What's the Point of Art?

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Description: Studying art or literature has the reputation of being notoriously unprofitable, even useless. At the same time, the richest and most powerful people on earth, from America in the 2020s to the Italian Renaissance and long before, feel compelled to pick sides among cultural movements and weigh in on aesthetic questions. What we now call "liberal education" has its origins in antiquity with the ideal of the liberal arts, and medieval curricula placed rhetoric and music as equally important to arithmetic and astronomy. Was Fyodor Dostoevsky right in saying that "beauty will save the world?" Or was Kurt Vonnegut correct to say that the power of art to directly affect society "turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high?" In this course, we will interrogate the social role of the arts and read some of the most insightful - and, in some cases, influential - reflections on the force of aesthetics to shape the world, by authors including Plato, Horace, Percy Shelley, Alexander Pushkin, Georg Lukacs, Bertolt Brecht, Leon Trotsky, Lydia Ginzburg, Guy Debord, Dubravka Ugresic, and Judith Butler.