Art and Politics
Sundays, 2:00PM EST
June 15 - August 17th, 2025
Location: ZOOM
Contact Laurie Rojas <laurie.rojas@gmail.com> if interested in joining.
• required / + recommended reading
Week 1. Art and politics after postmodernism | June 15th, 2025
“[Artists'] work is to sustain the critical moment of aesthetic experience. [Critics' work] is to recognize it.”
-- Susan Buck-Morss, response to Visual culture questionnaire (1996)
• Susan Buck-Morss, response to Visual culture questionnaire (1996)
• Robert Pippin, "On Critical Theory" (2004)
+ Rainer Maria Rilke, "Archaic torso of Apollo" (1908)
+ Being and becoming (freedom in transformation) / immanent dialectical critique chart of terms [PNG]
• Chris Cutrone, "The relevance of Critical Theory to art today" (2011) [PDF]
• Cutrone, "An incomplete project? Art and politics after postmodernism" (2010) [PDF]
Week 2. The meaning of art | June 22th, 2025
+ Being and becoming (freedom in transformation) / immanent dialectical critique chart of terms [PNG]
+ Kant's 3 Critiques [PNG] and philosophy [PNG] charts of terms
• Immanuel Kant, Preface and Introduction, Critique of Judgment (1790) [full book PDF]
Week 3. Art and humanity | June 29th, 2025
+ Schiller on aesthetic education (and Nietzsche on art) chart of terms [PNG]
• Friedrich Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794)
Week 4. Modern aesthetics of art | July 6th, 2025
• G.W.F. Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics (Introduction): [PDF]
1 Prefatory Remarks
2 Limitation and Defence of Aesthetics
3 Refutation of Objections
4 Scientific Ways of Treating Beauty and Art
5 Concept of the Beauty of Art
6 Common Ideas of Art
(i) The Work of Art as a Product of Human Activity
(ii) The Work of Art, as being for Apprehension by Man’s Senses, is drawn from the Sensuous Sphere
(iii) The Aim of Art
Week 5. Modernity and modernism | July 6th, 2025
• Heinrich Heine, excerpts from Salon of 1831 (1831)
• Heine, excerpts from Salon of 1843 (1843)
+ Baudelaire on the modern / modernity / modernism chart of terms [PNG]
• Charles Baudelaire, excerpts from Paris Spleen (1867)
• Baudelaire, excerpts from Salon of 1846 (1846)
• Baudelaire, excerpts from The Painter of Modern Life (1863)
Week 6. Art as justification for life? | July 13th, 2025
• Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (1872, including 1886 "Attempt at self-criticism")
+ Schiller on aesthetic education (and Nietzsche on art) chart of terms [PNG]
Week 7. Art and revolution | July 20th, 2025
“[A] protest against reality, either conscious or unconscious, active or passive, optimistic or pessimistic, always forms part of a really creative piece of work. Every new tendency in art has begun with rebellion.”
— Trotsky, “Art and politics in our epoch” (1938)
• Walter Benjamin, "On the mimetic faculty" (1934)
• Cutrone, "Trotsky, Benjamin, Adorno and Greenberg's critique of 'revolutionary art' " (2020) [PDF]
• Leon Trotsky, "Art and politics in our epoch" (1938) + Cutrone, “The politics of the culture industry: art today” (2010)
Week 8. Greenberg | July 27th, 2025
• Clement Greenberg, "Avant-garde and kitsch" (1939) • Greenberg, "Towards a Newer Laocoon" (1940) • Greenberg, “Modernist Painting” (1961)
Week 9. Revolutionary art? | August 3rd, 2025
• Walter Benjamin, "Experience and poverty" (1934)
• Benjamin, "The author as producer" (1934)
• Jürgen Habermas, "Modernity: an incomplete project" (1981) • Jean-François Lyotard, “Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?”
Week 10. Art and capitalism | August 10th, 2025
• Benjamin, "The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction" (1936)
• Theodor Adorno, letter to Benjamin (1936) • Sigfried Kracauer, “Mass Ornament” (1927)
+Adorno, "The social situation of music" (1932)
+ Adorno, "The fetish-character in music and the regression of listening" (1938)
+ Siegfried Kracauer, "Photography" (1927)
+ Benjamin, "Little history of photography" (1931)
Week 11. Art's necessity and impossibility | August 17th, 2025
• Adorno, "Those Twenties" (1962)
• Adorno, "Art's self-evidence lost" and "Society", Aesthetic Theory (1970)
• Stewart Martin, “Critique of relational aesthetics” (2007)
• Stewart Martin, “The absolute artwork meets the absolute commodity” (2007)
