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Wednesday, April 19, 2006
Teaching Aesthetics
Posted by Brandon Cooke on April 19, 2006 at 10:19 PM | Permalink
Robert thinks that the blog has gone quiet due to spring sloth, but I suspect it's from the late spring teaching slog. So here's a question about teaching. It seems to be the case that philosophy of art courses are often evenly divided between philosophy students and arts students. Typically, the former have little, if any, background in art history or any formal training in an artistic medium. The latter are usually new to philosophy. So here's the problem: how to teach a course in philosophical aesthetics, when many philosophy students don't have the data from the arts to test against the theories under discussion, and when the arts students lack basic philosophical tools and an understanding of why certain problems are important.
Yes (to anticipate one snarky response), I do understand that to a degree it is the instructor's reponsibility to motivate the problems, connect them with philosophical concerns outside aesthetics, and to know enough about art to explain the significance of examples. Too much of this, though, and what could otherwise be a rigorous and rewarding course turns into remedial teaching.
I'd like to know if anyone has hit upon clever solutions to this teaching challenge, maybe even ways of turning it into an asset.
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Comments
Posted by: Matthew | Apr 19, 2006 11:58:02 PM :
I don't have any clever solutions, but I can offer some feedback as a philosophy graduate student in such a course. I'm currently in the last weeks of a phil art course that isn't as evenly divided as you describe. In my case the philosophy students make up a mere quarter of the class. This divide hasn't always made for the best of relations among the students, and after the first week the divide was visible in the seating arraignment.
My experience would lead me to think that the knowledge divide between the two groups isn't on the same par, and that the art students are at the greatest disadvantage. The philosophy students seemed to have enough art background to get by in the class. In most cases we're well read, culturally literate, and museum going type folks. Also our university, like many, has an arts requirement for undergrads. In my case this turned out to be a stint in intro art history and theater. So, the philosophy students all had some exposure to the arts before enrolling in this course. On the other hand, the art students had zero background in any kind of formal philosophy. Without a background in philosophy talking about the ontology of art, aesthetic properties, meaning and interpretation, identity, etc, is an up hill task to be sure. The professor is left with the challenge of finding a place to teach that doesn't leave the art students in the dust or bore the philosophers to tears.
Two things our professor did seemed to help out the art students a great deal. The first is that at the beginning of the semester he provided two hand outs, one on how to do well in a philosophy course and the other on how to write philosophical papers. The second thing that he did was meet with the art students twice trough out the semester to handle basic philosophical topics and any questions that they might have that had arisen in the course. Attendance at these extra sessions was of course optional.
One thing that might be of use is a service learning component to the course. An assignment that forces the philosophers out into the art world to apply some of the things they've been learning. If your class is closely divided you might get a lot of mileage out of pairing philosophy students off with art students.
Posted by: Robert Kraut | Apr 25, 2006 1:19:37 PM :
Brandon Cooke asks about a familiar challenge posed by courses in “philosophical aesthetics”: half the students “have little, if any, background in art history or any formal training in an artistic medium;” whereas the other students “are usually new to philosophy.” Thus some students lack sufficient artistic data about which to theorize, whereas others lack basic philosophical tools and understanding of the role and dynamics of theory.
This pedagogical challenge mirrors the situation in aesthetic theory generally: people coming from the arts often lack adequate background in relevant chunks of philosophical theory, and people coming from philosophy often lack adequate familiarity with the complexities of the artworld. No wonder so much work in “philosophical aesthetics” smacks of mediocrity: aesthetic theory is very difficult, and demands a number of skills and knowledge bases not often conjoined.
I have tried many strategies in dealing with Brandon’s problem; the one that works best (for my students and myself) involves immediate immersion into the complexities of interpretation. Beginning with tiresome disputes about “What is art?” does more harm than good; and discussing the dynamics of artworld evaluation dosn't lead to class solidarity because of disparate (and inarticulated) views about the nature of value and evaluation, relativism, subjectivity, and all the rest.
But arguing about what Magritte’s work (for example) “really means” generates useful arguments about the relevance of historical context, Magritte’s intentions, constraints of the medium, etc. From there it’s possible to move into reasonably cooperative discussions about the nature of artistic meaning, the purpose(s) of interpretation, the contrast between “isolationist” and “contextualist” approaches, and various other issues. Moreover: it is a good idea to read not only what “philosophers” have to say about these problems, but also the views of artists themselves. Although artists' theoretical views don’t trump all others, art practitioners should be accorded some respect in the theoretical process.
It is also important, I have found, to connect with the artistic interests of the students, and not foist upon them some academic, Eurocentric paradigm. If a student spends his time listening to Red Hot Chile Peppers, that provides every bit as much valuable artistic data as is provided by the music of Stravinsky. Instructors in aesthetics courses are often pathetically removed from artworld realities: they must be willing to expose themselves to, and take seriously, artforms in which their students are engaged. Aesthetics instructors should not dwell upon the glories of Gaugin and Bartok while ignoring the subtleties (?) of Pantera and GWAR.
I had an aesthetics course in college; it was perhaps the most frustrating course I had taken, and a total waste of time. The instructor—for all his intellectual sincerity and philosophical brightness—knew nothing about the artistic developments around him, nor did he care. At the time I was working as a jazz guitarist several nights a week; I was struggling with various problems related to artistic performance. Yet not once was I able to engage this instructor in any discussion of performance, audience response, recognition, creativity, commercialism, or the like. For all his brightness, this instructor knew very little about artworld realities (except those related to his visits to the Louvre, perhaps); moreover his totally academic persona made it difficult for him to connect effectively with students actually engaged in artworld activities.
So often the problem is not with the students, but with the instructor. One way to deal with Brandon’s challenge is to be sure that the instructor is willing (and able) to explore artforms with which s/he might be unfamiliar. Teachers of philosophy of mathematics are expected to know a fair amount of mathematics; analogously, philosophy of art instructors should know—or be prepared to learn—a fair amount about artworld realities.
This is not to say that I have solved Brandon’s problem; I have not. I’m only commenting on one aspect of the larger picture.
Posted by: Gawain | Apr 26, 2006 3:36:18 AM :
What an interesting and revealing subject for those of us who are not in the academia. thank you.
Posted by: Scott Walden | Apr 26, 2006 9:56:03 AM :
I’ve had experience teaching mixed courses of the sort Brandon describes (fine-arts majors and philosophy majors), individual-study courses with fine-arts students, and a course at an art college on the philosophy of photography. I don’t have a solution to the problem Brandon highlights, but I do have some reflections that are more-or-less relevant.
In the individual-study courses I find out what project the student is working on and then suggest some books—both art historical and philosophical—that will furnish ideas which can inform the images they are creating. For example, one student was doing 35mm street photography, using shop-window reflections to layer images in ways that generated multiple meanings. We worked through the Meyerowitz-Westerbeck history of street photography and Book X of the Republic. The former led her to learn more about Freud, Surrealism, Cartier-Bresson and the role of chance and coincidence in fast-moving street photography. The latter occasioned my explanation of Plato’s ontology and his rationale for his suspicion of imagery, and more generally his emphasis on words and cognition at the expense of other dimensions of human existence. She was then able to write an artist’s statement informed by many of these ideas. This was one of the most positive teaching experiences I have had. In the space of a single semester the student was able to move from a raw desire to create images to an ability to create images in ways informed by art-historical and philosophical knowledge—matter informed by thought, which is what art is all about, as I see it.
Teaching at the art college I’ve found you have to be very gentle with the critical remarks, especially at the beginning of the semester. As well, it’s vital that you make the reason for critical feedback explicit. Art colleges are bastions of love and support, and giving reasons why a student is wrong about something will normally be interpreted as a hostile act. But if you explain to the students that the purpose of the critical feedback is to make them better, and that implicit in this is the belief that they can be better, they come to understand that such feedback is in fact a sign of respect. Most, I find, accept this by the end of the semester, and even find it quite refreshing once they’re used to it. As well, at the art college I insist on at least two papers and at least one write-and-rewrite cycle for each paper. The first version of the first paper won’t have much by way of argument in it, but if you write your comments carefully (it helps that my class has about 10 students), bringing to their attention what their argument is (or could be), by the final version of the second paper they’ll have a pretty good undergraduate-level argument on offer.
The difficult situation is the mixed one Brandon describes. But then again I’ve found that the techniques just mentioned don’t necessarily alienate the philosophy majors. While they’re more thick-skinned than the fine-arts majors, they probably haven’t stopped to think about why analytic philosophy is so imbued with critical feedback, and enjoy having the rationale brought to light. And they, like any students, will benefit from the write-rewrite cycle. In addition to this, I find that revisiting the philosophical basics with philosophy majors, as long as you do it well, is very beneficial to them, and will be appreciated. For example, it very much helps to get clear on the distinction between epistemology and ontology—many philosophy majors will be surprisingly murky on this, even in their senior year. And the fine-arts majors will be in serious need of such elucidation.
As for knowledge of art, I know of one professor who has a “five-event requirement,” which involves making the students visit five galleries or other art-related institutions/events and write brief critical analyses of each, which are then submitted (but, I believe, not graded). I haven’t tried this, but it sounds like an excellent idea, as half the battle is just getting them out there to see the stuff. This applies to the fine-arts majors as much as the philosophy majors.
Hope some of this is helpful.
Posted by: Arthur | May 15, 2006 3:11:38 PM :
I'm a former art student who took a few philosophy classes, including one in the philosophy of art. My experience in that course was that I was one of maybe two or three people with any background in philosophy whatsoever (and that was only two classes at that point, let me be modest). I found that that put me ahead of the rest of class in terms of being able to understand the readings and being able to frame what the philosophers (Dewey, Collingwood, Goodman, etc.) were trying to do. My recomendation would be to simply require students to take an introductory philosohpy course. In my experience, most art students would be eager to do this and would gain a lot from it.
Posted by: Alexandra Oliver | Dec 17, 2006 1:07:12 PM :
To paraphrase Schlegel, in a quote that Adorno once wished to use as the epigraph to Aesthetic Theory, philosophy of art normally lacks one of two things: either the philosophy, or the art.
Posted by: alessandro | Aug 29, 2008 12:09:18 AM :
I have longed for a course such as those mentioned here that discuss some of the less traditional and more current works that are shaping the American conscious. Tool, for example, has incorporated various theories from philosophy and astrology, and is freqently viewed superficially as an ignorant, angry metal band. I believe that studying more contemporary artists in all art forms will spark interest in the student, and help them to contexualize the movements of the past.
