Exams will consist of two or three essay questions chosen from twice that many distributed a week ahead of the exams, which may be turned in then as a take-home or written in class. Optional or voluntary assignments may be available late in the term. Note that the final exam will be early enough in the term that the last week can include discussions of what students have written. Attendance the last two weeks of class is compulsory. I am particularly interested in the weird behavior which sometimes shows that artists have believed philosophers, especially when artworks seem to stretch awfully hard to be evidence for some philosophical theory or other.
Art becomes a way of doing philosophy, usually to the detriment of both.
One may think of art history as a long line of artists at their easels stretching back through time, each with a winged cherub wearing the face of Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Marx, Foucault, . . . I am also interested in how poorly most theoretical writers have captured the life or the experience of the artist, and I expect this will be a theme in the course. The exceptions are noteworthy and make the rest of the pack seem shoddy. On the other hand, some of the most gifted writers on the arts, though they are not themselves artists, make us wince at how blind artists are to their own work, and we will look at some of those. I am also interested in the objectivity of descriptions of artworks, how one learns to read a work of art, and the relationships among artworks and the talk about the artworks.