Week One: Thinking

What if I write the following sentence? Once Linklater began to commit his ideas, images, dialogue, and so on to a medium he could show an audience, his artistic expression became impure. I sound Kantian perhaps. I bring this point to the table to establish my standpoint for the beginning of this class. I can speak more exactly here than I did on the first day about the reason I’m interested in this class. It’s easy for me to notice quickly that one of the ways the “artworld” talks and thinks at this moment possibly results from a body of thought and practice that wasn’t even available to me when I went through school. I graduated in 1973. All of the theorists we’re reading here whose publications appeared after 1975 weren’t available to me as aestheticians 40 years ago. Their names aren’t new to me in some cases; however, they weren’t organized into schools and movements yet. In the decades between then and now, these aestheticians have been contextualized by their schools and movements. They are now. The artistic culture we’re living with since 1975 is a construct that I’ve passed through as it developed. So, today I may speak in Kantian language. It’s my nature and something my education gave me the categories to recognize. I can place Linklater’s film in a place if I hold true to my Kantian schema. But if I begin to incorporate a more contemporary set of criteria to use in consideration of the film, such as, Timothy Binkley’s or Elizabeth Schellekens’, I begin to consider the film’s more cognitive qualities (Binkley) and engage with the film on an imaginative level “with the idea central to the artwork rather than a perceptual experience of its aesthetic properties” (Schellekens). And so, here I am in the present.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/conceptual-art/