Unexceptional Art

This course will seek to identify key traits of
Western aesthetic thought, consider the politics
of such thought, and explore alternatives to it.
Taking as a central point of reference Walter
Benjamin's classic essay on "The Work of Art in
the Era of Mechanical Reproduction", the course
will seek to pursue in particular a theory of art
whose concepts are "completely useless for the
purposes of fascism", as Benjamin already put it.
Using the work of the controversial political
thinker Carl Schmitt to identify the centrality of
exceptionalism in Western aesthetics, the course
will seek to destabilize that situation by
focusing on three figures that have long troubled
Western aesthetics: the vandal, the forger, and
the sage. Moving from discussions of art vandalism
(in works by Byung-Chul Han, Ben Lerner, Tobin
Siebers, among others), to art forgery (the
forgers Elmyr de Hory, Han van Meegeren, Zhang
Daqian), to ancient Chinese (and specifically
daoist) understandings of the work of
art-as-process (in the work of contemporary artist
Song Dong, for example), the course will explore a
theory of unexceptional art that gives pride of
place to the destroyed or damaged artwork; to the
copy, the fake and the forgery; and to Chinese
landscape painting (versus the Western nude). All
three will enable us to think-though rarely in
straightforward, non-dialectical ways-alternatives
to exceptionalist aesthetics that will emerge in
the course as politically meaningful, particularly
today.