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This course investigates one of the foundational paradoxes of Western painting: that the obviously fictional representation of three dimensions on a two-dimensional surface was assigned truth status. Over the course of
the
semester we will examine how questions of truth and fiction have been negotiated in writings on painting and aesthetics since the late eighteenth century to the present. Despite the fact that art is known to be founded
on
illusionism, theorists and critics have also consistently asserted that art had a relationship to reality, but they defined this relationship in radically different ways. Some found art's reality to reside in its
embeddedness
in a given cultural moment, others in its relationship to spiritual constants. Some have located art's claim to authenticity in its truth to its materials or medium, while others have found art's claim to truth to center
on its critique of dominant values and institutions, and so on. In addition to assessing different value systems, we will also be looking at the very forms through which truth was conveyed in art since the Renaissance,
in
particular perspective, and how and why it was discarded.
Readings will include texts by Kant, Hegel, Burckhardt, Riegl, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Novotny, Merleau-Ponty, Bell, Fry, Panofsky, Gombrich, Auerbach, Derrida,
Podro,
Clark, and Fried.
COURSE FORMAT: Seminar
Level: UGRD Credit: 1 Gen Ed Area Dept: HA CHUM Grading Mode: Graded
Prerequisites: NONE
Last Updated on MAR-21-2005
Copyright Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, 06459