“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin’s classic essay, addressing the cultural, political, economic, and epistemological impact of the new technologies of machinic reproducibility, represents a key moment in the long history of image, mimesis and representation, art, truth and number, politics, pedagogy, economy, ecology, and democracy, inaugurated by the Platonic discourse on the arts, philosophy, and government, but stretching further back to cave art, Mosaic aniconism, and forward to the printing press, Baumgarten’s Aesthetica and Noetica and the Kantian sublime. Indeed, Benjamin’s analysis prefigures the contemporary exponential acceleration of art making, dragged in forced complicity to the subterranean caves of reification, numeracy, dividualism, monetization, populism, and the algorithm. “Big Data” and its machine learning enablers, AI digital platforms, have vastly colonized the “imagination of billions” (Zev Manovich), and launched what Shoshana Zuboff has ominously called Surveillance Capitalism. What does this all mean for the future of the arts, culture, taste? Will this choke individual creativity, political agency, economic fairness, and ecological sustainability? Will Artificial Aesthetics devour anew the aura of the work of art? Or, paradoxically, could this open up into what I have called an “aesthetic(s) of the common(s)” of possible worlds-other and arts-other? These, and similar related questions and issues, would make what I hope could be a “virtuous feedback circle” of ideas and reflections among all the seminar participants and their current studio practices.

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History and Theory courses are designed to hone students' critical skills through intensive reading and writing assignments. Recent course topics have included gender, ethics, disease, aesthetics, and discourse on global art movements of the past 50 years.

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