Critical theory has tended to account for the aesthetic almost exclusively in terms of consumption, emphasizing aesthetics as a mode of perception or a kind of experience. While the migration of the term itself from the realm of theory to a pinterest- and instagram-coded vernacular certainly foregrounds its saturation with the  logic of platform capitalism, thinking only in terms of consumption risks misrecognizing why the aesthetic matters to people right now. The contemporary embrace of aesthetics is also undeniably about making things. This seminar asks: what would it mean to put making back into the way we theorize the aesthetic, or to recognize creating rather than just perceiving art as an aspect of aesthetic experience itself.  Foregrounding creativity, and in particular the complex and messy process of making things, feels particularly urgent in the age of proliferating slop.

We suspect that restoring an account of creativity to aesthetic theory requires a focus on amateur, rather than expert, creativity. What sorts of theoretical work is being done in the process of creating something, or even in the process of learning how to create something? This seminar originated in our interest in the kind of theoretical writing that emerges when people study their own attempt to draw, to paint, to weave, to sculpt. Such work is often attuned to the particular kinds of relationality and in-betweeness that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, writing about her own practice as a textile artist, identifies with the middle ranges of agency, or that Janet Sayre, in her introduction to Marion Milner’s On Not Being Able to Paint (1950), locates within the gap between “the orgiastic feelings during creation and the value of the created.” What might a canon of past critical writing by amateurs describing their attempts at making look like? 

Potential topics might include: 

• The recent renewal of interest in the work of Marion Milner
• Object relations theory and the aesthetic
• Queer theories of creativity
• Reparativity and making
• Craft epistemologies
• Beginners’ memoirs, diaries, or journals
• The turn to practice in maker communities
• Not knowing what you are doing
• Criticism and art pedagogy