The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½'s Center for Humanities and the Arts will host its annual Colloquium March 4-5 on the subject of "Beauty and its Discontents."
All events are free and open to the public.
The colloquium will open on Thursday at 1 p.m. and will feature two panels that will examine the topic of beauty from different perspectives. The first panel will tackle the aesthetics of popular culture, particularly the Oprah Winfrey book club phenomenon and the TV fan club. The second panel will examine aesthetic questions in relation to the philosophical tradition, nature and the everyday world.
The day's events will conclude with a keynote lecture by Martin Jay, the Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History and chair of the history department at the University of California, Berkeley, titled "Drifting into Dangerous Waters: The Separation of Aesthetic Experience from the Art Object." A reception will follow.
On Friday, the colloquium opens at 9 a.m. with a performance and lecture by Albert Chong of the CU-Boulder fine arts department. That morning, a keynote talk titled "Sleeping Beauties: Are Historical Aesthetics Worth Recovering?" will be delivered by J. Paul Hunter, the Barbara E. and Richard J. Franke Professor of English Language and Literature and Director of the Chicago Humanities Institute, University of Chicago.
In the afternoon, panels will discuss issues ranging from film aesthetics and ethnicity to the politics of eighteenth-century art academies, and from the representation of AIDS to the role of the grotesque in French literature. Closing the colloquium will be Anna Chave, art history professor in the graduate school, City University of New York, who will deliver a keynote talk on, "Eva Hesse, Beauty and Biography." A reception will follow.
"Beauty and its Discontents" is sponsored by the President's Fund for the Humanities. For information, please call 303-492-1423 or 303-492-1931.