PRELIMINARY COURSE SYLLABUS Quarter: Spring 2021
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A Philosophical Discussion of Representation
International Visual Literacy Association, Cheyenne, 1996 A PHILOSOPHICAL DISCUSSION OF REPRESENTATION One of the most basic theoretical areas in the study of visual communication and visual literacy is the nature of representation. Much of the discussion of this topic comes from either philosophy or aesthetics. This paper reviews some of the more important writings in this area in an attempt to develop a model of representation. The primary works reviewed include: E. H. Gombrich, "The Visual Image;" "Representation and Misrepresentation" Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols, "Representation Re- presented" Paul Messaris, Visual Literacy: Image, Mind & Reality David Novitz, "Picturing" Marx Wartofsky, "Pictures, Representation, and Understanding;" "Visual Scenarios: The role of Representation in Visual Perception" Richard Wollheim, "Representation: The Philosophical Contribution to Psychology;" Pictures and Language;" and "Art, Interpretation, and Perception" In describing the requirements for a general theory of representation, Wollheim says it must answer two questions: What is it to represent? (what is the relationship between the representation and the something that it is of?) What, in the narrow sense of the term, is a representation? Using his two questions to guide our analysis, we find that the major theoretical issues that need to be investigated include: Is pictorial representation based on natural resemblance or convention? What is the relationship between pictures and reality? Finally, as part of this review, we are investigating if it is possible to develop an overriding theory of representation that accommodates the various issues and viewpoints. What is the relationship between pictures and reality? In beginning this discussion, let's first look at Wollheim's second question about what is a representation. -
As in Milan Kundera's the Unbearable Lightness of Being
Journal of Xi'an University of Architecture & Technology ISSN No : 1006-7930 Postmodernism and the Concept of Kitsch- As in Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being Dr.Shanthichitra Associate Professor & Head, Dept. of English, College of Science and Humanities SRMIST, Chennai, India Abstract: The concept of Kitsch is one of the difficult concepts which has been so easily handles by Milan Kundera in his incredible work of art – The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Culturally accepted words and situations vs. the words which are labeled as grotesque points out that peculiar point which deviates the ordinary to sublimity. This paper studies that ordinary which is ignored in culture through Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Keywords: Kitsch, Postmodernism, Phenomenology, Milan Kundera, Ideologies and Culture. When I came across the concept of Taipei modern Toilet diner, I was reminded of Milan Kundera’s Kitsch…This Modern Toilet diner is one of chain of themed eateries in Taiwan appealing to largely the youngsters of the city. This diner has greater relevance to the modern culture, culture in which youngsters call each other by bad words out of love…they have overcome all the grotesques!? Are they above all the human hurts?! Or is it an effort to deviate from kitsch?! Milan Kundera in his The Unbearable Lightness of Being talks about the concept of Kitsch. Kitsch is a German word that’s been adopted by a number of other languages, including English. It refers primarily to art that is overly sentimental or melodramatic, and so refers to aesthetics. What’s interesting is the way Kundera uses the concept in his novel, not to talk about art, but to talk about political ideology and about life. -
Paintings and Photographs, Introduction to "William Wegman" Curtis Carter Marquette University, [email protected]
Marquette University e-Publications@Marquette Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications Philosophy, Department of 1-1-2002 Paintings and Photographs, Introduction to "William Wegman" Curtis Carter Marquette University, [email protected] Published version. "Introduction," in William Wegman. Roman Zenner, 2002: 1-5. Permalink. © 2002 Roman Zenner. Used with permission. WILLIAM WEG MAN Roman Zenner 2002 PAINTINGS AND PHOTOGRAPHS When William Wegman began his career in the late 1960s, he like many young artists of his generation decided to abandon painting preferring instead to use pho tography and video to explore contemporary issues in art. Why abandon painting at this point? Painting, after all, had been under attack since the invention of photogra phy in the mid-nineteenth century. Still its output has continued for centuries virtu ally without interruption. Perhaps it was because painting in the 60s seemed less exciting or less flexible than the new media and unable to satisfy the needs of artists and the public in a technological post-modem society. Against the aesthetics of post modernism, painting as a medium affirms the values of originality and uniqueness. But these values had already been called into question decades earlier by Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, and others. The decision to abandon painting overlooks certain facts about its resiliency. Painting has had a long history of success as an art form within a broad range of diverse cultures. As Richard Wollheim has argued," If artists over the centuries had not succeeded in putting across what they wished to convey, they would have turned to some other activity .... Or their public would have asked them to do SO."1 At the conclusion of a lengthy book on pain~ing, Wollheim's strongest argument for the continuation of painting is its survival as an art form. -
Walter Benjamin and Kitsch Politics in the Phantasmagorical Age by Ayşegül Ergül a Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Gradua
Walter Benjamin and Kitsch Politics in the Phantasmagorical Age by Ayşegül Ergül A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science Carleton University Ottawa, Ontario © 2016, Ayşegül Ergül Abstract In this dissertation I explore the relationship between politics, aesthetics, culture and technology by (re)thinking and (re)conceptualizing the concept of kitsch as a theoretical construct in order to investigate the dream-worlds of Europe which sprang at the intersection of liberalism, social democracy and capitalism. I argue that the unexplored potentialities of kitsch, as a concept, reside in the analysis of the dream-worlds, which have been occupying the social and political imaginaries of Western individuals, communities and institutions since the disenchantment of the world. My methodological approach is built on Benjamin’s notion of historical materialism. Thus, I engage with the historical object(s) (e.g., arcades, fashion, technological reproductions etc.) not as “object(s) of experience” but as a “participant(s) in historical experience” (Caygill 2004, 90). Challenging the progressive notion of history, I argue that within the objective impenetrability of commodity fetishism a “sur-real” world of fetishized images – that is, kitsch – emerges, alienated from the individual and the collective, yet constituting and shaping them. By mapping out the implications of this “sur-real” world on “the political,” the collective (un)conscious and action, I conclude that alternative politics could arise from the unsettling interpretations of the reified and symbolic expressions of this same “sur-real” world, paving a path for new political imaginaries. -
RICHARD WOLLHEIM Copyright © British Academy 2001
RICHARD WOLLHEIM Copyright © British Academy 2001 – all rights reserved Richard Arthur Wollheim 1923–2003 RICHARD ARTHUR WOLLHEIM was born on 5 May 1923 in London, the younger son of Eric Wollheim, of a German Jewish family, and Constance Baker, whose family came from the West Country and for centuries were peasants. His father was a theatrical impresario, who from 1918 acted as the Diaghilev ballet’s London manager. His mother was a Gaiety show- girl, who performed as an actress playing to the troops during the First World War, but at her husband’s insistence left the stage when she married. In his posthumously published memoir of his childhood, Germs (2004), which begins with his tottering out through the front door into the light at the age of two, Richard traces the roots in childhood of a variety of emotions he experienced in later life—resentment against calm, quiet places, the lure of danger, shame at the unreliability of his body, certain fears of inundation—and paints vivid pictures of his parents’ opinions, routines, behaviour and character. His father was emancipated and although he embraced no religious faith—indeed, considered all religion to be folly, he insisted that Richard was brought up as a Christian, an encumbrance Richard freed himself from when he grew up, from then on regarding all religions as harmful illusions, and, like Hume and Nietzsche, believing that religions tend to be worse the further they stray from polytheism. At the age of 13 he went to Westminster School as a King’s Scholar. It was the first time that he had been away to boarding-school, something he had been looking forward to but which turned out to be very different from what he had expected. -
AH 302: the Idea of the Aesthetic Syllabus Course Description Texts
Fall 2020 AH 302: The Idea of the Aesthetic Syllabus The schedule of classes/readings is subject to change. Registered students should consult the syllabus on Google Classrooms, which will be kept updated. Instructor: Katalin Makkai Course times: Monday and Wednesday 15:45-17:15 Email: [email protected] Office hours: TBA Office: P98 004 Course description “Aesthetics” and “aesthetic” are terms that are often taken for granted inside as well as outside academic discourse. We speak of aesthetic experiences and judgments and qualities, and we employ “aesthetics” to designate the study of such matters. Although their root is taken from the Greek, the now-familiar terms (in their now-familiar usages) are, however, comparatively new. They are commonly regarded as having been introduced into the philosophical lexicon in the eighteenth century—a few hundred years ago. This course studies some of the texts that were key to the discovery, or perhaps the invention, of the “aesthetic”. What work was the idea meant to do? How did its evolution retain or reconfigure its original senses and purposes? Is the idea of the aesthetic problematic, ideological, or chimerical? Do we need an idea of the aesthetic to think about art? Texts All readings will be provided during the semester electronically and are to be brought to class as printouts. Electronic devices Students may not use any electronic devices (laptop, tablet, mobile phone) in the classroom, unless an accommodation letter has been issued. Requirements ACADEMIC INTEGRITY Bard College Berlin maintains the staunchest regard for academic integrity and expects good academic practice from students in their studies. -
Art, Clive Bell
PHI 3240: Philosophy of Art Session 3 September 9th, 2015 Matisse, Henri. (1905) Luxe, Calme, et Volupte. Collingwood & Bell on the Ontology of Art 1 Today we officially begin a unit on the ontology of art, Ø the attempt to answer the question “What is art?” Ø This question is ambiguous. Is it asking: • What is the nature of artworks?, or • What is the nature of the practice of art? Ø We are going to read these authors as if they are answering the question as a claim about artworks. Before discussing Collingwood’s & Bell’s answers, let’s consider a theoretical predecessor. • The earliest views about art we have on record are mimetic, or representational theories: – these say that artworks mimic & depict images/events from the real world. • As Shakespeare’s Hamlet says about plays, artworks were understood to “hold as ‘twere the ‘play within a play’ the mirror up to nature” (Act 3, Scene 2) in Hamlet 2 Representational views were common among the ancient Greeks (e.g. Plato), • and popularized in 18th century Europe (especially by Charles Batteaux, in “The Fine Arts Reduced to a Common Principle” (trans. from French) Why have representational theories of art fallen out of favor? Greek sculpture, Fragonard, Jean-Honoré. nd Ø There are tons of counterexamples 2 -century B.C. (1772) The Reader. to the view, e.g.: – visual artworks which don’t clearly depict any recognizable objects or events (beginning in 1800s), – and purely instrumental music (e.g., symphonies) without lyrics or guiding narratives. • Mozart’s #40 in G Minor (1788): bit.ly/1O2GbSp Turner, Joseph Mallord William. -
Philosophy of Perception As a Guide to Aesthetics
OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Fri Jan 31 2014, NEWGEN 5 Philosophy of Perception as a Guide to Aesthetics Bence Nanay 5.1 The Provocative Claim The aim of this paper is to argue for a provocative claim: that many, maybe even most traditional problems in aesthetics are in fact about philosophy of perception and can, as a result, be fruitfully addressed with the help of the conceptual apparatus of the philosophy of perception. I will spend much of the paper clarifying and qualifying this claim, which after all the qualifications may not sound so provocative after all. I need to clarify the following aspects of this claim: (a) What is meant by aesthetics. (b) What is meant by philosophy of perception. (c) Why should we accept that it is a promising avenue of research to consider prob- lems in aesthetics to be really about the philosophy of perception. I will take these in turn. But before we begin, it needs to be emphasized that on the face of it, the claim I make does not sound crazy, at least if we consider the etymology of the term ‘aesthetics’. The Greek word ‘aesthemi’ means perception and when Alexander Baumgarten introduced the concept of ‘aesthetics’ in 1750, what he meant by it was precisely the philosophy of perception: the study of sense perception (scientia cogni- tionis sensitivae). My claim is that, regardless of etymology, this connection can also be made today. It is important that my aim is not to argue that aesthetics should be a subdiscipline of philosophy of perception or that any approach that does not consider aesthetics to be philosophy of perception is doomed or should be considered inferior. -
The Significance and Insignificance of Clive Bell's Formalism I
Navorsingsartikels/Research articles The significance and insignificance of Clive Bell’s formalism i Johan Snyman Dept, of Philosophy Rand Afrikaans University JOHANNESBURG Abstract Clive Bell coined the phrase significant form. The way he initially defined the phrase and the way he implemented it were two different matters. In this article Bell's procedure is analysed as a characteristic of late moder nist aesthetics, i.e. an attempt to come to terms with the challenge o f the radically new in art. It is suggested that one should bear in mind that formalism in this sense is a theory of artistic material which explains how meaning is communicated and perceived through non-discursive qualities o f the artistic material. That is the relevance o f Susanne K. Longer's re- interpretation o f Bell's phrase. 1. Introduction Clive Bell’s aesthetics does not make for profound reading. Why bother then? The least one can say is that Bell contributed towards the modem aesthetic vocabulary by coining a phrase that has since become a cliché or hackneyed for that matter, viz. significant form. On the other hand, if one reflects from a distance on the Wirkungsgeschichte of Bell’s phrase as well as on the Wirkungs- geschichte of the problem he wanted to solve, significant form has an intriguing logic. Significant form as an aesthetic category has spawned quite a generation of related concepts, from Clive Bell to Susanne K. Langer’s unconsummated symbol, up to Nelson Goodman’s languages of art (Goodman, 1976), Peter A revised version of a paper read at a 2nd International Symposium on Formalism, organized by the Slovenian Society of Aesthetics in Ljubljana, 14-17 May 1992. -
Monism and Pluralism: the History of Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Architecture - Part I Paul Guyer
Monism and Pluralism: The History of Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Architecture - Part I Paul Guyer I. Monism and Pluralism in the Early History of Aesthetics One way to think about the history of aesthetics since its inception as a properly named subdiscipline of philosophy in the early eighteenth century is to think of it as a debate about the right way to understand the relations among the terms of the Neo-Platonist triad comprised by the true, the good, and the beautiful: do these terms designate three separate domains of human interest, the theoretical, the practical and moral, and the aesthetic, the boundaries between which must be sharply defined and maintained, or do they designate three aspects of human experience that can and should be fused in practice, indeed do they suggest that the distinctive function of art among human activities is precisely to fuse our natural love of beauty with our theoretical and moral concerns, to provide a kind of unity in human experience that we otherwise do not find?1 Immanuel Kant might be thought to be the foremost of separatists rather than synthesizers in the modern history of aesthetics: his definition in the “Analytic of the Beautiful” in the Critique of the Power of Judgment of the “judgment of taste” as “aesthetic,” where that means that it is neither cognitive nor practical, that on the one hand “In order to decide whether or not something is beautiful, we do not relate the representation by means of understanding to the object for cognition”2 and that on the other hand “The agreeable, -
Are We Teaching High Art Or Low Art?
CHAPTER 7 ARE WE TEACHING HIGH ART OR LOW ART? We are apt to call barbarous whatever departs widely from our own tatse and apprehension; but some find the epithet of reproach retorted on us. (Hume, 1965, p. 3) References to high-art notions span the globe. Centuries of continuous and changing conceptions of high art have involved, for example: ideas about the grand and the common, the technical study of its rhetoric concerns, its indifferent morality or lack of any firm moral basis to it, its notions of beauty, perfectionism, emotion, idealism, formalism, the sublime, taste, academic painting and correctness, can be found in the work of Homer, Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Longinus, Joshua Reynolds, David Hume and Clive Bell. So consequently, we are sometimes asked in art education whether the art we are teaching is: ‘high art’ rather than ‘low art’, ‘high culture rather than low culture’, ‘high art rather than popular art’, ‘high art rather than student-centered art’. What are all these different distinctions with ‘high’ and ‘low’ in them segregating? What are their contrasts? Can we segregate what we teach in art in these ways and ought we to do so? ‘High art’ is poor art if, as Marcel Proust satirically mocks, we confuse art with ‘high society’, ‘social ambition’ and ‘special friendships in the art world’ (Proust, 2001, p. 59–67). Proust was aware that in the history of art no continent, nation and single group of people have a monopoly over what is ‘high art’. The above terms with ‘high’ and ‘low’ in them certainly imply a clash of ideas about teaching in art, but if so, why should popular teenage music necessarily clash with classical instrumental music, since on the one hand classical music can perform in instrumental ways Beatles songs rather well, and popular music can have instrumental orchestral influences that can benefit its music interest. -
The Mosaic of Aesthetics: the Manifestation of Clive Bell's and Roger Fry's Theories in the Waves
Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism Volume 13 Issue 1 Winter Article 8 4-2020 The Mosaic of Aesthetics: The Manifestation of Clive Bell's and Roger Fry's Theories in The Waves Nina Katarina Štular Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/criterion Part of the English Language and Literature Commons BYU ScholarsArchive Citation Štular, Nina Katarina (2020) "The Mosaic of Aesthetics: The Manifestation of Clive Bell's and Roger Fry's Theories in The Waves," Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism: Vol. 13 : Iss. 1 , Article 8. Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/criterion/vol13/iss1/8 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at BYU ScholarsArchive. It has been accepted for inclusion in Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism by an authorized editor of BYU ScholarsArchive. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected]. The Mosaic of Aesthetics The Manifestation of Clive Bell’s and Roger Fry’s Aesthetic Theories in The Waves Nina Katarina Štular In Roger Fry’s “An Essay in Aesthetics,” published in 1909, he explores the question of what art truly is. A year after the paper’s publication, Fry met Clive Bell on a train and they struck a conversation about aesthetics that marked the beginning of Fry’s life-long friendship with the Bloomsbury group—a group that gave home to many influential modernist thinkers and writers. The aesthetic theory that Fry explains in “An Essay in Aesthetics” influenced Bell’sArt , published in 1914, which in turn affected Fry’s Vision and Design, published in 1920, in which Fry fully elaborates his aesthetic theory.