READINGS

Bad at Sports

What is Art?

Stanisewski

What Defines Modern Art? Who defines it?
What is the problem of naming something "art" that as made in earlier centuries?
What does art do?
How do media and reproductions of art change how we perceive it?

Cave AllegoryCAVE ALLEGORYPlato

Against InterpretationSusan Sontag, 1964

How does this text influence how you attempt to understand art? Write your response on a page that links here and to your personal page.

Additional sources:http://www.susansontag.com/Book Review: Against Interpretation New York Times Obituary Toledo Blade ObituaryNew Yorker Obituary>http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/01/10/050110ta_talk_acocella

Billy Collins: Introduction to Poetry

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.