Philosophy of Art I

This is where you step back from making art to ask what art has been *for* across 2,500 years of Western thought — whether it imitates reality, refines taste, reveals truth, or loses something essential when it gets mechanically reproduced. You'll read primary excerpts from Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Benjamin, work through them in discussion, and write your way toward positions of your own through a midterm and in-class debate. Required late in the studio sequence, it gives the conceptual vocabulary to defend why your own work matters — not just how you made it.