Lesson Two

1
Lesson Two What is Art?

• FYS 100 Creative Discovery in Digital Art Forms

2
FORM AND BEAUTY

• One must not always think that feeling is
  everything. Art is nothing without form.
• Letter to Madame Louise Colet August 12, 1846,
• Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880)
•  

3
FORM AND BEAUTY

• Art should be independent of all claptrapshould
  stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of
  eye and ear, without confounding this with
  emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion,
  pity, love, patriotism, and the like. All these
  have no kind of concern with it.
• The Gentle Art of Making Enemies 1890,
  Propositions, 2,
• James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903)

4
FORM AND BEAUTY

• True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
• As those move easiest who have learned to dance.
• Tis not enough no harshness gives offense
• The sound must seem an echo to the sense.
• An Essay on Criticism 1711, pt. I, l. 162,
• Alexander Pope (1688-1744)

5
FORM AND BEAUTY

• a momentary stay against confusion
• The Figure A Poem Makes 1939, Robert Frost
  (1874-1963)

6
UNIQUE, INDIVIDUAL, AND CREATIVE

• There is no science of the beautiful, only a
  critique of it.
• Critique of Judgement 1790, Immanual Kant
  (1724-1804)

7
UNIQUE, INDIVIDUAL, AND CREATIVE

• Art is a uniquely human activity that grows out
  of our inborn impulse to create.
• We create things that have no utilitarian
  purpose.
• All art is quite useless.
• The Critic as Artist 1891,
• Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

8
UNIQUE, INDIVIDUAL, AND CREATIVE

• Individuality of expression is the beginning and
  end of all art.
• Sprüche in Prosa (Proverbs in Prose),
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)

9
MORE TRUE THAN NATURE

• Aristotle believed that art is more true than
  nature in that it can express the essence of
  things.

10
A MEDIATOR BETWEEN MAN AND NATURE

• Now Art, used collectively for painting,
  sculpture, architecture and music, is the
  mediatress between, and reconciler of, nature and
  man. It is, therefore, the power of humanizing
  nature, of infusing the thoughts and passions of
  man into everything which is the object of his
  contemplation.
• On Poesy or Art 1818,
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

11
ALIGNED WITH TRUTH

• Art for arts sake is an empty phrase. Art for
  the sake of the true, art for the sake of the
  good and the beautiful, that is the faith I am
  searching for.
• Letter to Alexandre Saint-Jean 1872,
• George Sand Amandine Aurore Lucie Dupin,
  Baronne Dudevant (1804-1876)

12
ALIGNED WITH TRUTH

• Beauty is truth, truth beauty, -- that is all
• Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know!
• Ode on a Grecian Urn 1819, John Keats

13

• Beauty is truth, truth beauty, -- that is all
• Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know!
• Ode on a Grecian Urn 1819, John Keats

14
REVEALING, COMMUNICATING, AND HEIGHTENING
EXPERIENCE

• Art is a human activity consisting in this, that
  one man consciously, by means of certain external
  signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived
  through, and that other people are infected by
  these feelings and also experience them.
• What is Art? 1896,
• Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)

15
REVEALING, COMMUNICATING, AND HEIGHTENING
EXPERIENCE

• Were made so that we love
• First when we see them painted, things we have
  passed
• Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see
• And so they are better, paintedbetter to us,
• Which is the same thing. Art was given for that.
• Fra Lippo Lippi 1855, l. 300,
• Robert Browning (1812-1889)

16
REVEALING, COMMUNICATING, AND HEIGHTENING
EXPERIENCE

• Only through art can we get outside of ourselves
  and know anothers view of the universe which is
  not the same as ours and see landscapes which
  would otherwise have remained unknown to us like
  the landscapes of the moon. Thanks to art,
  instead of seeing a single world, our own, we see
  it multiply until we have before us as many
  worlds as there are original artists . . . . And
  many centuries after their core, whether we call
  it Rembrandt or Vermeer, is extinguished, they
  continue to send us their special rays.
• The Maxims of Marcel Proust 1948,
• Marcel Proust (1871-1922)

17
REVEALING, COMMUNICATING, AND HEIGHTENING
EXPERIENCE

• A novel is balanced between a few true
  impressions and the multitude of false ones that
  make up most of what we call life. It tells us
  that for every human being there is a diversity
  of existences, that the single existence is
  itself an illusion in part, that these many
  existences signify something, tend to something,
  fulfill something it promises us meaning,
  harmony, and even justice . . . . Art attempts
  to find in the universe, in matter as well as in
  the facts of life, what is fundamental, enduring,
  essential.
• Speech upon receiving the Nobel Prize 1976,
• Saul Bellow (1915- )

18
TIMELESS, ETERNAL

• Tout passe Lart robuste
• Seul a léternité
• Le buste
• Survit à la cité.
• LArt 1832,
• Théophile Gautier (1811-1872)

19
TIMELESS, ETERNAL

• Everything passesRobust art
• Alone is eternal.
• The bust
• Survives the city.
• LArt 1832,
• Théophile Gautier (1811-1872)

20
TIMELESS, ETERNAL

• All passes. Art alone
• Enduring stays to us
• The bust outlasts the throne
• The coin, Tiberius.
• Ars Victrix 1876, st. 8,
• Henry Austin Dobson (1840-1921)