Instructor:
What are the aesthetic possibilities of a single day? How can the boring, banal, habitual, or ordinary details of everyday life open artists and audiences alike to thought-provoking, puzzling, or even arresting experiences? In this course, we’ll ask together what “aesthetics” and “everyday” could mean as we converse with works of art across various contexts and disciplines, including Kendrick Lamar’s album good kid, m.A.A.d city, Elif Batuman’s novel The Idiot, Clara Peeters’ still-life paintings, and Emily Dickinson’s envelope (and receipt, and scrap-paper) poems. We’ll ask ourselves how to engage with dailyness, mundanity, and forgettable details, pondering too how our own senses of attentiveness and observation color what we consider art at all. Ultimately, we’ll learn why it might matter to be an arbiter of the ordinary, which you’ll practice by contributing to your own working archive of everyday details, writing working definitions of “the everyday,” and crafting a self-designed final project with the support of a small group, which could be an essay, art piece, or presentation.