Art and the Body

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

Perception is more than just seeing. To experience art requires the use of our senses–sight, smell, touch, taste, and hearing. It can also enlist the “sixth sense” of proprioception, as well as kinesthesia, balance, and sentiment. Drawing on the fields of neuroarthistory, somaestheics, and the history of the senses, this course examines the relationship between art, science, and cognition across historical periods of visual and material culture. Our course aims to analyze the various ways that artists and spectators engaged with artworks through sensate data, stimulation, and responses. This course explores how the historical development of the “sensuous” played an integral part in the ways artists from the Medieval period to contemporary art consider the spectator’s senses central to the creative process. Students will survey topics such as: visuality, aurality, haptics, imagination and memory, pain and suffering, erotics and temptation, consumption and appetite, virtual and augmented reality, and kinesthesia through a wide variety of media. Cross-culturally, the senses are not limited to the traditional five Aristotelian categories, making sensory perception dynamic and variable within cultural and social groups and across time periods. For more information about this and other courses in the Department of Art and Art History, please visit https://art.georgetown.edu This course is not available to audit.