Aesthetics
Guidelines for Art/Film/Music Critic or/and Preliminary Research Paper
This paper is worth 10 points. The paper should be both expository and analytical. You are encouraged to conduct interviews of the author/film crew/musician/artist, but it is optional. You should provide both factual information and a personal point of view (e.g. lab policies [facts] and practice/perception of the lab policies [participation/observation]). You should use some of the key methods we learned in this course to analyze your study subject.
The Review
Write a 5 page film/music/art review. This could be a review of any type of (just to list a few) film: documentary, drama, independent, or anime; [etc.]
literature: poetry, fiction, anthropological notes; [etc.]
music: live performance or recording of any genre; [etc.]
art: digital, historical, folk, or an exhibition. [etc.]
For instance, if you want to give me an artistic review of graffiti, please tell me more than what the graffiti looks like. I want to know about its origin, its style, its audience, its impacts, its significance in the time and place you saw it, and etc. Do you find it aesthetically pleasing or important? Why or why not? If you want to give me a review of a film, well, please do not give me a 3-page summary of the plot, but what are some of the issues and ideas the film tried to present? Reviewing a song/an album by the Roots or Massive Attack? (I had a student who once did research on the origin and significance of Death Metal in Europe) Please give me more than pages of lyric(s). What is the artistic style of your subject? Who are the audience and why? I would encourage you to include images/figures in your paper, but that space does not count for the length of the text you suppose to produce.
The preliminary research paper for your final course project
Write a 5 page research paper which will serve as a preliminary to your final course project. The final court project could be any topic that we discussed in class in any specific context. For example, you could examine the idea of beauty, language, or the necessity of aesthetic education in any specific cultural context. You could also look at what it means to be beautiful, terror, sublime, or secular in religious setting or according to scientific standard. What may be the function of art, using your preliminary research as example in different society/historical period?
Reminder: The format of your final course project could be a presentation consisted of power point/website, an art project, a live performance, a research paper based on your preliminary research or a book review (5 pages). You must present your project in class (5min minimum).
It is possible that you might wish to expand your review into a final course project – however, if you wish to do that, please make sure that you will not be simply repeating what you write in this preliminary research paper but be able to expand and elaborate on it for your final project.
Note: Please conclude your essay with a question that emerged from this assignment, which includes the writing process of this paper.
Some suggestions:
1. If you are reviewing a film/music/art that is entirely new to you, you might wish to view it at least twice.
2. If you are reviewing an art/film exhibition or a concert (live band and etc.), you might wish to visit more than once and then write a summery based on the multiple trips (not required).
3. You might wish to take notes/photos/recordings/interviews (musician/artist) while viewing your study subject.
4. You should pay attention to the details: context, language(s), clothing, gestures, physical environment; sociocultural and political economic environment; time of event, and etc.
5. Think how you want to approach and share your experience through writing, and why.
6. You should go through your notes in class and/or the readings assigned for ideas and methods.
PRIVACY MATTER: This is a short review assignment. If ethnographic materials are used in your paper, your work will not be shared with the public, the class, or used for any purpose other than fulfilling the educational purpose of this Gordon Rule course. Nevertheless, please be aware of privacy issues when you conduct interviews. Inform your interviewee(s) or the people you will be interacting with that you are conducting a research and will write a visitation paper. If you are exploring a public setting, remember that your subjects didn’t give permission. Avoid using any real names or reporting anything personal unless you have a written consent approved by the University of Central Florida Institutional Review Board (see http://www.research.ucf.edu/Compliance/IRB/Investigators/; last modified September 10, 2011) and signed by the interviewee(s). You should not include private conversations in your paper but only report typical examples of speech, and extracts of conversation.