Aesthetics & Visual Culture

ART HISTORY 600-001, Special Topics in Art History

While much work in visual studies rallies round the “anti-aesthetic” and deliberately poses itself against (traditional) aesthetics, there are both recent calls for a "return to aesthetics" and a renewed interest in the theory and practice of alternative aesthetics: the aesthetics of garbage, Santería aesthetics, camp and queer aesthetics, abject aesthetics, the “aesthetics of hunger,” palimpsestic and hybrid aesthetics, ultrabaroque aesthetics, diaspora aesthetics, and the list goes on. The developing transdisciplinary field of Visual Culture Studies has challenged the notion of transcendent value and critiqued universalizing norms of the “good” and the “beautiful.” And, yet, the idea that histories and criticism of art should involve the development of aesthetic criteria and the exercise of aesthetic judgments has hardly
gone away. This course confronts the charged questions of how we value and judge and how we account for sensory response and affective experience. "Aesthetics and Visual Culture” is dedicated to thinking through the continued relevance of engagement with aesthetics to the
study and practice of visual culture. Must we understand aesthetics as predicated upon the premise of a privileged and separate aesthetic realm outside of politics and the appeal to universal, transcendent categories of aesthetic judgment? Are there other ways of theorizing aesthetics in terms, for example, of practices and tactics that may be vitally important for understanding and intervening in the political? We will explore these questions in several main ways: (1) critically rereading some of the classic texts of the development of that branch of philosophy known as the science or study of the beautiful (Kant, Burke, Hume, and Hegel) and questioning the separation of aesthetics and judgment from the political and the construction of the disinterested subject of judgment (2) considering various critiques of aesthetics and the role of aesthetic criteria and judgment in analyzing art and culture
(including Frankfurt School, New Left, Postcolonial, Feminist, and Queer critiques), and (3) exploring the possibility of radical, alternative, and/or transformative ways of thinking about sensory experience and value. Class meetings will be conducted with a mix of lecture
presentations and a great deal of discussion. There are no prerequisites. Course requirements include: one question presentation on one of the readings, a questioning response paper on two of the readings, a draft or prospectus of the final project that will be
submitted around at mid semester, a presentation of your final project, and a final project that may take the form of an extended essay or a creative project in some other form besides expository prose accompanied by a framing statement engaging with the readings.