PHILOSOPHY OF CULTURE AND THE ARTS

As part of the Master's Degree in Economics and Management of Arts and Cultural Activities, this course aims to develop a critical awareness of notions such as artistic autonomy, cultural industry, artworld, by considering some main philosophical problems inhering these notions as well as their historical and socio-cultural implications. The aim of the course is to allow a careful use of these conceptual tools by future operators in the management of arts and cultural activities.

Knowledge and understanding: knowledge of the topics covered in the course, independent self-orientation within the bibliography, critical awareness in using the fundamental concepts introduced in the course.
Applied knowledge and understanding: to recognize and use the notions of artistic autonomy, cultural industry and the art world with critical awareness, differentiating them from different uses of the same concepts in other disciplines (namely, "cultural industries" and creative industries "," art market "or " art system ").
Making judgments: The course aims to provide the tools for a critical consideration of the relationships and dynamics between artistic practices and socio-economic reality. Students should be able to make discriminations between different ways of intertwining artistic aspirations and cultural fruition, on the one hand, and socio-economic interests, on the other hand.
At the end of the course, students should acquire adequate communication skills to discuss investigated topics, as well as to formulate independent assessments providing sustainable reasons.

Students should have passed the exam of Aesthetics I during their Bachelor Degree and/or they have to know the most basic elements characterizing Immanuel Kant's aesthetics.

Art, autonomy and heteronomy: from the cultural industry to the artworld.
The course aims to focus on the relationships between art, society and economy with reference to the autonomist conception of art developed in the modern age. In particular, the course will consider the concepts of cultural industry and artworld in details, namely as notions originally arisen from the philosophical ground and subsequently extended to other areas in a more or less conscious way.
The course will be divided into three main sections.
In the first one, it will be discussed a concept of art as a radical alternative and as a form of resistance to the sphere of economic relations, by analyzing the emergence of the notion of "cultural industry" in Adorno and "avant-garde" in Clement Greenberg.
A second part of the course will be devoted to the reconstruction of the material and theoretical processes leading to an autonomist conception of the arts, through the analysis of essays by Kristeller and Larry Shiner.
In the last part of the lessons, we will focus on the notion of “artworld” developed in the philosophical field by Arthur Coleman Danto and later by George Dickie, differentiating it from Pierre Bourdieu’s and Oskar Becker’s theoretical proposals.

For preparing their exams, students are requested to study the following list of essays and articles:

Adorno T.W. – Horkheimer M. (1944/1972), Cultural Industry, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, London-New York: Verso
Adorno T.W. (1975), Cultural Industry Reconsidered, New German Critique, 6, pp.12-19.
Becker H. (1982), Artworld, California U.P. The following chapters: I, II, III, V, VIII, IX, XI.
Bourdieu P. (1983), The Field of Cultural Production, Poetics, 12, pp.311-356.
Danto A.C. (1964), The Artworld, The Journal of Philosophy.
Danto A.C. (1992), The Artworld Revisited, in Beyond the Brillo Box, California U.P.
Dickie G. (2000), The Institutional Theory of Art, in Carroll N. (ed.), Theories of Art Today, Madison: Wisconsin U.P.
Greenberg C. (2011), Avangard and kitsch, in Art and Culture, Critical Essays.
Kristeller P.O. (1951/1952), The Modern System of Art, Part I and Part II, Journal of the History of Ideas.
Shiner L. (2001), The Invention of Art. A Cultural History, Chicago U.P. The following chapters: Introduzione, I, II, III, V, VI, VII, IX, X, XI, XII.

Further recommended readings:
Cometti J.P. (2012), Arts et facteurs d’art, Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes.
Cometti J.P. (2016), La nouvelle aura: èconomie de l’art et de la culture, Paris: Questions Théoriques.

Further bibliographical references connected with the different topics will be suggested during the course (see Moodle Materials)

The written examination will be composed of a short list of open questions (4/6) focusing the main subjects of the requested texts. The exam will take 2 hours.
The exam will evaluate if the students have acquired the knowledge delivered in the course, their capacity to give reasons, their ability in communicating the different positions with critical awareness as well as their capacity to apply them to current cultural contexts.

Frontal lessons and reading of the texts. Discussions in class on specific topics.

Italian

Students who cannot attend the course are requested to contact the teacher (robdre@unive.it).
Students are requested to subscribe to the Moodle space of the course as well as to regularly consult materials and information they can find there.

Ca' Foscari abides by Italian Law (Law 17/1999; Law 170/2010) regarding support services and accommodation available to students with disabilities. This includes students with mobility, visual, hearing and other disabilities (Law 17/1999), and specific learning impairments (Law 170/2010). If you have a disability or impairment that requires accommodations (i.e., alternate testing, readers, note takers or interpreters) please contact the Disability and Accessibility Offices in Student Services: disabilita@unive.it.

written

This subject deals with topics related to the macro-area "Cities, infrastructure and social capital" and contributes to the achievement of one or more goals of U. N. Agenda for Sustainable Development