Aesthetics Working Group Meeting

 

From: Monday, September 30, 2019, 01:30pm

To: Monday, September 30, 2019, 03:30pm

Art and aesthetics, a working group sponsored by the CCA and led by Nancy Yousef (in English) and Elisabeth Camp (in philosophy), aim to explore disciplinary divergences and convergences around questions of artistic form, expression, and reception, as well as the cognitive, affective, and broadly psychological phenomena entailed in artistic experience.

We're planning to meet twice in the fall, to learn who we are and get a feel for fruitful avenues for exploration.  Those meetings have been scheduled for Monday September 30th and Monday November 25th from 1:30 to 3:30, in the CCA seminar room, 6050, on the 6th floor of Academic Building West.  For our first meeting, we'd like to discuss Garry Hagberg's "Word and Object: Museums and the Matter of Meaning"; attached.  For access to readings please contact Liz: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Here's the abstract:

"We often think of works of art as possessors of meaning, and we think of museums as places where that meaning can be exhibited and encountered. But it is precisely at this first step of thinking about artistic meaning that we too easily import a conceptually entrenched model or picture of linguistic meaning that then constrains our appreciation of artistic meaning and what museum exhibitions actually do. That model of linguistic meaning is atomism: the notion that the single, self-contained word is the ultimate building block of meaning. This picture was excavated with exacting precision in Wittgenstein’s sustained reflections on the nature of meaning, and the new way of seeing linguistic meaning that those reflections usher in holds direct significance for our understanding of artistic meaning, as we see here in examples from Rembrandt, Rietveld, and others. A more complete understanding of a dynamic, interactive, contextual, and use-based conception of language better reveals what actually happens in museums and the nature of the meaning we find there."

We'd be delighted to see you there!  Everyone welcome!

Liz & Nancy

Location

Center for Cultural Analysis
15 Seminary Place, 6th Floor
New Brunswick, NJ, 08901

Contact 

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

 
Events sponsored by the Center for Cultural Analysis are free and open to the public, unless specifically noted