CoursesCourse 31
Aesthetics and art
Six ways to understand what art is. The same word covers a painted bison in a Spanish cave, a medieval lesson in geometry, and a urinal signed R. Mutt. This course takes the lectures’ six keywords (imitation, freedom, form, authorization, exemplification, and experience), checks each against the philosophers who actually made the arguments, from Plato to Dewey, and ends with a question the six share: not only what art is, but when.
Start lesson 1Lessons
- 1 The age of art, and art as copyingA girl looks up in a Spanish cave in 1879, and for twenty years the experts will not believe her. Why a word as old as “art” has changed its meaning, why the question matters in an age of design, and how Plato and Aristotle first answered it: art copies, but what does it copy?
- 2 Free to look, free to shapeThree philosophers argued over one painting of a pair of boots. What it means for a thing to be freed from use, how Kant and Schiller put it, and how a theory of significant form turned out to be about balance, line, and color.
- 3 Who says so, and what it doesIn April 1917 a urinal went to a show that was supposed to accept everything. Family resemblances, an artworld, and a history that decides; then a way of asking what a work does, with a swatch, a pipe, and a Roman statue.
- 4 An experience, and six answersA great violinist played in a Washington subway station and almost nobody stopped. Dewey’s idea that art is an experience, a room made of light, and then the six accounts side by side: what each explains, what each misses, and what is left of the question.
You’ll be able to
- Explain why “art” has meant different things at different times: skill, the seven liberal arts, the modern fine arts, and a status that an object can be given.
- State, with names and dates, the six accounts of art the lectures sort the field into, and say which ones are the lectures’ own sorting and which are standard theories.
- Say what each account explains well and where it fails: a cave bison, a discus thrower, a pair of boots, a painting by Cézanne, Duchamp’s Fountain, a performance with a bow and arrow.
- Use the shift from “what is art?” to “when is art?” on cases from your own life, and say honestly what the lectures claim beyond the evidence.
About this course
This course covers 审美与艺术 (Aesthetics and Art), a set of lectures that sorts the many answers to “what is art?” into six keywords. The sorting is the lectures’ own, and this course says so. It does not read as a standard list in the philosophy of art, but each keyword rests on real theories with real authors, and the lessons go back to them: Plato and Aristotle on imitation, Kant and Schiller on freedom, Clive Bell on form, Arthur Danto and George Dickie on authorization, Nelson Goodman on exemplification, and John Dewey on experience.
The examples and the argument lead. Around them we add what is ours: dates, names, and quotations checked against sources (several familiar stories turn out to be tangled, such as the Discobolus, the Orchid Pavilion Preface, and Heidegger’s boots), background for readers in China and the United States, hands-on activities, and an honest “Another view” in every lesson. Where the course offers a reading of its own, it says so. Lesson 2 echoes Course 1’s lesson on useless on purpose, where the Greeks valued knowledge for its own sake, and Lesson 4 touches how context changes what we feel, a point developed with experiments in Course 10, Thinking, fast and slow.