MA in Aesthetics and Art Theory

What you will study

You'll study canonical authors including Adorno, Aristotle, Benjamin, Deleuze, Derrida, de Duve, Duchamp, Greenberg, Heidegger, Kant, Krauss, Rancière, and Schlegel, and gain a clear overview of the main philosophical approaches to modern and contemporary art.

The course will distinguish between ‘aesthetic', ‘Romantic' ‘Modernist' and ‘Contemporary' (global) problematics, and will offer a distinctive grounding in ongoing debates over the reception of contemporary art.

You may also choose from a range of option modules from the Modern European Philosophy and Philosophy & Contemporary Critical Theory MA courses.

You'll take one core taught module worth 30 credits, and then choose three other 30-credit modules from a range of options, before preparing the 15,000-word dissertation (worth 60 credits).

Modules

You'll engage with some of the most influential texts in modern and contemporary art theory from Kant, Schiller and Schlegel to Greenberg, Adorno, Rancière and Deleuze – framed in terms of fundamental conceptual problems inherited from the German Idealists.

Core modules

• Kant and the Aesthetic Tradition
• Philosophy Dissertation

Optional modules

• Art Theory: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Contemporary
• Contemporary European Philosophies
• Critique, Practice, Power
• German Critical Theory
• Hegel and his Legacy
• Kant and his Legacy
• Nietzsche and Heidegger
• Philosophy and Psychoanalysis
• Plasticity and Form
• Political Philosophy
• Recent French Philosophy
• Recent Italian Philosophy
• Romantic Philosophy of Art
• Topics in Modern European Philosophy

Additional year with placement

Many postgraduate courses at Kingston University allow students to do a 12-month work placement as part of their course. The responsibility for finding the work placement is with the student; we cannot guarantee the work placement, just the opportunity to undertake it. As the work placement is an assessed part of the course, it is covered by a student's Student Route visa.

Please note

Optional modules only run if there is enough demand. If we have an insufficient number of students interested in an optional module, that module will not be offered for this course.

After you graduate

Our graduates often progress to research degrees in European philosophy and critical theory, or to careers in media/journalism, publishing, the arts, education, and public policy.

For example, recent graduates from the Aesthetics and Art Theory MA course have progressed to the following:

• Michael Sperlinger has become assistant director of the arts agency Lux (London);
• Marta Kuzma has become director of the Office of Contemporary Art Norway (Oslo);
• Ruth Blacksell has become a lecturer and associate director of O-SB Design, at the University of Reading;
• Louise Hanson has begun a PhD at Brasenose College, Oxford;
• Dessislava Dimova is finishing a PhD at the Bulgarian Academy;
• Anda Klavina is now a curator at the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art (Riga);
• Kate Parker is the director of City Projects (London);
• John Millar began a PhD at CRMEP in the autumn of 2015 having been awarded a TECHNE-AHRC Consortium Studentship;
• Andrey Shental is a senior editor at Theory and Practice while contributing to several other Russian periodicals, including Artchronika;
• Alex Fletcher has been awarded a 3-Year PhD AHRC Studentship by the TECHNE consortium, to work on 'Spaces of Capital: Narrating Social Space and Time in the Photo and Video Essay' in the CRMEP;
• Josefine Wikström has begun a PhD in the CRMEP on Ontologies of Production and Performance;
• Luke Skrebowski submitted his PhD in CRMEP simultaneously with the dissertation for this, his second MA. He now lectures in art history at the University of Cambridge;
• Gil Leung is the distribution manager at the Lux Arts Agency, London, and editor of VERSUCH journal. She previously worked as an assistant curator for Tate Film and Live Programmes; and
• Pilar Villela Mascaro is a freelance curator in Mexico City.