Much of the seminar will be spent examining models of artistic practice from times and places distinct from our own. We will read about how artists worked in medieval China, about the Japanese Zen art tradition, about patronage in fifteenth-century Italy, about Native American potters in the southwest, and about artists at the beginning of the American republic. More generally, we will read about the tensions between art and commerce, about the tradition of the artist as a mischief-maker, about the problem of supporting creativity in a capitalist democracy, and about the ways in which art has always touched on spiritual life. Studying a range of models and issues in this way will put current artistic practice in historical and cultural context. Artists have always been the creators of their lives as well as of their work, all the more so when they have been able to see that there are many ways to imagine what it is they do.
Enrollment is limited.
This course is a continuation of INDS 17 for those students who want a more in-depth study of film construction by examining its constituent elements. We will consider the collaborative nature of filmmaking and how the various crafts combine to tell stories with perhaps the greatest mass appeal of any artistic medium. We will explore narrative structure, mise en scene, cinematography, staging, and editing as they have been used and advanced in the history of cinema. This course may be counted as credit for the major by students of dance and drama or English. In this course, we will study the design of scientific laboratory projects.