Art and Society

I took my first Art and Society session. Honestly, I don't really remember signing up for it. I was going to drop it before seeing that it was an SDS course and remembering that I had space for an SDS elective. I guess it fit my class schedule, met my breadth requirement, and was a 200-level course as well as fitting into my new artistic phase.  It's art and how it reflects and develops society, kind of like my Media Arts class, which I took in high school and enjoyed.

No final exam, so I will have no exams during Finals week this semester. Whoo.

Grading is divided between an Observation Journal, 5 assignments, a review essay, and two tests. So again, more content but less intensity per assignment. We already got our first assignment, which is to take two pieces of art at least 200 years apart from one another with no obvious connection and connect them. Instructor says it took him 15 minutes on Google to come up with his sample assignment, but I don't know. Sounds kind of challenging.

Our Art and Society instructor says that his other class is teaching poetry to engineers. Probably a breadth requirement hosted in their main building. That sounds amazing. I'm almost jealous I can't be in the engineering poetry course. He did a thing where he asked us what art is and we listed off something like "Creativity, expression, subjective" etc. Then he pulled up two examples of definitions, one developed by his social work students, and one by his engineering students. The typical social work students reflected us fairly accurately, while the engineers listed "Paintings, theatre, music, poetry" and other more technical answers.

It's kind of interesting to see how this semester's courses connect with last semester's. In East Asia, there was some overlap with Russia, and now I'm studying Russia. Social Psychology is right on the edge between Psychology and Sociology and I took Sociology last semester. And then Art and Society is about the philosophy and history of art, and I studied the application of art last semester.

I went to get a calendar this year and found out that Calendar Club has shut down at my local mall. I had long speculated that a shop specializing in calendars could not survive, as its relevance was limited to only a month or two per year. They had other stuff, like board games, but I felt they needed to rebrand. But weirdly, Calendar Club chose calendar month to call it quits. So I was reduced to purchasing a Lang-brand calandar at some place called Bonkers. It's.... okay. I got something called Beyond the Woods, which is art depicting weather and wildlife in its respective state for each month of the year.

I've been getting calendars that have art depictions of the natural state of each month over the past few years. Last year I got Raffi's Toronto, which was monthly depictions of Toronto by some cool artist named Raffi. Before that, it was a seasonal conglomeration of the Group of Seven.

But this year, I have to settle for Lang's  mediocre collection. There was another seasonal-focused calendar, but July depicted some guy in a speedo jumping into a lake and I'm not going to look at that for a full month. They did have one called Proud Rooster, that I was tempted by. It was just some rooster, and each month he's strutting with some seasonal colours and patterns in the background. It seemed a bit simplistic and I almost felt like I was missing out on an in-joke, so I didn't get it, but I kind of wish I did. Probably more memorable than this super basic seasonal wildlife calendar I got.

Over the past while, we have been caught in something called a Polar Vortex. Simply put, it means that we are getting incredibly cold weather even by Canadian standards during the coldest time of the year. It's not normal Canadian weather, it's like a cold-storm. Weirdly, we also got hit by some  warm air crawl from the states, so we went from having record-breaking cold weather one day, to nearly summer weather the next, melting everything away, and then back to record-breaking cold. I watched the rain turn back to snow as the warm crawl left and the polar vortex overtook again. People around here are in near-disbelief over the strange weather.

They turned the basketball court near where I lived into a skating rink. Pretty innovative, I feel.