What is Art? Why does it hold such a central position in humanity’s self-understanding? Art seems to have subjective, contingent, and relative aspects, while also evoking the eternal, essential, and radical. Art represents, communicates, explores, inspires, challenges, creates, and questions. This semi-monthly series, the second and fourth Tuesdays of each month, will explore the work of artists and thinkers through history.

 

Aristotle - “The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance”.

 

O’Keeffe - “To create one’s world in any of the arts takes courage.”

 

da Vinci - “Art is the Queen of all sciences communicating knowledge to all generations of the world.”

 

O’Connor - “Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.”

 

Picasso - “Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand.” 

 

Klee - “Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.”

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Brecht - “Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.”

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de Beauvoir - “Art, literature, and philosophy are attempts to found the world anew on a human freedom: that of the creator; to foster such an aim, one must first unequivocally posit oneself as a freedom.”

 

Dostoevsky - “Art is as much a need for humanity as eating and drinking. The need for beauty and for creations that embody it is inseparable from humanity and without it man perhaps might not want to live on earth.” 

 

Nietzsche - “Art is essentially the affirmation, the blessing, and the deification of existence”. 

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Works discussed will include selections from:

– On Beauty by Plotinus


– Books on Architecture by Vitruvius


– Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci 


– The Arts and Crafts of Today by William Morris


– The Spiritual in Art by Wassily Kandinski 


– Towards a New Architecture by Le Corbusier


– Some Memories of Drawings by Georgia O’Keefe 


– Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin


– The Search for the Real by Hans Hoffman


– Man the Musician by Victor Zuckerkandl


– Image-making and the Freedom of Man by Hans Jonas


– I Shock Myself by Beatrice Wood


– Remote Control by Barbara Kruger