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help me out, guys

help me out, guys

an iceberg
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Posted 02/14/08 - 12:41 AM: Subject: help me out, guys	#1
Hi, everyone. I'm an art major/philosophy minor. They are the loves of my life. Right now I go to San Francisco City College but I'll be transferring to UC Berkeley within the next year or so. I have big things planned for what I want to do in the art world. I want to enter a contest my school is holding. It's an essay contest, and the submissions are read by all of our philosophy professors. We have a really good program for being a city college. I have two ideas for what I want to write about. They are very underdeveloped, but they are things I really want to write about, although I feel like the research might be exausting (but well worth it). 1) The relation of art to aesthetics, and the concept of the two subjects being indistinguishable 2) Somewhat of a research paper on Ray Johnson, an artist, who I think was the best artist that has ever lived. I understand this is just an opinion, but I could literally go on FOREVER about his importance and total originality within aesthetics. I literally think that man was perfection. HOWEVER, I recently skimmed over a few of the past winning essays, and one of them is about the "ontological process of making art": http://ccsfphilosophy.editme.com/files/DavidEvera... I am not sure if playing out my first idea would be worth it. It's something I live by, but the fact that art has already been touched within this contest erks me a little bit. Anyway, If anyone has any ideas as to what I should do, or if they have any suggestions of new topics, please post your input. I would REALLY appreciate it! Thank you! -Anah

Goaswerfraiejen
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Posted 02/14/08 - 06:13 AM:	#2
If it's specifically a philosophy-essay contest, then you should probably have a fairly narrow topic (one particular problem), and talking about a specific artist may be too interdisciplinary--they don't usually want art criticism, no matter how philosophical. It's sad, I know--aesthetics and the philosophy of art are my thing, too. One good and interesting topic that springs to my mind would be about the role that aesthetics (read: theories of beauty) plays in today's art world. Arthur Danto has written quite a bit on the subject, and has a relatively new book on the marginalization of beauty in the art historical canon of the last hundred years or so. If that's what you meant by the "relation of aesthetics to art," then my apologies--it's a great topic, so long as you manage to keep it focused. I can't say I'm too impressed by that sample winner, but whatever. I know nothing about the contest, so it's not really a very fair remark. Good luck!

jdrw
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Posted 02/15/08 - 11:14 AM:	#3
Seems to me that art is the doing, and aesthetics is the talking about. Aesthetics can be talking about the process of the doing, and/or it can be talking about the product (painting, sculpture, symphony, dance etc.) and/or it can be the talking about other talking about (that is talking about other aesthetic analyses. Perhaps, of course, there's something of a conscious or unconscious aesthetic sensibility or context explicitly or tacitly influencing or informing artists as they do their art. Cheers. jd
_____________________ OTOH I might be exhaustively wrong about everything I've ever thought--with the possible exception of this sentence.

jaoman
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Posted 02/15/08 - 01:01 PM:	#4
There is a relationship between aesthetics and art? Since when? Gosh, I thought it was philosophical propaganda! If you want to be original, instead of exploring how philosophical speculation about art can be applied to making art, explore how philosophical exploration and methodologies of artists relate to philosophy and/or what philosophical conclusions can be drawn from their practices. All great artists are philosophers to varying, and sometimes astounding, degrees, but their contribution is usually unnoticed in philosophy because they aren't boring enough or not in the right medium. Nonetheless, I've always thought that the best way to do aesthetics was to start with the artist.
_____________________ "With no relation to class or social background, whether it suits them or not, people yearn for a dream. Sustained by a dream, hurt by a dream, revived by a dream, killed by a dream. And even after being abandoned by a dream, it continues to smolder from the bottom of one's heart... probably until the verge of death. A man should envision such a lifetime once. A life spent as a martyr to the god named "dream." - Kentaro Miura

Goaswerfraiejen
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Posted 02/17/08 - 07:47 AM:	#5
jaoman wrote: There is a relationship between aesthetics and art? Since when? Gosh, I thought it was philosophical propaganda! Actually, there isn't necessarily a relation between the two. It sort of depends on whether we want to use aesthetics as a byword for the philosophy of art, and while that was certainly a legitimate move once upon a time, it's no longer clear that we can do that. Aesthetics is primarily related to beauty and theories of beauty; in the last hundred or so years, however, art has increasingly abandoned the realm of the beautiful--sometimes for the ugly, as with Francis Bacon, and sometimes for something completely different to which "beauty" doesn't properly apply (e.g. Russian Constructivism, minimalism, conceptual art, etc.). Which is why I think that, if you're interested, there's a rich and relatively pristine field to dive into when it comes to the relationship of beauty to art and the philosophy of art today. Similarly, the questions of technology and art, advertising and art, etc. are all very interesting and rich topics; the danger, of course, is getting too art historical and not philosophical enough, whatever that means.

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