Synopsis: Late in the 19th century artists began to experiment with non-representational art. Dr. Hicks traces this movement to Immanuel Kant’s basic philosophy as expressed in his 1781 Critique of Pure Reason. Their conversation ranges over Kant’s metaphysical ideas and his ideas of beauty and the sublime as expressed in Critique of Judgment. The perceptual world, craft, and skill became less important and were replaced with notions of subjective ‘genius.’ Recorded in Norway. Timestamps below the video embed.
Timestamps: 00:32 Introduction 01:02 Stephen Hicks 02:39 Synopsis of Explaining Postmodernism 07:33 Counter-Enlightenment 09:04 What are the key points about the Enlightenment 12:35 Is there an indifference to the natural world? 15:11 The influence of Kant’s ideas about art 17:37 Kant’s three Critiques 23:36 A Kantian sense of life and its effect on a painter 25:45 What is the importance of the sensual world? 28:37 Subjectively constructed reality? 30:52 Subjectivism and a religious view 33:52 The redefinition of knowledge 35:31 Edvard Munch, subjectivism and painting 39:05 Abandoning universal subjectivity 41:08 Representational art then is not serious, it is kitsch. 43:31 Critique of Judgment 46:00 The sublime 50:51 Romanticism in art 55:10 Artistic genius is the opposite of craft 56:35 The real artist is going to be irrational 1:00:05 Expressionism 1:03:20 Originality 1:07:05 Distancing yourself from archetypes 1:09:13 Pursuing internal subconscious forces 1:11:54 “Thou shalt make no graven images” 1:22:39 How do we build something positive out of this? 1:30:50 Aristotle’s naturalism
Transcription to be published soon.
Related: Professor Hicks’s lecture at ESEADE University, Buenos Aires, Argentina, “How Art Became Ugly”: