Beauty and the Beholder: Approaching Art at the Berkeley Art Museum

4 credits · Undergraduate

This seminar-style course will take up a range of questions related to art works, aesthetic theory, the politics of art, and the relationship between artistic form and meaningful content by way of examinations of specific works at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA). Students will see how experts from several different disciplines approach works of art: What questions do scholars bring to an art work? What is a formal analysis vs. a critical interpretation of an art work? How do curators approach art? Are we supposed to ?learn from? an art work or ?experience? it or have some particular ?relationship? to it? Is art a matter of conveying feeling, a message, or an encounter with beauty?