Art & Aesthetics Video Response

1.) In the Philosophy of Arts video the basic idea was about the journey of understanding beauty through the arts. The CARTA video was about how our brains perceive images and the evolution of our brains as well as the capacity for creating and interpreting pleasing images.

2.) I think that of the philosophers mentioned in the video, Immanuel Kant (18th century Enlightenment Era) is the one that sticks out the most prominently. He said that the "inner sense of beauty is innate and spontaneous", which I couldn't agree more with. He thinks that judging what is considered beautiful is a feeling and can't be made to follow rules. He said that beauty is not rule bound and is based on subjective judgement. His goal was to combine reason with experiences and logic. (Objects that are outside of our own experiences can still be used to explain logic, we don't need to conform or limit ourselves to what we are comfortable with)

3.) I thought that lectures by Changeux and Ramachandran were interesting because of the scientific aspects to the subject. It makes art seem less abstract and random. The part from Changeux's talk I found most interesting was when he was talking about the "Rules of Art" when he said that artists are attempting to share their conception of the world, and art makes us aware of ourselves and of others. In the beginning of the talk he was discussing how the human brain has been growing in size as we evolved and as it grew so did our complexity for creating and understanding artworks. 

I really liked listening to Ramachandran's lecture, and I think the part that was most memorable to me was when he said that the word art shouldn't be used but rather "visual aesthetic" because what someone finds pleasing can be vastly different from another person. He also said that goal of an artist is to produce a product that creates something pleasing in the brain.

4.) The videos relate to the readings because the brain and beauty and art are all linked together. The issue is still in figuring out just how they all work together. It's good to have different mediums for learning a topic, so having the videos and the readings from the book allows for many ideas to be sparked and to gain more perspective.

5.) Of the two films we watched, I really enjoyed the second half of the CARTA film when Ramanchandran spoke, and the first video wasn't terrible either but the one man in the black shirt and gray beard was simply aggravating to listen to because of his long pauses and how low he talked. I wish I could have been able to hear the speech by Jean- Pierre better and his powerpoints were very difficult to read because the print was small and blurry. Overall, they were interesting but I think the quality needs some improvement. I like supplementing videos with the text book too, it helps show the subject matter in different ways and it's cool to see hear the scientific aspects of art as well.