Additional Resources for Philosophy at the Virtual Art Museum
The units on this website use works of art to introduce topics for philosophical discussions. This page provides some resources that will be useful to get your students to go more deeply into their ideas. You’ll find philosophy encyclopedia entries, art history resources, videos and podcasts to enrich your students’ Philosophy at the Virtual Art Museum experience!
Philosophy Resources
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Art History Resources
Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History
SmartHistory offers videos on many major works of arts and genres
Portraiture
Portraits are visual representations of individual people. Painted portraits were common until the invention of photography in the middle of the nineteenth century. When looking at portraits, it’s important to engage not only with the person depicted in the work of art, it’s also important to discuss the artistic choices the portraitist made when creating the image.
Three issues are raised by the philosophical questions in this unit: the nature of beauty; how self-knowledge differs from the knowledge we have of others; and whether objectification always enters into our perception of others. These are difficult and interesting questions. Here are some resources to help students grapple with these questions.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on beauty
Philosophy Talk episode: “What is beauty?”
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on self-knowledge
Philosophy Talk episode on the self and self-presentation
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Sartre and objectification
Landscape
Landscapes are works of art that focus on scenes from nature. The landscapes featured in this unit encourage discussion about how the natural world is depicted and our relationship to the natural world.
Overview of the landscape genre from the J. Paul Getty Museum
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on environmental ethics
Expressionism
Expressionist art focuses on the expression of emotions rather than the accurate depiction of objects or people. Artists use color and visual distortions as a means of communicating emotional states.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on emotion
Philosophy Talk episode on “indispensable emotions”
Abstract Art
Abstract art, also known as non-representational art, is imagery that does not make visual reference to people, places or things in the real world. The paintings in this unit are all examples of Western abstract art from the twentieth century.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art: Abstract Art is an excellent resource for further information on abstraction and abstract art.
The topic of the meaning of the term “abstract” introduces themes from the philosophy of language, in particular the difference between description and evaluation. Here are some more resources for exploring the concepts introduced by abstract art.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on abstract objects
There is an interesting controversy between John Locke and George Berkeley on whether there can be abstract ideas. The Introduction to Berkeley’s The Principles of Human Knowledge contains a nice presentation of the theory and Berkeley’s criticisms of it.
Episode of Philosophy Talk about the nature of art
Conceptual Art
The philosopher R. G. Collingwood claimed that the true works of art were the ideas in the minds of artists. Similarly, in 1967 the American Artist Sol LeWitt wrote that, “In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.” In this unit on conceptual art, the artists featured focus on language and its relationship to visual images.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on conceptual art
“The Hard Case of Duchamp’s Fountain” by Launt Thompson
Conceptual art at the Museum of Modern Art
Conceptual Art in the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History
Photography
Photography is an art form that came into existence in the mid-nineteenth century. At the outset, photography consisted of the recording of light on a photo-sensitive emulsion. In recent decades, digital technology has replaced the photo-chemical one, transforming the nature of photography. Because photography reproduced reality in a naturalistic manner, it caused a crisis in traditional painting and the art world at large.