Arts

Artistic medium and perception prospered in the 19th century, it is the emergence of photography which influenced artists to innovate and alter the way they made art. Photographs allow an audience to observe and categorize, they aren't just statements of the world but actual pieces of it. While painting can be a narrow and selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a mirror of reality. How did photography fundamentally transform painting?

During my first or second year studying the history of art, I experienced one of those moments in which the discrete bits of knowledge I'd been acquiring in my courses suddenly congealed and connected to the larger context of human experience. Specifically, I began to consider that stylistic notions of Romanticism and Classicism as they had been taught in art history were not just artistic movements, styles, or even broader attitudes toward the nature and purpose of art. They were individual temperaments through which artists see the world, and artists throughout history—not just those of the late-eighteenth or early-nineteenth centuries—were all either classical or romantic.

As I dwelled on this idea, I came to think of these concepts not as polar opposites, but as zones on a continuum. It was intriguing to ask where I thought different artists fit on this spectrum, whether toward one end or the other, extremely (like David or Delacroix), or ambiguously in-between (like Degas). In time, my thinking matured, and I realized that art and artists are more complex than simple schemas can accommodate. But that mental model helped me organize my thoughts and understand not just artists, but people, in a way that was clarifying and systematic.

Explore whether traditional notions of "classic" and "romantic" are accurate models for understanding artists' temperaments or mindsets, or whether they misrepresent artistic nature. To what artists might this model apply, either in ways that clarify or ways that distort? What artists or entire cultures might fall outside this model or defy it (if any)? If applicable, consider how the classic/romantic schema relates to other dichotomies such as Apollonian/Dionysian, the Ancients and the Moderns, or the like.

Analyze the influence and impact of Mexican artwork in the 1920s and 1930s. Specifically, analyze the political messaging the art, the new indigenous themes and influences, the artists themselves (Kahlo and Rivera come to mind) and their influence on the greater art world and their contemporary artists (Picasso et al.).

Analyse the birth and develpment of action painting as an art movement and look at some of the examples which followed on from it. Jackson Pollock is the person primarily associated with this movement but there are a lot of other artists who were working in this mode as well. Raise questions about its form, concepts, potentialities and the critical and effective work which are inhabiting this style.

Many celebrated artists have been involved in scandals or socially problematic situations. From today's Chris Brown to the deceased David Foster Wallace, many popular artists of their trade have been tangled up in scandals and/or crimes. Is it possible to separate the art from the artist? Is it possible to celebrate someone's work without supporting the artist, too?

At the end of the 19th century, a sociologist named Thorstein Veblen argued that privileged people flaunt their wealth in three ways: conspicuous consumption (showing that they can afford to buy products); conspicuous leisure (showing that they can afford to waste time); and conspicuous waste (showing that they can afford to throw things away). Recently, conspicuous consumption and conspicuous waste have lost a lot of their worth as status symbols because goods have become more affordable and both practices are associated with environmental destruction, but conspicuous leisure (which can entail anything from sitting around and doing nothing to lavish vacations to memorizing pointless social rules and regulations) doesn't seem to carry the same stigma. Classically, conspicuous leisure was embodied in an aristocrat who sits around in a large mansion and looks down on people who perform manual labor, but what are some modern equivalents, either in real life or in our media?

Analyse how schools should upgrade their current material to better prepare students for the modern world. May include a change in curriculum, how social media is/may be taught to them, security control, etc.

I'm really interested in the barriers that algorithms may put up on social media in terms of finding like-minded communities, particularly around social justice and activism. Does the use of the algorithm and other tools like shadow-banning limit who is allowed to speak out and be seen within social media, and what impact might that have in our society? Who runs into these hurdles more than others, and why?