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featured syllabus
Critical Theory & Aesthetics
What is art's relationship to truth, power, and liberation under conditions of capitalism and technological reproduction? We begin with Martel to frame what is at stake. By starting with someone trying to reclaim rather than just diagnose the issue, the problem becomes a little easier to contextualize. Six blocks: Introduction; Foundations of art and the aesthetic experience; The crises of reproduction, commodification, and spectacle; Critical theory and aesthetics; Late capitalism and the postmodern condition; Contemporary condition — art after the internet and AI; with Kierkegaard as a supplement to Debord.
- Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artificestart here
Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice
J. F. Martel
2015
Art as Experience
John Dewey
1934
- Eye and Mind
Eye and Mind
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
1961
The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility
Walter Benjamin
1935
- Little History of Photography
Little History of Photography
Walter Benjamin
1931
Dialectic of Enlightenment
Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer
1944
On Photography
Susan Sontag
1977
Towards a Philosophy of Photography
Vilém Flusser
1983
Aesthetic Theory
Theodor W. Adorno
1970
The Aesthetic Dimension
Herbert Marcuse
1978
- The Politics of Aesthetics
The Politics of Aesthetics
Jacques Rancière
2000
Art on My Mind
bell hooks
1995
- Society of the Spectacle
Society of the Spectacle
Guy Debord
1967
Simulacra and Simulation
Jean Baudrillard
1981
Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
Fredric Jameson
1991
- Saving Beauty
Saving Beauty
Byung-Chul Han
2015
Duty Free Art
Hito Steyerl
2017
Art and Cosmotechnics
Yuk Hui
2021
The Present Age
Søren Kierkegaard
1846
ways in
if you liked
Confessions
Augustine
1482
We read Plotinus in this group, and the Christian God really does look like the One. What's missing is that the One doesn't look back. It's amoral, nothing is at stake in it, and contemplating it doesn't change how you live. Augustine's move is to keep the whole apparatus and add stakes.
you’d like
The Essential Plotinus
Plotinus
1964
Pull the thread →if you liked
The New Testament
Anonymous
This lawyering of the divine — and we saw it throughout Genesis and Exodus, Jacob testing his brothers, the Israelites finding workarounds, Pharisees tithing mint and dill while ignoring mercy — seems like the very substrate Jesus is working against. We arrived at Paul's letters carrying the thread from Jeremiah: a holy law the people could not keep, and the promise that the covenant would one day be written on the hearts of men.
you’d like
Tanakh
Anonymous
1985
Pull the thread →if you liked
Plutarch's Lives
Plutarch
1870
This moment in Roman history — the transition from Republic to Empire — looks like a lived-out version of Plato's assertion that all democracy degrades into tyranny through the corruption of souls.
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