The Royal Institute of Philosophy‘s series of lectures on philosophy and the arts continues Friday evening, 21 January 2011, at 5:45 pm with Paisley Livingston at the JZ Young Lecture Theatre, Gower Street. His talk is called “Cinematic Genius”.
From the Institute’s blog:
If one of the objects of artistic appreciation is the understanding and evaluation of artistry, or the skilful achievement of specifically artistic designs, what, more precisely, does this kind of accomplishment consist of in the case of the art of cinema? What are an appreciator’s necessary and optional sources for understanding such achievements? And what sort of thing must a work of (cinematic) art be if it is the bearer of such qualities? My central examples in developing an appreciation-based argument in the ontology of art will be drawn from works by Bellochio, Bergman, and Nair. The approach is contextualist and intentionalist, and based on careful attention to actual cases.
The following Friday, 28 January 2011 (same time, same venue): Andy Hamilton on ‘Artistic Truth’. Prof Hamilton’s note:
…the concept of artistic truth has sustained hammer-blows both from a post-Romantic conception of art, and from a fashionable modern subjectivism about truth. In this lecture I seek to resurrect it, finding a middle way between Dr. Johnson’s didactic concept of art, referred to by Wittgenstein, and the modernist and post-modernist divorce of art from reality, that seems to make it a game or plaything. According to this middle way that I outline, artworks present truth-assessable possibilities that should be freely interpretable. That is, the most valuable art leaves open to the audience how it should be interpreted, and does not preach or broadcast messages, whether religious or political.
This is not in any way a technical lecture. It will be illustrated by frequent reference to artists and musicians, including Mahler, Samuel Beckett, Solzhenitsyn, Primo Levi and Michael Bublé.
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