Sunday 21st June - Sunday 23rd August

Time: 16:00 - 18:30 (BST)

Reading group sessions will take place on ZOOM (link: https://lse.zoom.us/j/97132319483)

• required / + recommended reading

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Week 1. Art and politics after postmodernism | June 21, 2020

“[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)
+ Being and becoming (freedom in transformation) / immanent dialectical critique chart of terms [PNG]
• Chris Cutrone, "The relevance of Critical Theory to art today" (2011)
• Cutrone, "An incomplete project? Art and politics after postmodernism" (2010)

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Week 2. The meaning of art | June 28, 2020

+ 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]

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Week 3. Art and humanity | July 5, 2020

+ Schiller on aesthetic education (and Nietzsche on art) chart of terms [PNG]
• Friedrich Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794)

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Week 4. Modern aesthetics of art | July 12, 2020

• 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

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Week 5. Modernity and modernism | July 19, 2020

• 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)

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Week 6. Art as justification for life? | July 26, 2020

• 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]

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Week 7. Art and revolution | August 2, 2020

“[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)
• Clement Greenberg, "Avant-garde and kitsch" (1939)

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Week 8. Revolutionary art? | August 9, 2020

• Walter Benjamin, "Experience and poverty" (1934)
• Benjamin, "The author as producer" (1934)
• Jürgen Habermas, "Modernity: an incomplete project" (1981)

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Week 9. Art and capitalism | August 16, 2020

• Benjamin, "The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction" (1936)
• Theodor Adorno, letter to Benjamin (1936)
+ Siegfried Kracauer, "Photography" (1927)
+ Benjamin, "Little history of photography" (1931)

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Week 10. Art's necessity and impossibility | August 23, 2020

• 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)

[. . .]

On September 21, 2012, Chris Mansour interviewed Ste­phen Eric Bronner, a professor at Rutgers University and author of Rosa Luxemburg: A Revolutionary for Our Times (1980), Socialism Unbound (1990), Of Critical Theory and Its Theorists (1994), and Reclaiming the En­lightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement (2004), among many others. His most recent book is Mod­ernism at the Barricades: Aesthetics, Politics, and Uto­pia. What follows is an edited transcript of the interview.

[. . .]

At the 2011 Left Forum, held at Pace University between March 18–21, Platypus hosted a conversation on the theme of Aesthetics in Protests. Panelists Stephen Duncombe (Reclaim the Streets), Marc Herbst (Journal of Aesthetics and Protest), Chris Mansour (Platypus), Laurel Whitney (The Yes Men), were asked to consider: “What are the historical roots that contribute to the use of current aesthetic interventions in political protests? In what ways do they expand or limit the possibilities for protests to transform the social order? How does experimenting with aesthetic and artistic sensibilities influence our political consciousness and practice?” The same theme was the subject of another event held at the New School in NYC on May 23, which featured Marc Herbst (Journal of Aesthetics and Protest), Chris Mansour (Platypus), A.K. Burns (W.A.G.E.), and Beka Economopoulos (Not An Alternative). The article that follows is a modified version of the opening remarks made by Chris Mansour of Platypus at both events.

[. . .]