Bianca's Digital Garden

Last updated Oct 10, 2023

—- title: “2023-08-16” —-

#IDS143_03 #art #history #philosophy

• What is art?
  • Form - the work itself
  • Function - artistic intent or rationale or form
  • Content - what the work says, originally
  • Context - the particular circumstance the work occupies, which may affect the other areas
• Tip: Don’t bring your baggage into interpreting a work
• Questions:
  • What do I see?
  • What is it made of?
  • What are the words used? What do they mean?
• To understand art, you need to understand history, pop culture, psychology, etc.
  • This is what makes art one of the purest expression of the humanities
• 2 broad categories
  • Plastic arts: tangible
  • Ephemeral arts: not permanent (e.g. performances)
• Three main distinctions
  • High art
    • Typically seen in museums (white cubes)
    • References more abstract ideals (e.g. feminity)
  • Pop art
    • Like the murals you seen on the street
    • They reference more common/everyday thing
  • Kitsch
    • Looks/emulates high or pop art, but specifically made for consumption
  • Something to think about: Fan art
• Aesthetics
  • A branch of philosophy concerned about the nature and understanding of beauty and taste.
  • Practically speaking, we will be talking about ideas and standards of art through the ages.
  • These can change and transform over long periods of time within the same society being studied.
  • At the same time, other cultures and groups of people from different parts of the world can have dramatically different views on the same subject.
  • Questions to think about:
    • Is it good or bad?
    • Standards that define Art
    • Art is whatever society/culture says is art
  • Watch: Shozo Kato - Way of the Sword (compares Western v.s. Eastern standards of beauty)
• Elements of Art & Design:
  • Line
  • Value (and light)
  • Color
  • Shape
  • Form (volume)
  • Texture
  • Space
  • Time and motion
• Principles of composition:
  • Balance
  • Rhythm
  • Proportion and scale
  • Emphasis
  • Unity and variety
  • Composition and design have a lot of overlaps. This video provides a good illustration of both, which complements our ideas about form.
• Materials
  • Natural
  • Synthetic
  • Found object

• 4 Basic Ways
  • Formal Analysis
    • An integrated study of all the formal qualities of an art object to see how they work together
    • An understanding of established conventions
    • Traditions deemed aesthetically satisfying
  • Reading the Context
    • An artwork’s themes or message
    • Surface Content vs Learned Content
    • Subject matter, references
  • Influence of Context
  • Human Encounter and Experience
• Content-Subject Matter
  • Subject matter - what’s it about?
  • Subtexts
  • Underlying themes and messages
• Content-Iconography
  • Visual metaphors - descriptive elements
  • Symbolic elements - culturally determined
  • Iconography - picture writing used to communicate complex ideas
• Content - Art Writings
  • Art critics, historians, curators, etc.
  • Content is never fixed
  • Five major positions/approaches:
    • Formalist
      • Importance of formal qualities
      • Content/context deemed superfluous
      • Art seen as independent from society/nature
      • Approach is seen to be too narrow
    • Ideological
      • Questions the political implications of art
      • Art in relation to knowledge, discourse, and the operations of power
      • Art is seen to carry and represent ideas that are of significance to society
    • Structuralist
      • Structuralism - social/cultural structures shaping the meaning and value of art
      • Semiotics - signs/structure of language, and the underlying biases and limitations within
      • Deconstruction - worldview is constructed (not real); this system of knowledge limit any knowledge outside of themselves
    • Psychoanalytic
      • Art as the product of individuals
      • Influenced/shaped by their own personal pasts, unconscious urges, and
    • Feminist
      • Advocates equality - social/political/economic
      • Borrows from the three previous positions
      • Body, gender, and sexuality are of importance
• Influence of Context
  • Context consists of the interrelated social and political conditions
• Human Encounter and Experience
  • The way we encounter art adds meaning to it
  • It also affects how we perceive the work
  • Art in museums — always more/less out of its original religious/historical/social environment

• What is art?
• Art is something that ==transforms the everyday.== It transfigures the ordinary.
  • There is something unexpected. There is something that isn’t quite in your ordinary experience yet it is related to your ordinary experience.
  • Related to Cognition and Estrangement in science fiction
  • art is connected to what we experience every day, but it represents some kind of transformation of the everyday, something that is not actually entirely real. It can’t be found by locating it. It requires human intervention. It is the fingerprint, if you will, of our existence in the world that has its impact on things we transform through the use of our imagination.
  • For example, music: We can identify when it starts and when it ends and we have a pretty good idea of how it is organized. Now that is totally artificial.
  • This is completely fictive. It ==doesn’t have a real place in the world==, even when we try to be realistic.
  • Go to a museum and you’ll look at a painting, a genre painting or a historical painting, which depicts a scene that you think is really quite realistic. Someone is fighting a battle. A person is looking out a window or you’re looking at a landscape which you actually perhaps have seen yourself, but ==that frame is very artificial and we allow ourselves to be caught up in the illusion of its realism.== It isn’t really out there. It isn’t real. It’s somebody’s imagination of what is real.
    • The perfect example is TV, video and film where we get caught up in a storyline that may take years and centuries. It seems real to us. The whole thing is only an hour and a half long, but it has the ==illusion of realism== and that is the ==artificial manipulation of our sensibilities== through the work of an artist.
• Art v.s. taste
  • There’s a continuum
  • Art is about the beautiful…which is subjective
  • Often pegged as something elitist
  • One of the important things about what makes a work of art is the power of the human imagination to predict something
  • Most of what we think is art is the result of people thinking about doing something and being carried away by either some plan or some intuition or some imagination
  • so the child’s finger painting is probably distinguishable from Jackson Pollock by its structure, its composition, its intent, its design.
• Art-making is distinctly human
  • From the Greeks…gods didn’t make art, but we made art about the gods
• Art as communication
  • Art is really the attempt to communicate through time and in space a work, statement, or event that has some coherence that is both connected to and estranged from everyday experience
  • It creates a vocabulary of sensibility, a vocabulary of interpretation, a vocabulary of meaning that in one sense is beyond that of language.
• Art transcends language
  • Very important about art is that it is not restricted to language. There is art in language.
  • much of art and much of the art that we care about responds to something other than the linguistic. We talk about it in language, but our experience transcends language
  • Many philosophers have argued that the visual and particularly musical reaches an individual in a different way, not through the medium of language and therefore is not entirely rational. It’s not something that we can say is right or wrong. When we say we’re moved by a work of art or that we’re inspired by a work of art we often find it hard to put that in words. of it is somehow around language. It bypasses language.
• The role of art in human life
  • The most important public art of all is architecture
  • Both a public and private endeavor
  • Art is not only the enterprise of the individual art maker; it is also about how we live our lives in the public circumstance
  • Public art lies at the intersection of communal living and private experience
• Engaging with art gives us purpose
  • Art is not merely the act of an individual who exceeds his/her boundaries of experience in ways we cannot predict
  • Art is never something that has to exist
    • E.G. Science: discovering something that is out there
    • Meanwhile, in art, what is created has no reason to exist. This is what makes art significant to the individual. It is a reminder both to the maker of the art and the audience of their uniqueness in the world
  • In the past, we thought our primary existence was for labor. Labor that could be rewarded so that we could survive
  • God was a creator. He used language to create. We also use language to create…we have the capacity to create
  • Art can be dangerous because it doesn’t follow rules; it rarely follows rules
  • The important thing about art, in both its making and its absorption, is that it requires ==engagement==.
    • We invent ourselves
  • Art allows us to create identities in a world where we can’t make a practical impact
  • We join communities for the sake of purpose….art does the same thing…we follow someone else’s imagination
  • Is there an objective scale of artistic quality?
    • Political value does not equal to truth value
• So what constitutes quality in art?
  • Taste changes with time
    • E.G. artists becoming popular post-mortem
• Art and society
  • Art has usually been an avenue of dissent…a place of last resort, the last refuge of freedom
  • Art, is in its core, a social activity. It is an activity in which individuals seek to communicate
    • Which is why it can be viewed as dangerous by political regimes
• Art as social criticism
  • Much of art in societies is patronized by wealthy individuals
  • Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “Art allows us to be complacent with injustice”
  • Not clear that art is constructive, always about freedom, indivuduality, etc.
    • The values it puts forward aren’t always defensible
  • At the core of this question: “Is there a relationship between what art does and the good?”
• Is art inherently good?
  • Leo Tolstoy: “Beauty isn’t the issue; it’s the problem”
    • Tolstoy: Art should emphasize that we all the same in God’s eyes
    • But he was also suspicious of individuality, and in turn art
  • The performing arts cannot be standardized. The work (of music, theatre, dance, etc.) is in its ==presence==
  • The more sophisticated our society becomes, the more instruments of diffrentiation that we accumulate
    • Art recognizes our interdependence and equality
  • Art redeems the sanctity of the individual
    • When you deepen the sanctity of life, you create some potential of resistance
  • The making of art is an exceptional reflection of ambition and courage
• Ars longa vita brevis
  • The impulse to create art….is worthy of study
  • When you’re studying art, don’t just do it passively (e.g. art history). Take up a craft yourself
  • The most important thing about art is the capacity of the human to make it

• Now that we have laid the foundations of our approach regarding our inquiry and exploration of art, we can move on to a more elaborate example.
• The following material below outlines for us the long and rich history of gold as an artistic element employed throughout the ages.
• Try to apply what you have learned so far in understanding its use, significance, symbolism, and legacy in relation to art and history.
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkLn_4xBaMk

• We’ve often used gold to revere the things we’ve found most sacred (e.g. royalty)
• We first fell in love with gold because of how it looked…it reminded us of the sun
• Ancient Egyptians had tons of access to gold because of their territory
• Original: fine threads

Our journey continues with an introduction to the notion of the classical ideal, and culminates with the decline of the Roman empire. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgWno9NMGks

• The human form and mind attain to a perfection in Greece
• They created personal museums for idealizing values like reason, liberty, and justice