On Beauty: Aesthetics and Its Discontents

3 units

During the past decade a variety of theorists have sought to return our attention to the subject of beauty, and in particular to the experience of the beautiful in contemporary art. What all of these authors share is a desire to revitalize the autonomy of aesthetic experience and judgment. Their hope is to counterbalance what they consider a long history of aesthetic denigration, pursued in various forms by the modernist proponents of the sublime, the political agendas of the avant-garde, the hybrid practices of postmodernism, and the itineraries of cultural studies. The task of this seminar is to explore various discussions of the aesthetic since the late eighteenth century to provide a more rigorous basis for contemporary debates about the return of the aesthetic. Special attention will be given to the ways in which classical aesthetic theory sought to situate art and the beautiful in opposition to the everyday, the moral, and the political, but also to how this construction of aesthetic autonomy has been challenged or renegotiated in the name of various modernist projects. Readings include texts on art and the beautiful by authors such as Winckelmann, Kant, Hegel, Fiedler, Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse, Heidegger, Danto, and Scarry, but also on the reconceptualization of the aesthetic in the context of contemporary media and installation theory. Additional focus will be given to a number of aesthetic objects-dramas, poems, sculptures, paintings, and installations-to both probe and complicate our examination of modern aesthetic thought. All readings and discussions in English.