Aesthetics on Art and the Built Environment

Catalog description

This course is an examination into the traditional concerns of aesthetic theory as it can apply to the making and consuming of art as it shapes and challenges our relationship to the built environment. Using original and seminal texts in Western philosophy, the class will examine those topics most relevant to aesthetic experience like taste, judgment, beauty, creativity and imagination as students think about space and place as a product of human interference and design with themes like the archive, home, virtual worlds, outer space and the "meatspace". Appropriate for students who make art or merely like art (including music, performance, poetry, writing and film), this course will help students articulate a more philosophical approach to these experiences and engagements. The class will be reading traditional philosophical writings as well as the more contemporary and post-modern theories on aesthetic experience that can inform and improve their artistic practices.