Humanities and Aesthetics Quiz

Which of the following assumptions are not shared by humanists and aesthetes?

• The imagination is a vital, perhaps the best, part of our humanity

• The business of the artist is to hold up a mirror to reality

• The artist is the ideal human type

• Art plays a crucial role in human welfare, deepening and enriching our lives.

Matthew Arnold holds that…

• Life and art are similar in that both are fundamentally moral phenomena

• Life and art stand to one another as origin to copy

• Life imitates art

• Life and art are both finite

"All art is quite useless," says Wilde. What does he mean?

• Art doesn't have a purpose

• Art has no practical purposes, only aesthetic ones

• Artists try to achieve all manner social-political purposes, but they typically fail

• Art's real purpose is impossible to put into words

Culture, according to Arnold, is comprised of two components:

• Ambition and scholarship

• Knowledge of foreign language and good manners

• Curiosity and the desire to do good

• Business sense and a pragmatist orientation

Why do Aestheticists shy away from constructing canons?

• Because it's presumptuous to tell other people what they should read

• Because they hold a subjectivist view of value

• Because canons are dangerous and should be left to military experts

• Because they deny that beauty is in the eye of the beholder

Culture, according to Arnold, will replace… what?

• Science

• Philosophy

• Art

• Religion

What is the main similarity between culture and religion, according to Arnold?

• Both are organized around the idea of the Divine

• Both work on the inner self

• Both involve a priesthood

• Both are traditional

Humanists and Platonists are alike in that…

• Both believe that literary art is dangerous and corrupting

• Both believe that art exists in a sphere of its own, separate from social and political concerns

• Both believe that art exists in the same sphere as morality and politics

• Both believe that the highest telos of art is catharsis

Which of the following is the best description of the Aestheticist view of the relation between artworks and the question of social-political impact?

• Artworks never have social-political effects and therefore the latter are irrelevant to their merit as artworks

• Artworks may occasionally have social-political effects, but such effects are irrelevant to their merit as artworks

• Artworks always have some social-political effects, and critics should consider these effects when evaluating the artwork

• Artworks should aspire to have political effects and such effects should form part of their evaluation as artworks

Which statement best encapsulates the subjectivist position?

• There are no individual norms or standards of evaluation

• One's own private consciousness is the only source of evaluation and judgement

• Judgement and evaluation follow commonsense

• Objective standards of evaluation should be judged subjectively before being applied to the world