ARH411 Theory and Methods 2022

      In this week’s reading, we examined the discouragingly rampant sexism in art history through Linda Nochlin’s essay Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? She points out the similarities between all the “great” artists through history - they were white men with access to extensive art education or apprenticeship through association, and they were deemed “great” by white men with access to extensive bank accounts. She explains that, although these famous artists are often revered as “prodigies” or “artistic geniuses”, implying that their artistic success was inherent from birth,¹ they actually had significant advantages over other (especially female) artists at the time.      Nochlin’s most obvious example for this is that professional male artists at the highest level studied live nude models, but women weren’t allowed access to these sessions until the very end of the 19th century, and even then, they weren’t fully nude.² Without equal acces...

A screenshot of the website where you can purchase Benjamin's essay as an NFT, (Zak Loyd, 2021) https://foundation.app/@zakloyd/foundation/54893       This week, we read Walter Benjamin's essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, published in 1936. In the essay, Benjamin discusses how modern technology was affecting how art was being made, replicated, seen, and perceived. In particular, he was comparing photography and film to more traditional media like painting and live theater. Benjamin uses the concept of an art's "aura"¹ - the qualities that Benjamin has assigned importance, including the cultural significance, connection to the artist and audience, history, and uniqueness of the piece - to explain why he believed art produced using the new mechanical processes of the time were not only bad for art, but bad for humanity as a whole.     For example, he believed the reproducibility of the photograph diminished its aura by allowing more...

       In this week’s reading, we were given two perspectives on a theory of aesthetics in art - Amelia Jones first broke down Dave Hickey’s model, which was supposed to go against the “liberal” art historians’ manner of interpreting art's meaning through historical context. ¹ In his model, good art is simply “beautiful”, without causing any special emotional or physical reaction in the viewer. As Amelia Jones continues, she immediately starts to unravel the logic behind this idea. Hickey’s model places himself in a position of authority, the arbiter of beauty, by suggesting he is able to remove himself from the cultural, political, and sexual implications of the subjects, and accurately identify the pure aesthetic beauty of the forms. But, he is only able to do so because the artists - whose work he has already identified as beautiful - are able to adequately represent beauty in the art. ²      Not only does this trigger red flags immediately by the...