Aristotle(384–322 BC)

Poetics

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

mimesis

Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux 1636 — 1711

Aesthetics is the science of norms in art, which should guide the artist as to the canon, norms, rules deriving from philosophy and politics.

Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717 – 1768)

Winckelmann's History of Ancient Art (1764) (cultural factors: climate, freedom, and craft)

Ratio vs. intuitio

The aim of art is to depict beauty

The idea of the work of art is of supreme value

The art has to provide food for analysis/thought

Hippolyte Taine(1828 –1893)

Aesthetics follows the facts and states them.

"race, milieu, and moment“ concept

Victorian Age

More than anything else what makes Victorians Victorians is their sense of social responsibility, a basic attitude that obviously differentiates them from their immediate predecessors, the Romantics. Tennyson might go to Spain to help the insurgents (=rebels), like Byron had gone to Greece and Wordsworth to France; but Tennyson also urged the necessity of educating “the poor man before making him our master”.

John Ruskin (1819-1900)

Aestheticismis

pre-Raphaelitism without religious and spiritual content.

Letters to the “Times” in Defense of Hunt and Millais (1851)

Religiousness and morality are synonyms

Pre-Raphaelites combine these two most naturally

Direct contacts with God, no priests

“the morality of great art is essential”https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-

history/becoming-modern/victorian-art-architecture/modal/a/a-beginners-guide-to-the-pre-

raphaelites

John Everett Millais

The painting illustrates an episode from Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameronnovel Lisabetta e il testo dibassilico (1349 - 1353), reprised by John Keats's poem, Isabella, or the Pot of Basil, which describes the relationship between Isabella, the sister of wealthy medieval merchants, and Lorenzo, an employee of Isabella's brothers. It depicts the moment at which Isabella's brothers realise that there is a romance between the two young people, and plot to murder Lorenzo so they can marry Isabella to a wealthy nobleman. Isabella, 1849

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-history/becoming-modern/victorian-art-architecture/modal/v/pre-raphaelites-curators-choice-millaiss-isabella 2:15

Sir John Everett Millais Christ in the House of His Parents

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-history/becoming-modern/victorian-art-architecture/modal/v/sir-john-everett-millais-christ-in-the-house-of-his-parents-1849-50 4:30 min

William Holman Hunt

Rienzi vowing to obtain justice for the death of his young brother, slain in a skirmish between the Colonna and the Orsini factions centers around a moment of inspiration. Despite his painting's realism and basis in historical fact, Hunt avoids his dreaded mere duplication of reality and, instead, emphasizes the emotional importance of the moment.

This is that blessed Mary, pre-elect

God's Virgin. Gone is a great while, and she

Was young in Nazareth of Galilee.

Her kin she cherished with devout respect:

Her gifts were simpleness of intellect

And supreme patience. From her mother's knee

Faithful and hopeful; wise in charity;

Strong in grave peace; in duty circumspect.

So held she through her girlhood; as it were

An angel-watered lily, that near God 10

Grows, and is quiet. Till one dawn, at home,

She woke in her white bed, and had no fear

At all,—yet wept till sunshine, and felt awed;

Because the fulness of the time was come.

John Ruskin

Traditional neoclassical conceptions of painting: a theory of intellectualized imitation

Ruskin:

o art does not imitate the natural world but makes statements about it;

o art is a means of important truths about the human environment

o a theory of instinctive beauty: the mere contemplation of beauty in nature and art is a spiritual, spiritualizing act.

Arnold Hauser(1892-1978)

The Social History of Art (1951)

http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/ruskin/index.html

He [Ruskin] was indubitably the first to interpret the decline of art and taste as the sign of a general cultural crisis, and to express the basic, and even today not sufficiently appreciated, principle that conditions under which men live must first be changed, If their sense of beauty and their comprehension of art are to be awakened.... Ruskin was also the first person in England to emphasize the fact that art is a public concern and its cultivation one of the most important tasks of the state, in other words, that it represents a social necessity and that no nation [136/137] can neglect it without endangering its intellectual existence. He was, finally, the first to proclaim the gospel that art is not the privilege of artists, connoisseurs and the educated classes, but is part of every man's inheritance and estate.... His influence was extraordinary, almost beyond description.... The purposefulness and solidity of modern architecture and industrial art are very largely the result of Ruskin's endeavours and doctrines.

Walter Pater(1839-1894)

Oxford graduate and Oxford professor

Studies in the History of Renaissance (1873)

“art for art’s sake” = art exists for the sake of pleasure it offers

15th century Italy: it was one of the few eras when many great personalities came together to form one “general culture” with a common spirit that gave unity to all their various productions.

Definition of beauty = individual experience + “pleasurable sensations”

The critic’s job is to analyze these impressions of beauty, separating the beautiful from what accompanies it and distinguishing the special nature of its power.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHI7TcMb3bM 1:20

Intensity of experience is the goal of life. The greatest wisdom is the love of art for its own sake.

Algernon Charles Swinburne

Beauty for beauty’s sake

Rejection of Christianity

Self-indulgence

Influence on Wilde: John KeatsA thing of beauty is a joy for ever:Its loveliness increases; it will neverPass into nothingness; but still will keepA bower quiet for us, and a sleepFull of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing. Pre-Raphaelites A.Ch.Swinburne

Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray

The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his

impression of beautiful things. The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being

charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meaning in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these

there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or

badly written. That is all. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at

their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and

vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself. We can forgive a man for

making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.

modernism

Conceptualism

Idea – Notion – Intention – Criticism- Language

Joseph Kosuth, Clock (One and Five), English/Latin Version, 1965“time”, “machine”, “object”; “why a photograph is considered to be art, not the object itself?”

Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hzh0TTrnS2o

T A T E M O D E R N

H T T P S : / / W W W . Y O U T U B E . C O M / W A T C H ? V = Y WS B 9 Q M L L O Q 1 2 : 5 0

Damien Hirst

A R T A R I S E S F R O M T H E F E E L I N G A N D T H E K N O W L E D G E T H A T T H E L I N E B E T W E E N A

G E N E R A T I V E A N D D E S T R U C T I V E R E A L I T Y I S P A P E R - T H I N

Art in Liquid Times

Gustav Metzger

Auto-destructive art is a term invented by the artist Gustav Metzger in the early 1960s to describe radical artworks made by himself and others, in which destruction was part of the process of creating the work. Auto-destructive art was inherently political; also carrying anti-capitalist and anti-consumerist messages. It addressed society’s unhealthy fascination with destruction, as well as the negative impact of machinery on our existence.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nzzLdiI9eg 1:21

http://csw.torun.pl/sztuka/wystawy/dzialaj-albo-gin-gustav-metzger-retrospektywa-4343/ 0:42

The important thing about burning a hole in that sheet, was that it opened up a new view across the Thames of St Paul’s cathedral. Auto-destructive art was never merely destructive. Destroy a canvas and you create shapes. (Metzger quoted by Stuart Jeffries, The Guardian, 2012)

The Manifesto’s

Time- the work must, within the course of 20 years, return to its original state of nothingness.

Self-completion- Metzger emphasizes the importance of the process continuing once the artist sets it off, avoiding any sense of ownership over the development of the piece.

Participation- This movement is centered around public participation. Although the artist can set off the process, it must happen in a public space. It is not to be consumed privately for a select group.

Zygmund Bauman

Liquid modernity may be characterized as a state in which the important oppositions which constituted the framework of early, solid modernity have been cancelled: oppositions between creative and destructive arts, between learning and or getting, between forward and backward steps. The pointer has been removed from the arrow of time; so you have an arrow, but without a pointer.

For Arendt, you could recognize a great work of art by its ability to arouse the same sort of emotions and artistic experiences as it did several centuries ago. Instead of that, these artists of the liquid modern era concentrate on short-lived events; events which it is known in advance will be short-lived, so that the event of art, ratherthan the work of art, will come to the end very soon.

Jacques Villeglé (born 27 March 1926, Quimper, Brittany), a French mixed-media artist

records of a history which proceeds by shredding its traces

Manolo Valdes (b. 1942), a Spanish artist residing in New York

Portrait of a Woman, 1990

Are these bits and pieces of hessian still-not-fixed, or already-un-fixed?There is no difference between creation and destruction.

Herman Braun-Vega (b. 1933), a Peruvian artist

Washington in New York, 1999

Impossible encounters

a kaleidoscope of constant change

Liquid modernity is a condition in which the distance, and the time span, between novelty and waste, between the origin and the dumping ground, have been drastically shortened. The result is a convergence into a single act of destructive creation or creative destruction.

Consumerism is assumed to mean greed for acquisition; the wish to accumulate things, to have more and more. Is this still true? It now seems that it is the rapidity, the promptness of disposing of things, which is the secret of contemporary consumerism: not accumulation, not acquisition, but change. Disposing of things which were there before, replacing them with other, newer things. You would have to search quite hard to find any advertisement for a product which recommends it for its durability.

Liquid modern life is a daily rehearsal of universal transience. Today’s useful and indispensable objects, with few and possibly no exceptions, are tomorrow’s waste. Everything is disposable, nothing is truly necessary, nothing is irreplaceable.

Bauman: Art in Liquid Times

The idea of beauty was at the center of aesthetics. Philosophers of art, however much they differed and quarreled about virtually every other aspect, agreed that beauty is something altogether distinct from ephemeral fads. Beauty is something very nearly immortal; certainly very long-lived. You recognize beauty by its enduring lifespan; and also by its claim to universal validity. So beauty is both timeless and universal. Philosophers try to answer the question: ‘What is beauty about?’ The ideas and descriptions which crop up most often are those of harmony, proportion, symmetry, order and suchlike. They all share something in common, and they suggest very much the same thing now as in the time of the Renaissance, as Leone Battista Alberti suggested when he defined the idea of perfection. According to Alberti, perfection is a state in which any and every further change would be change for the worse. So perfection is the product of change which itself eliminates the need and desirability for any further change. So the end product, the ideal destination of all change, of all creation, is the end of creation, is the end of change. This is the state of perfection in which nothing could be further improved, and every attempt to tinker with what exists will result in adverse effects.

Bauman: Art in Liquid Times

When you look at the classical modern, modernist, art you will see the very clear traces of this sort of tendency and understanding of the purpose of artistic creation. … You will see that all other arrangements are again inferior, less aesthetically satisfying. Once you reach perfection the world comes to a standstill. There is nothing else to do, and nothing will change. But we are all liquid modern; and so perfection, in which everything will be evermore the same, is not an ideal, it is a nightmare.So the idea of beauty which guided the art of the solid modern era is in a deep crisis, because there is this apprehension of stagnation: the end of change; the end of novelty; the end of experience; the end of adventure. This gives weight to and also explains my earlier statement, namely that you have a situation where you have aesthetics saturating the world in which we live, but no object of art, no works of art. There are still some around, but their place is in the museum; and I suggest that what graveyards are to living humans, museums are to the life of art.

Happiness

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clKQc-WdfoA

FB

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DG42ZW_nW0E

The Swedish Theory of Love -Zygmunt Bauman https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7GL_HFCXbs

H T T P S : / / W W W . K H A N A C A D E M Y . O R G / H U M A N IT I E S / B E C O M I N G - M O D E R N / I N T R O -

B E C O M I N G - M O D E R N / V / W H E R E - A R E - T H E -W O M E N 4 : 4 5

Where are the Women?

Mona HatoumMEASURES OF DISTANCE (1988)

Tate Galeryhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Piwti3NRn8I

Mona Hatoum

Mona Hatoum

H T T P S : / / W W W . T E D . C O M / T A L K S / T I T U S _ K A PH A R _ C A N _ A R T _ A M E N D _ H I S T O R Y ? R E F E R R E R

= P L A Y L I S T - 5 7 1 1 2 : 3 0

Can art amend history?

From canvas to technology

Patricia Piccinini

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XKSpWxR5tA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Swx7ewLxyfw

Maurizio Cattelan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybsuca1UXGg

Tim Noble & Sue Webster

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9rVxkjP1IY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dl7VEEpTEM8:00

Thechnoculture

TECHNOSCIENCE

■ Science (i.e., pure, basic) [superior]

■ Technology (i.e., applied, engineering)

?the role of science and technology in our society?

?the rise of interdisciplinary approaches to the cultural studies of science?

?the emergence of the post-human condition, techno-cultures, & bioscience?

Couveuse (an incubator)

Jacques Ellul

Modern technology has become a total phenomenon for civilization, the defining force of a new social order in which efficiency is no longer an option but a necessity imposed on all human activity.

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/betrayal-technology-portrait-jacques-ellul/

Clone Dolly, 1996

The Young Family by Patricia Paccinini

DNA, 2000

The DNA Journey

Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance, 2002

report commissioned by the U.S. National Science Foundation and Department of Commerce

NBICS – converging of nano-, bio-, info-, cogno- and socio- and humanities-based technologies

From Kara (2014) to Sophia (2017)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-pF56-ZYkY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8Ox6H64yu8

Never Let Me Go

Novel (2005) by Kazuo Ishiguro

Film (2010) https://www.youtube.com/watch

?v=sXiRZhDEo8A trailor

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZBBj6_7DLs 2:00

The Posthuman Condition…

… is merging or morphing of humans with machines, or it is the abilities of the organic to extend its life and abilities through the introduction of inorganic materials into a body.

Cyborg is smth that is part human and part machine and generally, because of this altered condition, healthier and often wealthier than ‘natural’ humans.

Pistorius was denied entry to the Olympics for being -- get

this -- too fast. He is a double-amputee sprinter

fitted with "cheetah" prosthetics. The

International Association of Athletics Federations said

the prosthetics gave him an unfair advantage against his

two-legged rivals.

Stelios ArcadiouArcadiou -- or Stelarc, as he is

better known -- is a performance artist who believes the human

body is obsolete (fallen into disuse). To prove his theory, he had an artificially created ear

surgically attached to this left arm. In another stunt, Stelarc hooked

electrodes up to his body that allowed individuals to control his

muscles via the internet.

surgeries

Cosmetic surgery often refers to unnecessary medical procedures to enhance features for vain reasons.

Reconstructive surgery refers to the restoration of body features that might have been disfigured at birth or because of an automobile accident or a fire.

implication

Every year millions of interventions are performed to suck out or insert fat, carve better facial features, modify the immune system, or otherwise ‘improve’ the natural body. All of these procedures raise important political issues, from the nature of informed consent to the wisdom of using medical resources to improve someone’s buttocks while others die for lack of basic care.

Chirs Gray

“Cyborg Citizen” (2001)

Theorists:

N.KatherineHaylesDonna Haraway

■ The history of the post-human is rooted in Western civilization and the recent developments of computer technology

■ Rene Descartes: mind is separated from the body

■ Information theory: suggests that meaning is separated from information.

■ Cybernetics (lit. “helmsman”) refers to the idea that machines can function just like human brain as an information processing deice.

The body is the original prosthetic.

“Cyborg”

…was coined by Manfred E.Clynes and Nathan S.Kline in 1960 as a shortened form of “cybernetic organism”

Donna Haraway“A Cyborg Manifesto” (1985)

The rise of cyborgs as the end of essentialism.

What it is to be human then?

Why not use it by women to enter into careers and relationships that were forbidden previously?

CM is a call to end hierarchical ordering of life and the beginning of an era in which all entities are accorded certain rights that ensure their dignity.

Life → other organisms (animals) + inorganic materials

Technocultures …

Textual interaction + visual simulation

Computer-mediated worlds are guided by 2 concepts:

Immediacy & hypermediacy

… are remediations or reconfigurations of old media forms, esp. film

immediacy refers to the belief that the technology we use to create [T] is most effective when technology disappears – we do NOT notice it is there creating an interactive world for the users.

hypermediacy is a reminder to technology users that the worlds people are interacting are constructed by some technological means

Lev Manovich

Telepresence enables a user to manipulate reality without being physically present.

To understand [T] is NOT to assume that computer-generated realities are not real.

Pierre Levy

Virtualization is “NOT derealization… but a change of identity” or a reality without physical limitations.Actualization is “a solution to a problem”. It’s a physical creation. It is this physical dimension that marks [V] from [A], but both are real.

Bioscience …

… a combination of technocultures, the posthuman condition & the biological fields like bioinformatics (the reading of DNA), biotechnology (P.E.T. scans & polymerase chain reaction technology), biomedicine (pharmaceuticals).Interdiciplinarity

implied

… the merge of biology and other natural sciences

What is the future of humanity?

Modern Times (1936), dir. Ch.Chaplin

Modern Times (1936)

From “man and his

environment” to…

Concerns

■ Posthuman

■ Technohuman

Technology will increasingly dominate the world, as population, resource exploitation, and potential social conflict grow. Therefore, the success of this convergent technologies priority area is essential to the future of humanity. (2002)

Television & representation of technology

THE CHANGE IN INTERACTION WITH THE WORLD

Shaping the world for the viewers

the screen-making television as “extremely intimate” experience, thus the television screen has altered our nervous system (McLuhan)

Samuel Weber:

Television “serves as a screen which allows distant vision to be watched”

“it screens, in the sense of selecting or filtering, the vision that is watched”

“serves as a screen in the sense of standing btw the viewer and the viewed”

Media Representation

In production of media, decisions made by the media producers can limit the interpretive materials and can encourage audience to accept some information by making it more available. Audience members can and do provide resistant readings in which they have the opportunity to ‘resist, alter, and reappropriate the materials’ and in which ‘viewers have considerable control, not only over [the text’s] meaning, but over the role that it plays in their lives. (Quinlan & Btaes, 2009)

Bionic Women, 2007 (1976-78)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNHGsxjDpkE

Bionic Woman (2007)

GENDERMedia representation of female bodies tend to reinforce the dominant culture order by sexualizing female bodies as objects.The dominant representation of women is disempowering and marginalizing and sexualizes women as objects.Bionic Woman is potentially empowering.

DISABILITYMany people gain their knowledge about people with disabilities from the media and rely heavily on the technological media to serve as interpreters for understanding people with disabilities. The media often propose a simplified and stereotypical image of people with disabilities, which mis- and under-informs the audience about people with disabilities. Media indicate that Am.publicfail to perceive people with disabilities as sexual beings.

Bionic Woman (2007)

CYBORGSDonna Haraway“A Cyborg Manifesto” (1985):A hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality and of fictionGoddess vs. cyborgORVirtual cyborg vs. actual womanCyborgs in dominant representation are gendered

Jamie’s old live vs. cyborg = normal vs. disable

Normal: a parent, gainfully employed, heterosexual, attractive

Success depends on Jamie’s humanity and relationships, not superpower

Journey of self-discovery Thankful to technology

for return to normal

What are the consequences of having empowered women?

Humans vs. the machineIS TECHNOLOGY CONSUMING HUMANITY?

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN A COMPUTE R BLENDS WITH THE HUMAN MIND?

Chuck (2008-2012)

Season 1

Season 2 - Finale

… man and his personal

space = technology and the

human body

Pop images

Till 1950s

From transferring human brains into robotic bodies

Robocop (1987),

I, Robot (2004)

Since 1960

Cyborgs (bioscience) = human-machine hybrids

1966 Doctor Who

Cybormen – fear of dehumanizing medicine

“spare-part surgeries”

…losing smth of their humanity in the process (mind, emotions, individuality, identity)

Chuck explores the

consequences of the human

mind and technology being

blended into one.

Television

Escape

Entertainment

Source of information

Viewers regularly judge a program whether it feels true to life, expecting content to be believable and relate to their life.

(Jason Mittell, Television and American Culture, 2010)

Chuck (2008-2012)

Season 1Season 2 - Finale

Chuck Bartowski

John Casey, NSA agent

Sarah Walker, CIA agent

“the Intersect”, the computer program

Upgrade Intersect 2.0

Season 4

“the Norseman” (with a DNA

sample)

Ellie, Chuck’s sister, a medical

doctor

Side effect of work – exhaustion,

not the change in personality

Doctors vs. nerds

Cautionary tale: do not get

obsessed with technology

Computer control over humans:

inability to make a choice

Chuck (2008-2012)

Objectification of an individual with the Intersect – the loss of individual identity due to the blending of mid and the computer

Chuck evolves from a part-time Nerd Herder to a confident spy

The Intersect is removed from his brain but he does not need a computer in his head to be successful

He married Sarah, became a manager of Buy More and an owner of a spy company

The computer in his head was a tool that provided IMPETUS for change, not the SOURCE of change in and of itself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQxcYVHVulU

Season 5

Chuck (2008-2012)

Exploring the power of memories How do memories define identity? Do choices define our identity? Cautionary tale: the intersect technology is

potentially dangerous for an individual’s personality (Volkoff=Winterbottom, Morgan, Sarah)

4 Chuck the Intersect becomes an integral part of his identity

The power of the human mind (Lucy) David Carr: Is Google Making Us Stupid? Google as “a mental prosthetic” (Dragani, 2012)

What matters in using [this] technology is an individual.

Technology is a tool and should be used as

such.

The danger in using technology is in alteration

of personalities and identities due to the

technology.

If individuals can maintain their identities,

independent of technology, there is NO

danger in having a computer encroached

further into our personal space, into our minds.

Person of Interest (2011-2016)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xAK3ueOJxE

2013http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=re3FFyFJaIs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pp_iP8femO4

WestWorld, 2016 (1973)

Hyperrealism of Patricia Paccinini:Bio-morphic Sculpture

P O P U L A R C U L T U R E P R O V E S I T S E L F T O B E A M E D I U M T H R O U G H W H I C H S O C I E T Y

E X P L O R E S B O T H T H E E X C I T E M E N T A N D A N X I E T I E S G E N E R A T E D B Y I N C R E A S I N G L Y S O P H I S T I C A T E D T E C H N O L O G I E S A S T H E Y

B E C O M E S O C I A L L Y A N D C U L T U R A L L Y E M B E D D E D .