审美的祭坛：象征，隐喻，符号，暗示｜线上艺术课程（英文）·706同学社

2020 年 5 月 28 日

Art, or however a man may call it, is originated from an ancient family of acquired skills, named craft as a whole. Some spend an entire life lauding its magnificence while others turn the nose over its non-material, namely abstract expression, and incomprehensibly lofty price that may still rocket up with the paces of time. Most of the time, we would ask, how good is it?

Any piece of art has not come into being out of blue, there always is a clue, a source as name, to help those that devote time to studying it reconstruct a universe going about the art piece itself. It may be called inspiration. Narrowly speaking, it pours out of the world of imagination of an artist—may we call the maker of such a piece this way—as is conceived, interpreted as a very private milieu, full of individual feelings such as joy, tristesse, tantrum, discontentment, compassion, loathing so and so.

An artist is one that’s capable of entrusting these feelings on art, unlike most of us. Can this man, however, generate all these “emotional outlets” on his/her own, out of none, and just through some mysteriously unknown self-satisfied mechanism? This could be a very controversial question that I am not of enough courage to bring out here, as it may tip over the balance bearing the core value of creation itself deemed holy by all the “pious art men”.

Yet we’re still curious, regardless of that misty core value, and it may also be the question endlessly asked as soon as we, humans, recognize what art is: how much subjective can it be extended?

I think, as I may, before we delve into the possible width art can reach, let’s first have a look under what interpretation it often appears in the mundane life. The best consensus, if one, points to a somehow gaudy, pompous derived-from-Greek term, Aesthetics. Born again from the Greek linguistic/morphological wisdom, it is the variation of aisthetikos, as an equivalent of sensitive, perceptible, esthetic etc. in our modern language. A possible conclusion made just by reading these entries is to be “feelings”, or in other words, aesthetics is “of feelings”. Is that all? A.G. Baumgarten deduces (or induces) from this primitive definition such that Greeks of Hellenistic era were in the mention of the so-called 5 senses/sensations with which they tasted the world, to a broader, a more ideological angle of denotation, the judgment of such taste. Then the story became complex, in addition to the solely pure, simple human feelings, there ensue comments, certainly mixed with likes and dislikes, which, following the human scientific fashion to approach the “reality” since the Renaissance, must give rise to a set of principles that serve to evaluate the artwork. A far-ranging debate was then put on stage in the coming centuries, involving figures such as Kant, Hegel, Goethe, Tolstoy, Lamartine, and Keats among other countless partakers. Since, the concept of axia (value in Greek) has seized the focus of this battle of tongue.

This is so far still being the question we need to ask, for the sake of secular life, what’s the value of art? And can we read it as if it were a shred of our cogito? Or just as it is?

I suppose none has an exact answer on that though, we may take it as a small cut in the flesh of life full of scepticism and mysticism as to see how Art, having crossed down nearly the same long period of time as humans exist on this planet standing on two limbs, with its symbols of all sorts of forms, tells us stories about ourselves.

活动详情

Subject：

Art, under the guise of symbols, marks, signs, traces as necessary constituents, how does it lead us to the accomplishment of an aesthetic ritual?

Course Outline：

5 June Fri. 19:30～21:00 A simple anatomy over the concept of aesthetics from the classical era to modern times;

12 June Fri. 19:30～21:00 Who precedes who as a pre-shaped module? When architects dive into literature；

19 June Fri. 19:30～21:00 Dialog between the Eyes and the Ears—an audio-visual feast by colours and notes；

26 June Fri. 19:30～21:00 Motion pictures, oh, you have all, even my soul between the shadow and the light.

Instructor:

一一 Graduate of l’ENS Paris in Philosophy and Sociology, and of Strasbourg University in linguistics, postponed PhD of Eastern studies(specialized in Indian studies) of University of Heidelberg

Language Requirement：English

Target Group：All that’s mesmerized by art, ideally with basic English knowledge