bemoaned the exile of beauty from art and criticism and heralded its return. But, what is beauty? A classic category of evaluative judgment and the founding term for the development of that enlightenment branch of knowledge called aesthetics or the science of the beautiful, beauty comes down to us tied to traditions, academies, and formalized rules. Are things of beauty natural or cultivated works of art, the results of labor? Or, is beauty not a thing at all but rather an incitation? But, if so, toward what ends? Does beauty conduct us toward truth, good judgment, and even political justice? Does beauty incite lust and lead us away from civic duty and moral codes? Or is beauty allied with ornament and condemned as superficial, even criminal? Is beauty learned or intuited? Is beauty about the decorous and mannered or the scandalous? Is beauty characterized by perfect wholeness or constructed by the cut? Is beauty free and independent or tied to the market, to commercialization and commodification? While the particulars may change, is beauty a universal value? Or is beauty all about the particular details? Is beauty not a set of traits inherent in the object but rather a symptom of cultural fantasies to be excavated? What of the genderings, racializations, and sexing of beauty? Is beauty relative, contingent, in the eye of the beholder? Is the beholder of beauty a disinterested spectator or a captivated subject? What do we make of the history of beauty, its variable cultural significance, and its changing value in light of the new calls for its importance? This seminar will pursue these and other questions by: (1) critically rereading some of the classic texts of the development of that branch of philosophy known as the science or study of the beautiful (Kant, Winckelmann, Hume, Schiller, and Hegel) and questioning the separation of aesthetics and judgment from the political and the construction of the disinterested subject of judgment (2) considering various critiques of beauty and the role of aesthetic criteria and judgment in analyzing art and culture (including Frankfurt School, New Left, Postcolonial, Feminist, and Queer critiques), and (3) exploring the possibility of radical, alternative, and/or transformative ways of thinking about and activating the potential of beauty. Class meetings will be conducted with a mix of short lecture presentations and a great deal of discussion. Course requirements include: one question presentation on one of the readings, a questioning response paper on two of the readings, a project proposal, a draft of the final project, an oral presentation of your final project, and submission of a final project that may take the form of an extended essay or a creative project in some other form besides expository prose accompanied by a framing statement engaging with the readings. P: Instructor consent only. Priority given to Art History undergrad majors. |