Dr. Arthur Pontynen - History of Art

Although Arthur Pontynen was trained as a specialist in East Asian art and culture, the focus of his academic research research and teaching centers on a cosmopolitan but now commonly neglected choice. We can either seek a violent aestheticism in our lives, or we can seek truth, goodness, and beauty. In the face of a dominant yet failed Modernist-Postmodernist ideology today so common in the academy, Dr. Pontynen advocates development of the critical language by which we can pursue the truth. The conflict between relativism and the pursuit of truth is developed in Dr. Pontynen's “For the Love of Beauty: Art, History,” and the “Moral Foundations of Aesthetic Judgment” (Transaction Publishers, 2006).