This event starts at 6 pm in downtown Kitchener!
Today's event will be comprised of three parts - a tour of the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery facilitated by an art educator, some free time to amble around the gallery and look at the art, and then a pub decampment to eat food and have some discussion.
You can join in for any part, but please RSVP if you're going to part 3 so I can make a reservation at the local pub. As always, if you can't RSVP but then find that you can make it after all, please come anyways!
Rationalists have always had a fairly uneasy relationship with art, and it seems like the more modern the art, the more fraught the relationship. Let's explore this.
Naming the Nameless (2018) - Sarah C writes about aesthetics, and why we should care about them. Pay attention to the Arts and Imitation section in particular, and let's see if we can draw a line from the art in the gallery to contemporary commercial design.
Here are three tumblr pages (one, two, three) curated by rationalists on the art that they like. See if you can pick up any common themes in them. Then see if any themes they like don't pop up in the gallery, and see if any themes are very common in the gallery but not on the tumblrs.
Sam Rosen, who curated the first tumblr linked (opulentjoy.tumblr.com) has a short two part series on art, expressing what's probably the typical rationalist view:
But What are Birds Really? (2014)
Lastly, if you're interested, I wrote about my own experiences in a modern art museum here. This reading is extra optional since I would feel bad making you all read my own writing :P
Meet at 5:50 near the entrance of the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery (Google Maps link).
KWAG is hosting a free guided tour of the space. It starts at 6pm and takes an hour according to the event page.
KWAG doesn't close until 9pm on Thursdays. I think after the tour we can stick around for another half hour or so, looking at art but this time without adult supervision.
At 7:30, let's head to McCabe's (I made a reservation for 8pm) where we'll have food, drinks, and discussion.
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