1. Key concept of the CNN Article: how our brain recognizes art. The whole article is an exploration in the way the brain processes art as coherent concepts. For instance, lines don’t exist in the real world, but lines alone in artwork can still be recognized by our brains as coherent forms - shapes, faces, etc. Our brains do this because of light and shadow in the real world that the lines mimic enough for us to get the idea. It talks about the different ways our brain recognizes faces and how art can mimic that with just color differences. The last part of the article talks about why we like art and it comes down to the same reasons we like anything as humans - it makes the pleasure center in our brains fire off. So even abstract art - art that is not necessarily a coherent idea or form - can still cause a pleasurable reaction in the brain that allows us to draw meaning from the piece.
Key concept of the Philosophy video: the history and evolution of aesthetics as a branch of philosophy. The video went through different philosophers throughout history, starting with the Ancient Greeks & Plato. It explored aesthetic theory through different lenses: not just philosophers but novelists and other artists.
Key concept of the Neurobiology video: same as the CNN article - how our brain recognizes art. This video goes a bit deeper than the CNN article, starting from the beginnings of art history - cave paintings and making tools. It attempts to use what we know in the fields of neurobiology and neurology to explain how humans were able to create in the first place, and why we recognize certain themes as universal despite time context.
2. I really like Kant’s aesthetic theory. Kant was the philosopher in the 18th century who first proposed a perception of human experience that tried to reconcile the reason-oriented rationalists and the sensory-oriented empiricists, creating aesthetics as a comprehensive philosophical system.
I think Kant’s theory of aesthetics is important firstly because he tied aesthetics to his theories of reason and human experience. He made connections not just to our emotional reactivity - a sensory reaction studied by the empiricists - but to our judgement and reasoning. Aesthetics are a subjective response to how the artwork pleases our imaginations. We feel as if our judgements on aesthetics are logical and we appear to use reason when justifying beauty, however. This paradox is because aesthetics invokes a disinterested pleasure in us and this pleasure has universal validity - this is a concept of common sense, a reasoning concept used in conjunction with our emotional reactivity upon seeing art in the first place.
Secondly, he makes a distinction between different elements of the aesthetic. Kant made a distinction between beauty, which we can point to, and the sublime, which we can appreciate aesthetically - that is, emotionally/subjectively - but that isn’t as easily defined; it’s a fuzzy relationship between our reasoning faculties (engaged when studying art) and our imagination that the sublime draws on.
3. The scientific views of aesthetics and art as shown in the Neurobiology video are quite interesting to me as they explore evidence that our psychological processes have a physical basis and that those physical traits influence psychological processes.
The most interesting fact from the first speaker’s lecture (Changeux?) was about how art evokes emotion in us, making us aware of certain things. He showed brain scans that were lit up in the sections related to empathy when viewing art with tragic themes and it was cool to see that art can actually make the brain react like that - these themes aren’t just abstract concepts; they have a real physical basis.
The second speaker (Ramachandram) was more engaging and I was more interested in what he said. I particularly liked how he connected certain art styles and themes across cultures and times. He was talking about how Picasso chose to exaggerate certain things in his paintings and to take away the realism and how it was similar to Indian painters and sculptors and how they exaggerated reality and why they would do that aesthetically. I also enjoyed how he talked about visual aesthetics instead of art because the word “art” has all these connotations to money and mass production and things that don’t really have anything to do with what we’re talking about.
4. The videos and article didn’t do much for me except connect the text to my chosen major. For instance, I’ve studied Immanuel Kant in a couple of different courses by now, though never quite his aesthetic philosophy. So I have a basis in which to understand Kant to begin with, the same with Plato. The article especially was fun, because I’ve studied perception since PSY 101 - every psychology student has to understand the basics of perception (and the basics of the brain in general) before being able to understand anything else. Now, connecting the text back to the subject I’ve been studying the most/hardest does make some of the concepts easier to understand. It’s almost as if you have to psycholanalyze the works of art that you look at because it plays into the work almost as much as technical art theory does.
5. My opinion of the article is a pretty positive one. I thought it was a very well-written work that connected art back to neuropsychology in a simple, yet interesting way. My prior coursework allowed me to understand the connections the article was making easily and the text gave me enough background on the art side to allow the article to make some concepts clearer.
The philosophy of the arts video was almost as bad as listening to Karuza teaching History and Systems. Don’t get me wrong, I love Karuza as a teacher, but he drones in his lectures and they can be a little dry and boring. I literally felt like I was sitting in that class again, since although the philosophy is different (aesthetic philosophy), the method of delivery for the video was nearly exactly the same. That was painful; not interesting or fun and it didn’t really expand my understanding of aesthetics any better.
The CARTA video was a little more interesting, or at least the material was. It was difficult to listen to the first speaker; he was heavily accented in a way that made his speech difficult to follow. However, it was interesting to go back in history and to use neurobiology to explain our creation of art, what we are drawn to when we create and why we recognize certain themes universally. The second speaker was more engaging. He was funnier, though he spoke quite quickly and I almost found it difficult to keep up after struggling to decipher the first speaker. He related the science back to real life in a way that was easily understood and engaging to listen to.
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