JAN 315-01 - Aesthetic & Moral: The Values of Modernism, The Value of Art

Level:  300-level

Course Times:  9:15am - 11:55am

Course Materials Fee:  $20

Instructor(s):  Chad Arnold

Email:  carnold@stmarys-ca.edu

Do you love art? Would you like to learn about painting and sculpture? Wanna know more about film? Are you curious about weird site-specific art? Might you be interested in how 160,000 pounds of sugar was rendered into one of the most important works of art in the 21^st century? 

We will begin this course by asking what art is and furthermore, what is not art? (A far more interesting question.) Or do we simply know it when we see it? Other considerations will include: what criteria are required for a work to be considered great? And what do we mean when we say Important?

The serious upheavals in what would become evolutionary biology, psychology, cosmology, and global finance remarkably ushered in a whole host of artistic movements that arose in their wake in the early 20^th century, and it is this connective tissue that this course concerns itself with.  

Furthermore, this aesthetic understanding and rendering of life in the arts and in science in the late 19^th and early 20^thcenturies (roughly, for this course, the years 1880-1945) has had significant and lasting influence on our lives in the 21^st century because there was a distinct break from all that came before. 

But aren’t all ages and all times modern? Yes, all ages are, in some sense, modern, and yet there is this period a collective deviation in focus and interest in disciplines ranging from painting, sculpture, physics, biology, and film. 

This is an art class, and a class in culture, and a class in the history of ideas as they wiggle down through history. We will be watching some films, visiting SFMoMA, and having conversations about the books for the course. 

The cultural shifts between 1880-1945 were seismic and continue to inform our age. And while this course will focus primarily on the artists and artworks of the early 20^th century, we will also talk about how the notion of modernism has been carried forth. We will also discuss the cultural and intellectual aspects of the shifts they birthed. Among the central figures that initiated the shifts are Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Charles Darwin.

The artistic results of all this change, as we move into the modern sensibility, are the primary focus of this course. We will be discussing films and poems, paintings, and poetry. We will talk about architecture and music. 

We will be examining the influence of these and other thinkers and the influence they had on specific recent artworks by figures like Virginia Woolf, Pablo Picasso, and Wallace Stevens. If you are interested in understanding where and when our century, with all its multitudes of cultural currents, got its start, and having some fun doing it, take this course.

Modernism has been around for a long time, so we will address its origins and then delve into the history and main views over the 20^th & 21^st centuries. The last 145 years or so has been an especially remarkable period for many reasons, and one of the most important and uplifting is in the world of art. The central philosophical consideration of this course, however, is that making art is a moral/political act, to one degree or another; it can make a difference in people’s lives in the real world. Aesthetics and ethics are not mutually exclusive. 

We will focus on the social aspect of art, how it can help the suffering and the world’s poor. To that end, we will also consider the financial aspects of aesthetic valuation and the price of artworks and who gets to buy them. There are many artists, and artworks that function in response to, for example, armed conflict, migration, and poverty, among others. 

In this course, we will seek to understand the central movements, trends, and concerns that have come to define contemporary culture, with specific attention to works in the fields of sculpture, fiction, film, painting, and poetry that have been passed over or are otherwise marginalized. We will also consider the history and role of female artists as the profound period of acknowledgment and affirmation that it is. 

In this exciting course, we will be explicating in detail major works by T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, JR, Ai Weiwei, Pablo Picasso, Claude Monet, Virginia Woolf, John Cage, Marina Abramovic, Kara Walker, and many others. This will be a short, if detailed, history of the last hundred years or so of primarily American and European art, focusing on both canonized as well as marginalized and disenfranchised artists and works. 

This course also seeks to develop your analytical skills and attentiveness for reading deeply and seeing past the pigments’ glow and tint. You will learn how to read and enjoy poetry and learn how to look at paintings and sculptures with new insight and appreciation. We will also explore the vital relationship between how much you know and how much you like. And it will be fun. 

The ability to recognize and be moved by art is a skill that needs to be practiced, not only for the moral evolution of humanity, but for its health and diversity. With such discipline, we might improve the condition of the world. 

Art has restorative powers beyond the page or gesso ground, and the study of art is one of the most satisfying ways to connect with other people and the world around you. This challenging course will explore connections between seemingly disparate modes of aesthetic inquiry to unpack the vitality of the whole. 

Prerequisites & Notes
None

Credits: 3