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Free Community Seminar Series - 
The Glory of Art 

Agora Foundation Online Free Community Seminar Series - 
The Glory of Art

What is Art? Why does it hold such a central position in humanity’s self-understanding? Art seems to have subjective, contingent, and relative aspects, while also evoking the eternal, essential, and radical. Art represents, communicates, explores, inspires, challenges, creates, and questions. This monthly series, the second Tuesday, will explore the work of artists and thinkers through history.

 

Aristotle - “The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance”.

 

O’Keeffe - “To create one’s world in any of the arts takes courage.”

 

da Vinci - “Art is the Queen of all sciences communicating knowledge to all generations of the world.”

 

O’Connor - “Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.”

 

Picasso - “Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand.” 

 

Klee - “Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.”

Brecht - “Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.”

de Beauvoir - “Art, literature, and philosophy are attempts to found the world anew on a human freedom: that of the creator; to foster such an aim, one must first unequivocally posit oneself as a freedom.”

 

Dostoevsky - “Art is as much a need for humanity as eating and drinking. The need for beauty and for creations that embody it is inseparable from humanity and without it man perhaps might not want to live on earth.” 

 

Nietzsche - “Art is essentially the affirmation, the blessing, and the deification of existence”

Works discussed will include selections from:

On Beauty by Plotinus


Books on Architecture by Vitruvius


– Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci 


The Arts and Crafts of Today by William Morris


The Spiritual in Art by Wassily Kandinski 


Towards a New Architecture by Le Corbusier


Some Memories of Drawings by Georgia O’Keefe 


Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin


– The Search for the Real by Hans Hoffman


Man the Musician by Victor Zuckerkandl


Image-making and the Freedom of Man by Hans Jonas


I Shock Myself by Beatrice Wood


Remote Control by Barbara Kruger

Next Event in the series:

Tuesday, December 10 - 12:00-1:00PM

at the Ojai Library

The December 10 reading is:

Walter Benjamin - Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction. Artwork will also be shown.

Schedule:
12:00 - 1:00PM PST

Location:

The Ojai Library

111 East Ojai Avenue

Ojai, California 93023

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