CoursesCourse 32
Contemporary art and the law of extremes
How modern and contemporary art can be read as a series of extremes. This course starts from what aesthetics really means, follows four turns in art from Van Gogh to Beuys, and tests one interpretive thesis, the law of extremes, against the paintings themselves, from Mondrian's tree-to-grid road to the black square and the white canvas.
Start lesson 1Lessons
- 1 A word for feelingThe word aesthetics began as a word for perception, not beauty. How the fine arts, the Louvre, and a mocking review of 1874 set the stage for a break with the great tradition, and how a photograph in 1839 challenged painting's oldest job.
- 2 Four revolutionsA green stripe down a face, a pile of little cubes, a urinal signed R. Mutt, and a broom in a forest. Four turns in modern art, what each one pushed furthest, and why the tidy count of four is only one way to tell the story.
- 3 The law of extremesTake one element out of a harmonious picture and push it as far as it will go. Mondrian's road from a red tree to a grid of black lines, the thesis behind it, who else said something like it, and the test of turning a painting upside down.
- 4 Where the law endsA headless statue, a square of black, a blue void, a white canvas, and a cut. What classical art hides in its figures, what golden-ratio claims really show, and where the road of extremes reached its end and turned.
You’ll be able to
- Explain what the word aesthetics originally meant and why the Impressionists, photography, and the museum made a break with the great tradition possible.
- Place Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso and Braque, Duchamp, and Beuys on a map of four turns in modern art, and say what each pushed furthest.
- State the law of extremes as a thesis, trace it step by step in Mondrian's road from tree to grid, and say which parts of that story the evidence supports.
- Say what hidden structure classical art really has, why golden-ratio claims are easy to make and hard to prove, and where the road of extremes ended and turned.
About this course
This course covers 极端法则 (The Law of Extremes), a way of reading modern and contemporary art: again and again an artist takes one element out of the classical whole and pushes it as far as it will go. It is a thesis, not a settled fact of art history, and the course says so wherever it applies it. The thesis has relatives in the history of criticism, and it has critics; both appear in every lesson.
The argument and the artworks lead. Around them we add what is ours: dates, names, titles, and quotations checked against museum and scholarly sources (several familiar stories turned out to be wrong or half true), background for readers in China and the United States, hands-on activities, and an honest “Another view” in every lesson. For the Greek habit of measuring and ideal proportion that the last lesson meets again, see Course 1, Why science began in Greece; for why feeling is part of judging at all, see Course 10, Thinking, fast and slow.