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*DUE 12PM , NOON FRIDAY 9TH DECEMBER, 2022**

Essay length: 2000 to 2500 words (word count INCLUDES footnotes, but EXCLUDES essay title and bibliography)

All requests for extensions must go through an Extenuating Circumstances application to the Departmental Tutor, rather than via course tutors.

Presentation: Essays should be typed, spacing should be 1.5 or double spaced. Please do not put your name on any part of the essay itself, and save your file with your candidate code and course code eg. ABCD1_HART0031_ESSAY2

Referencing: It is crucial in this essay that you adequately reference the texts and ideas you cite, so please include footnotes in a consistent format and a full bibliography of sources consulted, also properly formatted. Please have a look at the Writing Guide in the History of Art Student Handbook accessible via Moodle. If you have questions about any of this, please ask us for guidance.

Your bibliography should indicate which edition/site of the primary sources you used and include secondary literature. If you quote frequently from one or two primary sources, you may refer to these in brackets in your text. For example, if your essay focuses on Hegel you might just use as short title and the pages number (Aesthetics: 387).

Essay topic: You can, if you wish, work on the same author or theme as in your first assignment, however you should make sure not to repeat yourself and to open up that topic from another perspective, or in another context. You may also propose a different question, but this should follow the general format of the given questions below and MUST BE AGREED WITH ONE OF THE TUTORS.

For this essay you need to spell out how you are approaching the question and make an argument in your response. Your discussion can develop predominantly from your reading of the primary texts. You are very welcome to refer to images (in which case please illustrate your essay and provide captions), but you are not obliged to.

ESSAY QUESTIONS:

1. In what ways does David Hume’s “culture of taste” relate to the shifts that were occurring in British society during the 18th century?

2. What kind of subjects are produced by the aesthetic experience Edmund Burke defines as the “sublime”? Discuss in relation to issues of race, class and gender.

3. In his analysis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, David Lloyd (Under Representation. The Racial Regime of Aesthetics) argues that “in a situation where the social conditions prescribed by a liberal moral philosophy of history cannot be realized in practice, the aesthetic takes over”. What does he mean by that? Discuss the relation between aesthetics, race and power in relation to Kant.

4. For Hegel, art gives expression to spirit’s understanding of itself. What in Hegel’s aesthetic philosophy led him to this conclusion? Discuss in relation to Hegel’s views on the ‘African Spirit’.

5. “This, then, is the position of art in this epoch. It is helpless and crippled amidst the sea of utilitarian brutality. It cannot perform the most necessary functions: it cannot build a decent house, or ornament a book, or lay out a garden, or prevent the ladies of the time from dressing in a way that caricatures the body and degrades it. On the one hand it is cut off from the traditions of the past, on the other from the life of the present. It is the art of a clique and not of the people. The people are too poor to have any share of it”. (William Morris, ‘The Socialist Ideal: Art’, New Review, 1891) What notion of art and its production does Morris propose as a ‘remedy’ and why?

6. What does Henri Bergson mean by “creative evolution” and how does Senghor’s aesthetics of Négritude relate to and differ from Bergson’s vitalism? In what ways do these vitalist approaches depart from previous traditions of aesthetics and why ? Discuss.

7. Compare and contrast Carl Einstein’s notion of aesthetic form with that of Clement Greenberg. How do their differences speak to diverging politics of art history and why do you think they matter?

8. What does Theodor W. Adorno in his Aesthetic Theory define as the ‘double character of art’ and how does it relate to mass culture? In what ways does this notion respond to the shortcomings Adorno perceived in the history of aesthetics? Discuss.

9. What role does black femininity play in articulating normative conceptions of beauty? Discuss in relation to Lorraine O’Grady and Saidiya Hartman.