These are all vivid case studies in the valuation of art. This course will give students tools to mull over cases like these by providing 1) a basic understanding of the Western philosophy of art, and 2) an array of modern critical perspectives that focus attention on the way art practices negotiate the question of value in the context of a complex and changing world. We will ask: How does art acquire value? In relationship to what social groups, institutions, and markets? How do these various contexts condition the meaning and significance of art? Why do we value the art that we do? In particular: How can we value the critical power of art? How does it resist the world, and why does it matter that art can say "no" and disrupt the normal flow of perception? These are questions that have been debated for centuries, but this class helps us ask why this matters now: Why does it matter to us, as the next generation of the world's philosophers, artists, and critics?
The course begins with a selection of foundational writings in Western philosophy of art. It then pivots to the modern world. We will discuss sociological readings on the valuation of art, and then we will turn to a wide range of critical readings of aesthetic practices, many of which call our attention to obscure, marginal, difficult and undervalued objects. The arc of the course arrives at an investigation of the ways the twenty-first-century arts and humanities might be re-conceived of as a mode of slowing down, critiquing, and disrupting normative habits of modern life, of calling our attention to what is forgotten or left to the fringes of human societies.