The CAS Research Forum showcases recent scholarship and commissioned art/musical works of Center members. Forum events are free and open to the public.
SPRING 2008 SCHEDULE
Wednesday, February 6 - 4:30 PM Hunt Library-Fine and Rare Book Room, 4th Floor
Elaine A. King, Professor of Art History, Theory and Museum Studies, College of Fine Arts
Ethics and the Visual Arts
Join the Center for the Arts in Society for a discussion of Elaine A. King's newly published anthology, co-edited with Gail Levin, Ethics and the Visual Arts.
New technologies not only have the potential to be consciousness transforming, but also they can function to diminish the critical and analytical abilities of the viewer and user. Ultimately, attitudes about the future will depend upon our shared and collaborative efforts to address the ethical dilemmas posed by technology in its many guises. Probably the most famous analysis of technology and society—or rather the technological attitude that gives rise to artifacts—is Martin Heidegger’s phenomenological essay “The Question Concerning Technology” (1977). This research forum will address a contextual orientation to Heidegger’s ideas about technology, and will examine the relationship of ethics and new media and how to consider the actions of producers / creators and the consequences of certain acts on a greater social community. Is there a way to connect actions and consequences? Is new media technology altering our sense of social responsibility?
Reception to follow.
Tuesday, April 22- 4:30 PM
Baker Hall 154R
Special guest speaker Frédérique Desbuissons, Associate Professor of Art History
Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne, France
Portrait of the Artist as Beer Drinker: Gustave Courbet
That Gustave Courbet (1821-76) drank beer would have had a minor, anecdotal value in the history of his artistic career if his contemporaries had not turned his taste for the drink into the crux of a cultural, perhaps even ethnic interpretation of Realism. When his sometime champion, the writer Francis Wey, attributed Courbet’s self-indulgence and the decadence of his painting to the artist’s acquaintance with Nordic barbarians who preferred beer, he brought to a head several decades of material and symbolic associations. Join us as Professor Desbuissons argues that what was at stake in Courbet’s painting and his consumption of beer were one and the same: the betrayal of French classicism.
Desbuissons is the author of several articles on the French artist Gustave Courbet, as well as the author of a forthcoming monograph. She is a participant in the international symposium organized by the Musée d'Orsay in Paris to coincide with the current exhibition of Courbet which will travel to New York to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2008.
