Course Syllabus for Philosophy 150931102 - Aesthetics WI
Fall 2009 - Rowan University
Bunce Hall 348 - Monday and Wednesday, 3:15 - 4:30 pm
Professor David Clowney

Course Methods:  The course will consist of readings, some looking and listening assignments, class discussion and presentations, visits to various exhibits, concerts, and performances, and regular writing assignments, both graded and ungraded.  Graded assignments include two short essays in criticism and the preparation of a term project in philosophical aesthetics, to be designed in consultation with the instructor.  Ungraded assignments include five event reports, a reading response paper every week, and various in-class writing exercises.  Your grade will be based on the quality of your critical essays (40%), the quality and regularity of your class participation and reading responses (16%), your attendance at five events, each documented by a one page response (10%), and the quality of your final project (34%). 

Course Policies:  In my ideal educational world, there would be no grades.  Voluntaryteacher student relationships would be individually negotiated according to the interests of the student and the teacher.  We don't live in that world. For good educaction in the world we do live in, I expect you to adhere the following policies. 

            You must meet all deadlines and complete all assignments.   Missed deadlines may be penalized by as much as a letter grade.  That goes for proposals and rough drafts as well as for final drafts and oral presentations.  Papers more than a week late will not be accepted unless you have negotiated an extension in advance.  Final projects will not be accepted without prior review of a rough draft. 

           All work must be sumitted electronically through Blackboard, in a form that I can read. Acceptable formats are .doc, docx, .rtf, and as a last resort, .pdf files. If you use a word processor that cannot generate one of these formats, please contact me immediately and we'll figure something out. I don't want hard copy unless you are having trouble with Blackboard, and even then I prefer that you e-mail your paper to me.

            I expect regular attendance, both at class sessions and at our first Friday excursion, and other such events.*   The class needs your contribution, and you need the discussions and experiences that happen when we meet.  You are allowed three absences; after that your participation grade will suffer.  Meanwhile, please make every effort to submit your work on time even if you must be absent. 

* Note: I am flexible about scheduled activities outside of normal class time, since you were not aware of them when you signed up for this class and made your schedule for the semester.  If you can't make an outing, let me know, and we'll make other arrangements. 

          Stay in touch!  If you can't make class or are having trouble with an assignment, e-mail me, or make an appointment and come see me.

Class starts promptly at 3:15, and ends at 4:30.  Come on time and stay till class is over.

Online Component:  The course syllabus, a list of concerts, exhibits, and other events, sample critical essays, course lecture notes, reading guides, images, sounds, and as much else as I have been able to prepare, are available on line.  Assigned readings not in the text are posted on Blacboard under Course Content. Other materials are available on the course website. Start at my home page (http://www.rowan.edu/philosop/clowney), and click on Aesthetics. You may communicate with me by e-mail (clowney@rowan.edu). I will communicate with you using your Rowan e-mail account. It is your responsibility to check your Rowan e-mail regularly, whether or not it is the account you normally use. If you like, you can set it up to forward your mail to the account you do use.

We will be using Blackboard as an integral part of the course. Your Rowan username and password will give you access to MyBlackboard, and from there you will have access to this class. Assignments and (some) handouts will be posted there. In addition to handing in your assignments through the Assignments tool, you will use the Blackboard Discussion tool to discuss certain of your assignments with each other and help each other to improve them before handing your rough drafts to me. I'll give further instructions for this in class.

Course Outline:  The course will develop along several axes simultaneously.  We will pay attention to several arts, namely painting and sculpture (about four weeks worth); music (also four weeks); and a mixture of theater and dance, film and television, and fiction and poetry during the remaining weeks of the semester.  We will view, read, or listen to particular works (including student works), and we will discuss issues in philosophical aesthetics raised by the works or the media they represent.  We will also read and discuss essays by several philosophers and critics about the arts.  We will discuss a number of topics in aesthetics, including those raised by the list of questions at the end of this syllabus.  We will visit some museums and galleries, and go to some concerts and other arts events.  We will also have some in-class concerts, and some guests.

Course Texts:

S.D. Ross, Art and Its Significance (NY: SUNY Press, 1994); an anthology of readings by philosophers and artists.

Honore de Balzac, "The Unknown Masterpiece" and "Gambara", Introduction by Arthur Danto. (NY, 2001, New York Review of Books Classics). We will read the first of these two novellas, "The Unknown Masterpiece", by this great nineteenth century novelist, and the introduction to it by philosopher of art and art critic for The Nation magazine Arthur Danto.

Carl Wilson, Let's Talk about Love: A Journey to the End of Taste (NY: Continuum, 2007). Start reading this book right away (it's about Celine Dion, popular culture, and taste), and keep reading it in small doses so that you have completed it by November 16, when we will discuss it in class.

David Clowney: Image and sound selections and accompanying narrative for the lectures on visual art and music.

Also, some photocopied essays, to be handed out from time to time or made available on Blackboard.

Graded Assignments:

- Two critical essays, each on some work of art that interests you. Each of these will be submitted as a rough draft. You will receive comments from a classmate, and also from me. To get the two points on your rough draft, you must identify the classmate to whom you provided comments. I will return comments to you, you will revise and submit a final draft.

- One final project: see description below. There are many ways to fulfil this assignment; see the website for a longer description and some examples. Rather than make the requirements too narrow, I've chosen to make the process interactive, and help you define your project in stages. This means that I must see your proposal and your rough draft.

- A presentation related to your final project. 5-10 minutes, one or two per day beginning October 5, sign up.

A word to the wise: Graded assignments get more or less points depending on their quality. You can't do well in the class without doing them well. However, 29 points out of 100 in this course come from ungraded assignments: reading reports, event reports, rough drafts and proposals. You get one or two points for doing each of these, and lose points for not doing them, regardless of their quality. If you blow off the ungraded assignments, your highest possible grade is a C-.

Reading, Viewing, and Listening Assignments will be made week by week.  Other assignments will be due periodically. See Week by Week below for a list of these asssignments with their due dates. They will also be posted on Blackboard. You are responsible to know what they are, and to keep up with them, whether or not I announce them in class. Please note that the class schedule is likely to change. If it does, just keep submitting reading reports each week, covering the readings we are actually doing that week, whether it matches the questions in Blackboard or not. For September 2 and 9, familiarize yourself with the course web-page.  Read the introduction to Larry Shiner's The Invention of Art., and do the viewing assignment on African Art listed in the syllabus. Write about a page summarizing these readings and exhibitions, submit it to Blackboard before class begins, and come to class prepared to discuss. Use the Assignment tool to submit your work. Click "show all" in the bottom right hand corner of the screen to make sure that they are all there. Then scan down until you get to Response 1, open it and submit. You may type your response directly into the submission area (actually easier for me), or you may attach a readable file.

Our topic for the introductory sessions (9/2 and 9/9) is the distinction between "fine art" and other arts (craft, popular art, commercial art and design, entertainment, etc.). This distinction and the baggage that comes with it is fundamental to the modern idea of art. Rather than argue about whether to accept it, we will look at its historical origin and its social function. We will also consider what common arts-related practices and propensities are universal in all human cultures. In the week of September 14, we will discuss the topics of art as representation and of art and morality.

Course Instructional Staff: You and I!  I mean this seriously.  Many of you are working artists, and you have more expertise in your artistic field than I have.  Some of you are biology or psychology or business majors, and by now you know more about some parts of your chosen field than I know. Sometimes that knowledge will be relevant to the philosophy of art. On the other hand, I have more expertise in philosophy than you do, and after teaching this course for many years I've also picked up a lot of knowledge about the arts. By sharing our knowledge, our experiences, and our questions, we will produce an exciting and worthwhile course.  You are as essential to this result as I am.

My office is on the third floor of Bunce Hall, in the Philosophy and Religion Department's part of the building (Bunce 315).  My office hours are Monday and Wednesday, 1:45 til 3:00 pm.  I am usually in on Tuesdays, and am available at other times also if necessary.  Please come see me! You are welcome to drop by any time; but to be sure we connect, it is best to make an appointment. My e-mail is clowney@rowan.edu. Feel free to e-mail me with questions or to tell me anything I should know about.

Deadlines for Written Assignments:

First critical essay               9/30 (rough draft), 10/7 (final draft)

Project proposal                   9/28

Second critical essay           10/26, 11/2

Project rough draft                11/30

Project presentations           1 or 2 per class, beginning 10/5

Project final draft                  12/14

Preparing for class:  Each class session, we will be discussing a topic for which you will prepare by doing an assigned set of readings, as well as by reviewing the course lecture pages for the day, reading the narrative that goes with the images or sounds, and doing some other looking and listening.  You will also look for additional examples from various arts that will illustrate the topic, or confirm or refute or expand one of the claims made by an author, or otherwise contribute to the semester's conversation about philosophy and the arts. Please take the looking and listening part of preparation as seriously as you take the reading part, and vice versa.

Doing the reading, viewing and listening assignments:  The readings, the virtual gallery tours, and all listening and viewing assignments are an essential basis for class discussion.  You are expected to come to class having done them, and prepared to participate in class discussion on the basis of them.  You are expected to refer to them in your two critical essays and your term project when they prove relevant.  In order to ensure these results, you will prepare reading, looking and listening responses. These are short summaries (a paragraph to a page) of the required reading, viewing or listening assignments, together with your reactions to it. Further instructions for each response are included on the Blackboard page for that assignment. You must post these to Blackboard each Wednesday before you come to class (so include your Monday responses with your Wednesday one; but please don't wait til Wednesday to do the Monday part).  You get one point for doing each one of these response papers. I will check Blackboard to make sure that you are keeping up. As long as you are making some effort to understand and react to the readings, you will get your point. Completing these responses makes up 13% of your grade (in other words, not doing them will drop you more than a letter grade). 

Getting the most out of the readings: You will find some of the readings difficult to understand. That's because this is a course in the philosophy of art and art criticism, and philosophical writing and thinking is hard intellectual work.  Sometimes philosophers make it harder than it needs to be.  But even the best and clearest writers will still give your brain a workout. Critical discussion about the nature and meaning of the arts, such as that contained in the papers I have assigned, is an essential part of the cultural context within which the arts have their meaning.  I have found the workout worth it; I hope you will too! I will take time in class to clear up the murky parts (but this will not work if you have not first struggled to understand them for yourself). Reading guides for most of the readings (usually power points) are posted in the "Reading Guides" folder on the course website. Many authors also have an entry about them on the course web-site.  Make things easy on yourself; use these aids before tackling the readings. I will not usually assign more than 50 pages a week; often I will assign much less than this amount. I will not assign more than an hour's worth of listening or viewing assignments for any one class.   

Writing Criticism:

The peer review sheet (on Blackboard, under Course Content) is good quick outline of what I expect in your critical essays. Here are a few more helpful hints:

There are many ways to write criticism well, depending on the audience, the purpose of the criticism, and the vision and goals of the critic.  By including the following elements you can usually produce a good and readable piece of criticism, and unless you have specific permission to do something different I expect to find all of them in your essay.  After that, it's practice, familiarity and insight!

• Give specific details about where or in what venue the work was seen or heard or performed, and say how readers can have access to it.

• Describe the work well enough that your reader can understand the rest of what you say, and can tell whether he or she is interested in hearing/seeing more. 

• Describe any unique features of the work.  Say what general categories the work fits into, if it seems to you to fit any such categories, and indicate how it compares with other work in this category.  Tell us anything else important about where the work comes from, who made it, and its place in the world.

• Tell us what draws you to the work, or turns you off. Do this by describing the aspects of the work that make you feel that way, rather than by telling us how you feel!

• Comment briefly on the strengths and weaknesses of the work, if you have not already done so.

• Discuss any aesthetic issues that the work raises for you.

Preparing your project: Your final project will be the equivalent of a ten page (or longer) term paper. It will have a written component, which may or may not be that long, depending on its other components. Your project may be an extended essay in criticism, in which you develop some point in philosophical aesthetics.  It may be a piece of straight philosophical aesthetics, like some of the readings. It may be the presentation of a piece or a body of your own work, with comments on how that work relates to themes we have read about and discussed in class. If you want to do this, be sure to talk to me first. Please note that I will not be grading your project as art, but rather as aesthetics (philosophy of art). Other options are also allowable; check them with me. You must present your project to the class, either in one of its planning stages or as a finished product.    Make sure you do the rough draft; this is the only way that you will be sure we are on the same wavelength about the expectations you must meet.  The following list of topic questions should give you some ideas.  Check the web-site for a list of specific projects you might do, plus some examples of successful past projects.

Presenting your project: As part of your project, you will make a 5 or 10 minute presentation to the class on your project topic. Slots are available from October 5 through December 14. Early presenters will be expected to tell us what you are working on, why it interests you, what questions you are trying to answer, where and how you will look for the answers, and why your project is an example of philosophy of the arts. Later presenters will be expected to present a class-friendly version of your finished project (of course it will answer the questions above).

Topic Questions (a partial list - for the course and for your project):

• Do criticism and theory make any contribution to art? Why not just experience the art and forget about the theory and the criticism?

• The word 'art' originally meant 'skill', and sometimes it still does (the art of cooking, of massage, etc.) Does fine art have to show skill?

• Is it possible to say what makes art different from non-art? Why do people care about this question? Would the question be easier to answer if 'art' meant 'skill'?

• Should we recognize a sharp distinction between fine art, commercial art, popular art, and craftwork, such that what belongs in one of the last three categories is excluded from the first?  Are these distinctions made in every time and culture?  And if not, how did they develop in our culture?

• What (if anything) do the (fine) arts have in common?

• Is it possible to define 'art'? If not, why not, and if so, how would you go about doing it? (Hint: When a word has a use in a language, its meaning cannot simply be 'up to you'.  Even the meaning of "delicious" is not up to you in that way, although your tastes won't be exactly the same as anyone else's. But just repeating the dictionary doesn't help much, either.  What other options might you have?)

• Case by case, how are the different arts like each other, and how do they differ? How do different arts (e.g., poetry and music) accomplish similar things when they work together (e.g., in a song).

• What are the unique possibilities and limits of particular arts? (For example, what can film do that other arts cannot? What can it not do easily, that other arts can?) How do these possibilities and limits affect the project of "translating" a work from one medium to another (e.g. from book to film, or from poem to music)? How do the differences and similarities between different arts affect an interdisciplinary project? (These questions are usually most fruitful when you are considering particular examples.)

• What is a symbol?

• How does art mean?  How does the answer to this question differ with the different arts? (e.g., painting, music, dance, poetry). Is the dimension of meaning essential to every fine art?

• How do the different arts express emotion (if they do)?

• What's the status of aesthetic standards?  Do they simply express individual or cultural tastes?  Is there anything objective about them?

• What's the nature of aesthetic properties?  (E.g., beauty, integrity, unity, mood, expressiveness, etc.)  Are they in any sense "objective"?  Or are they simply "in the eye (or ear) of the beholder"? What do they have to do with the senses?

• How do the arts relate to: Spirituality?  Morality?  Emotions?  Economic power and class structure?  Philosophy?  Culture and cultural development?

• What's the nature of aesthetic intelligence, and how does it relate to other sorts of intelligence?

• What's the relationship between the arts, biology and psychology? For example, is there a biological or a universal psychological basis for our love of music and dance? For our association of certain colors with certain emotions?

• What's the relationship, if there is one, between appreciation of art works and appreciation of nature?

• Can animals be artists?

• Is there any special connection between art and gender, or between art and sex or the erotic?

• How important is performance to art? Is there anything like performance in the non-performance arts?

Course Schedule with Assignments, Week by Week

9/2: Introduction: Orientation, handouts, class policies and assignments, website, Discussion: some human universals. The universality of the arts.

9/4: First Friday. Tour of Philadelphia Art Galleries. Meet at 5 pm at the Larry Becker gallery, 43 North 2nd Street in Philadelphia. Galleries are open from 5 til 8 pm. See Events page on website for tour itinerary. 

9/7: Labor Day, no class.

9/9: Introduction: Arts, fine art, craft, popular art, etc. View the images and read the narrative on the course website for the two "Introduction" pages. Do this each week, for every set of lectures that has pages devoted to it. Consider it part of the textbook.Read Shiner, The Invention of Art, Introduction (handout).  Start reading Wilson, Let's Talk about Love, read a chapter a week until we discuss the book in class. Viewing assignment: National Museum of African Art (Smithsonian) http://africa.si.edu/collections/index.htm , focus on "The Diversity of African Art" and "The Uses of African Art." Discussion of Art and craft, commercial art, popular art, traditional art, etc. Where did we get these distinctions, and what should we make of them? 

9/14: Art as representation.  Read Plato, Republic (selections from book X, in Ross, pp. 32-44, also from Book VII, "The Allegory of the Cave", (on Blackboard) and a bit from Aristotle's Poetics, in Ross, pp. 70 - 74. View the images and read the narrative on the corresponding course lecture pages on the web-site.

9/16: Representation and the power of Image: Art and Morality.  Read Plato, Republic, selections from books II, III and X in Ross; Ion and Symposium (selections) in Ross, pp. 45-63; Aristotle, Poetics, pp. 66-74. Start by reading the entries on Plato and Aristotle under Philosophers, Critics and Artists on Art on the course website.  Viewing assignment: Michelangelo (on Artchive) or Giorgio Vasari http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/giorgio.vasari/ or another Renaissance artist of your choice. See the “Arts on Line” section of the course web-page to find your way to these artists on line.  And don’t forget the library; art books have much better images than your computer does! 

9/21: Visit to the Dance Studio: Art and Experience, embodiment, expression (date subject to change; stay tuned).

9/23: Is beauty in the eye of the beholder?  Read Hume, Of the Standard of Taste (it's in Ross, but use the annotated edition on the web site, linked to the entry on Hume). 

9/28: From Taste to Aesthetic Judgment: The creation of fine art in the eighteenth century.  Read web-site entry on Kant, read “From Taste to the Aesthetic” in Shiner, The Invention of Art. Viewing assignment: TBA. Project proposal due.

9/30: Taste (cont.) Read Kant, Critique of Judgment, in Ross, pp. 98-120, 130 - 138. (Warning: not for the fainthearted. Use the reading guide!) Supplementary reading: Mattick, "Art and Money", on Blackboard. Critical essay 1, first draft due

10/5:Art as Expression/Art as Experience.  Read Tolstoy, pp. 177-181 in Ross, and Nietzsche, selection from the Birth of Tragedy, in Ross, pp. 161-167. Begin project presentations.

10/7: Art as Experience: Read Dewey, Art as Experience, in Ross, pp.l 204 – 220. Viewing Assignment: Works by Munch, Schiele, Klimt, Bacon, Frankenthaler, DeKooning, Pollack (or other Expressionists and Abstract Expressionists of your choosing) Critical essay 1, final draft due

10/12: Where do we go from here?  Western Art History: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the "End of Art." Read Hegel, "Philosophy of Fine Art", in Ross, pp. 143-161 or Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art

10/14: Where do we go from here?  Continued Read Danto, "The End of Art",  Gablik, "Has Modernism Failed?" (On Blackboard. Use the reading guides for help with these essays!) Viewing assignments: Dia website http://www.diacenter.org/ or  InLiquid.com http://www.inliquid.com/ - Spend an hour looking around and thinking about what you see.

10/19: Musical taste and Western music history: from medieval & renaissance to classic: the invention of fine art (or “absolute”) music.  Listening Assignments (on web site).

10/21: Performance and improvisation: the case of jazz. Live jazz concert with question and answer. Details TBA.

10/26: Western music history part two: the modern revolution and post-modern pluralism.  Where do we go from here?  Listening assignments (on web site) & reading (Schoenberg, Glass, who else?) Critical essay 2: rough draft due.

10/28: How the Human Animal Got its Groove (or, if I'm so musical, why can't I sing?)  Guest lecture - Dr. Lili Levinowitz from Music Education.

11/2: Musical expression and musical meaning.  Does music mean anything?  And if so, how?  Readings: Langer, "Feeling and Form", pp. 221-237 in Ross. Critical essay 2: final draft due.

11/4: Musical Expression and musical meaning (cont.) Stravinsky entry on web-site; Jenefer Robinson, "The Expression and Arousal of Emotion in Music" (class handout). Listening assignments: Debussy, La Mer or Stravinsky, Rite of Spring; Bach Toccata and Fugue in C major.

11/9: Performance and improvisation, cont.  Reading assignment: TBA. Listening assignment TBA.

11/11: Commercialism and the arts: the case of popular music.  Reading Assignment: Adorno, “On the Fetish-character in Music and the Regression of Listening”, in Ross, 539-548

11/16: Popular music (cont.)  Discussion of Wilson, Let's Talk about Love, with examples provided by the class. Supplementary  Reading Assignment: "Art and Money" by Paul Mattick (on Blackboard). Listening Assignment - find examples to illustrate your thoughts about Wilson!

11/18: Literature and theories of interpretation, part I.  Reading assignments: Balzac short story "The Unknown Masterpiece", & Danto introduction.

11/23: Literature and theories of interpretation, part II.  Reading assignments: Hirsch, "Validity in Interpretation", in Ross, pp. 331-349, Gadamer, selection from Truth and Method, in Ross, pp. 349-383

11/30:  Philosophy and poetry   The art of poetry.  Project rough draft due.

12/2: Poetry Day Readings and discussion.  Bring your favorites!

12/7: Philosophy at the movies: discussion of the art of film.  Reading assignment: Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproduction" Viewing assignment: The Age of Innocence (film by Martin Scorsese).

12/9: Philosophy on televison: Guest lecture by David Biancouli from RTF department, with discussion to follow.

12/14: Project presentations.

12/14: Project final draft due.

12/18 (2:45-4:45 p.m.) Overflow period for final presentations.