Kant

Through watching the vidoes and reading the chapters in Living with Art, my knowledge on the visual arts is beginning to expand.

Alexander Baumgarten, an eighteenth century German thinker coined the word aesthetics. Aesthetics is the combination of many different things coming together to bring beauty. Aesthetics can be described as proportion, harmony, symmetry and order.

 Immanuel Kant was an eighteenth century theorist. Kant argues that everything can be made beautiful-even the ugly. The only thing that can not be made beautiful is that which is disgusting. Ugly is not the opposite of beautiful because ugly can be transformed into beauty, disgusting is the true opposite of beauty. 

Jean-Pierre Changeux's video presentation on how the brain processes the visual arts, and the biology behind human brain development was very interesting. Although the French accent was at times hard to read through, one interesting fact I pulled out was how an artist style may emerge. He said that the selection and storage of an efficient rule (rules are the acquired patterns of connections stored in the long term memory) most often implicit for the top-down restriction of the number of possible representations creates the artist's style. 

To me the book was a lot easier for me, having no art background, to read and understand. The videos were very interesting, but went a lot deeper into the history of art, which is probably more interesting for people with more background knowledge of art.