Visual Pleasure & Photography in NOLA

Catalog description

The class is about visual pleasure and aesthetic beauty. What makes a picture or painting beautiful? We will examine this question through several disciplines including philosophy, art history and experiential artistic practice. We will consult short readings of the classics answer to this question (e.g. Plato, Kant, Schiller, Delacroix, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Freud, Vygotsky, Foucault, Gombrich, Susanne Langer, John Berger, Elaine Scarry, Boris Groys, Clement Greenberg, Laura Malvie) At the same time we will also look at several distinct periods and ask what was beauty at these specific times. I have chosen four such times. The first period is the Northern Renaissance (e.g. Van Eyck, Bosch, Dürer, Bruegel) the second the Baroque (e.g. Velázquez, Rembrandt), the third the impressionists (e.g. Manet, Degas, Cassatt, Monet, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec) the expressionists (Franz Marc, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner) and fourth 20th century art photography. We will examine various concerns that we have with the beautiful. For example, the concern that the love of beauty is at best an evasion from the problems of social reality, at worst a way of legitimizing the status of the rich and powerful. That it is merely a marker of social class (e.g. Bourdieu). That beauty is frivolous, decadent, distracting, and unserious. That there is nothing to describe or to share or give account to this most subjective experience. We will attempt to answer this question by looking to both the experience as well as production of beauty as a kind of temporary emancipation from a life-world experience, a lifeworld that is limited by material conditions and social factors. We will also look at beauty as a transformative decentering of the self. We will examine deeply Kant’s idea that true beauty is the free play of imagination and understanding in the mind of the audience and therefore can include any theme of topic.