Art Ed 4900/6900

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Art Ed 4900/6900

• Raymond Veon, Instructor
• artrev_at_langate.gsu.edu
• rveon_at_atlanta.k12.ga.us
• www.igniteart.weebly.com
• 404-271-0152

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Aesthetic Experience

• The term aesthetic is a moving target it is
  used in many ways and there is no final agreement
  on what it means among art professionals. We
  shall attempt to define it in a broadly
  inclusive, clear, and educationally useful way.

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Small Group Discussion and Sharing

• What is aesthetics?
• What is your personal aesthetic?
• What is Postmodernism?
• Is it an aesthetic theory?
• What is art? (Write individually and share)
• List some criteria

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Art?
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• Well be exploring many ideas and approaches in
  this class
• Some will conflict
• Your job will be to figure out where you stand
  while learning multiple approaches that, when
  implemented in the classroom, will result in
  student achievement

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Why are these people naked?
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Are these artworks original?
Are these artworks creative?
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Speculate

1. The Naturalistic Interest
2. The Pragmatic or Instrumental Interest
3. The Formalistic Interest
4. The Postmodern Interest
5. The Intellectual or Cognitive Interest

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1. The Naturalistic Interest
2. Art as a mirror or window through which we look
   at a copy, reflection, or transformation of the
   world
3. The Pragmatic or Instrumental Interest
4. Art as an instrument or tool for something
   non-artistic
5. The Formalistic Interest
6. Art as autonomous creation without referent to
   the real world
7. The Postmodern Interest
8. Art as purely contextual sign, essentially
   linguistic, and typically an instrument of
   ideologyamong other things
9. The Intellectual or Cognitive Interest
10. The arts as the creation (not reflection) of
    knowledge and intellect

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• The Naturalistic Interest
• Art as a mirror or window through which we look
  at a copy, reflection, or transformation of the
  world
• Realism The arts as a reflection of the actual
  world
• Idealism The arts as a reflection of an ideal
  world
• Perfectionist Idealism
• Anti-Idealism
• Normative Idealism
• Metaphysical Idealism
• Fictive/Imaginative The arts as reflecting
  imaginative actuality or the unachievable ideal

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• The Pragmatic or Instrumental Interest
• The arts as an instrument of
• of education or improvement
• of religious or moral indoctrination
• of expression or the communication of expression

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• The Postmodern Interest
• The arts as purely contextual, an ever-changing
  sign without a stable referent, instrumental
  role, or formal purpose
• The visual in service of the essentially
  linguistic
• Art as always the instrument of ideology
• Etc.
• The Intellectual or Cognitive Interest
• The arts as the creation (not reflection) of
  knowledge and intellect

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Back to the Greeks

• What do we typically mean when we use the term
  Classical or Ancient Greek Art?
• Need to understand Naturalism if we are to
  understand Modernism and Postmodernism
• The Naturalistic Interest (or Naturalistic Theory
  of Art and Aesthetics) Art as a mirror or window
  through which we look at a copy, reflection, or
  transformation of the world

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• It is inherent and central to the naturalistic
  outlook/interest that attention is diverted from
  the work of art itself to what it representswe
  do not see a beautiful statue but a beautiful
  body skillfully imitatedattention is deflected
  as through a glass window to an image that
  reflects the actual world in some way

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• 6th-4th Century bce First time a cycle of
  techniques developed to produce convincing
  facsimiles of the visible appearance of things
  instead of the forms/characteristics that they
  were known to have
• Convincing foreshortening and perspective
  techniques on vase painting
• Brunelleschi and Alberti rediscovered linear
  perspective Vitruvius (1st c. bce) talks of the
  correspondence of all lines to the vanishing
  point, as does Agatharcus in the 5th c. bce but
  they never quite mastered its practice as did
  Brunelleschi and Alberti

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Canon of Polyclitus

• Chrysippos holds beauty to consist not in the
  commensurability or "symmetria" ie proportions
  of the constituent elements of the body, but in
  the commensurability of the parts, such as that
  of finger to finger, and of all the fingers to
  the palm and wrist, and of those to the forearm,
  and of the forearm to the upper arm, and in fact,
  of everything to everything else, just as it is
  written in the Canon of Polyclitus. For having
  taught us in that work all the proportions of the
  body, Polyclitus supported his treatise with a
  work he made a statue according to the tenets of
  his treatise, and called the statue, like the
  work, the 'Canon.
• -Galen

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The Canon vs. OriginalityImportant distinction
in art and aesthetic theory
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Aesthetic Experience

• Modern aesthetic trend beauty is the quality in
  an object which enables it to arouse and sustain
  non-theoretical contemplation in an attitude of
  direct awareness.
• Why is this particularly modern?

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Share What can you tell About Ancient Egyptian
Art?
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Conceptual vs." Naturalistic

• Egyptian, Mesopotamian vs. Classical Greek Art
• Egyptian art not conceptual in the contemporary
  sense
• Egyptian mortuary art a magical surrogate for
  reality to be used in the afterlifea rational
  ideal of truth independent of time/space (ideas
  that influenced Plato)

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Ancient Egyptian Art

• Conceptual in that they represented what they saw
  as objectively true forms beyond sense
  perceptions
• The last thing they wanted was to reproduce the
  accidental and changing appearance of things
• The last thing they wanted This leads to a
  working definition of aesthetics

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Aesthetics A working definition

• Aesthetics consists of the ideas and ideals
  (values, aspirations) of a culture, group, or
  movement that are embodied in their definition,
  use, or making of art
• The Canon vs. Originalitydifferent values
• Similarly, a personal aesthetic consists of the
  ideas and ideals of an individual as they
  influence or are expressed through their art
  making or worldview

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• Plato objected to perspectival distortions used
  for monumental sculpture to make them look
  correct from far below because this was about how
  things look to the sensesnot how they
  metaphysically are
• Like the Egyptians, he was interested in the
  unchangingnot the perceptual, which always
  changes
• Plato Views not typical of Greek aesthetic
  thought
• Egyptian art literally figure writing
• Signs whose meaning is to be read, not
  something that reflects or refers to what we see
  in everyday reality.
• Note Signs/symbols will become important
  Postmodernism

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Naturalism of Classical Greek Art

• Revolutionary for its time
• Greek naturalism important because it determined
  main course of European art from antiquity up to
  20th century
• Gombrich The Greek Miracle (His famous book
  reflects naturalism in its title, Art and
  Illusion)
• Other historians naturalism is the exception
  rather than the rule (As we shall see when we
  look at instrumentalism and Chinese art
  aesthetics)

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Other periods/cultures also had a naturalistic
interest, sometimes combined with an instrumental
outlook Mochica in pre-Columbian art
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The Grand Theory

• Lasted 2,500 yearsup to the present
• THE tests of art in the Western World
• Fidelity to nature
• The artists power to create illusive imitations
  of nature, i.e. the artists skills in making it
  appear to be not what it is but the reality of
  what it represents
• To what extent do you plan on assessing students
  according to the Grand Theory? (i.e. try to see
  yourself in the overarching aesthetic views that
  shape us)
• To what extent can you JUSTIFY doing this by
  proving it is educationally valuable?
• For your journal/notebook
• What are the criteria you will use to judge
  student accomplishment? Where do these criteria
  come from and how do they assure student
  achievement?

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Aesthetics of the Average Greek

• Aesthetic naturalism is reflected vividly in
  folktales and stories about what the average
  educated man expected artworks to be like, what
  standards he applied, and what qualities he
  admired in artists
• Parrhasius painted a heavily armed soldier in a
  race so realistically that he seemed to sweat as
  he ran
• Zuexis painted a boy carrying grapes so real that
  birds tried to eat them
• Zuexis felt this was a failure if he had painted
  the boy as realistically as the grapes, the birds
  would have been too scared!
• The mythical Deadulus was the first to make a
  statue with open eyes it seemed so real that
  they had to tie it by the foot to keep it from
  running away

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Value of these Legends

• Significance of these stories Indicate new
  standards of judgment and new ways of looking at
  graphic art
• Accepted attitudes and beliefs, the raw material
  of inarticulate philosophy, are reflected in
  these legends and stories
• What do art philosophers and critics do to this
  raw material that makes it different?
• A well reasoned, consistent framework in which
  the major terms are well defined, areas of
  ambiguity/vagueness are identified, empirical,
  conceptual, and normative statements are
  distinguished

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• Value placed on the meticulous accuracy of detail
• Ancients admired anything in the nature of a
  visual tour de force

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The Renaissance

• In Renaissance, accuracy again became commonplace
  of appreciationwith similar anecdotes and
  folktales
• Giotto painted a fly on the nose of a portrait so
  realistically his teacher, Cimabue, tried to swat
  it away
• Giotto stood out because of his talent and
  because he drew from life
• In his day, Giotto was hailed as the greatest
  painter who ever lived and who brought the art of
  painting back to the true path that had been lost
  since antiquitythen, using the same standard,
  this honor was given to Masaccio, then
  Botticelli, then Leonardo, then Raphael

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How are they different? What does this mean?
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• To us it seems incomprehensiblebut this is
  because of the filters and millennia of artwork
  we have at our disposal. Greek artists and Giotto
  do not seem strikingly illusionistic to usbut
  did so at the time. WHY?
• We admire Giottos work for other aesthetic
  qualities WHAT ARE THEY??

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Techne

• The Greeks did not distinguish between what we
  call art and other kinds of making thingstechne,
  or human planned production, covered them all and
  had to do with the idea of teleology
• In the 21st century, we conceive the mind to be
  active. We actively expand our understanding of
  the world to control our lives.
• The Greeks lacked our attitude that the future
  is wide open and yet to be written instead,
  they tended to believe that nature had immanent,
  predetermined ends, and that the best that humans
  could do was help nature achieve those ends.

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The Greek Mindset

• So, for the Greeks, Human planned production or
  techne was an instance of nature at work, an
  example of a natural process enlightened by the
  rationality of nature become explicit in human
  understanding.
• We, as humans, operate within a closed,
  teleological system that has rational,
  predetermined ends (Aristotle). The pinnacle of
  mental and artistic prowess is not to break free
  of these constraints, since this would have no
  meaning for the Greeks, but to align ourselves in
  such a way as to embody and further these
  endsthis requires that we investigate external
  nature.
• The natural world is already perfect, even as the
  perfection of the oak is already present in the
  acorn the only active help required from us,
  in any help was required at all, is to fertilize
  it. Today, in contrast, we dont stop at just
  fertilizing, but actively manipulate the genetic
  code to suit our own ends.

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Naturalism and the Depiction of Emotion

• In Ancient Greek art, the representation of
  emotion or character by direct visual imagery
  instead of symbolically by traditional convention
  (as in Egyptian art) was innovative and novelthe
  Greeks called this the imitation of the soul.
• It was held that people experienced pleasure when
  they see the inner workings of the
  mind/character/passions represented in
  artworks.this attitude staged a comeback in the
  Renaissance

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Naturalism and the Depiction of Emotion

• Leonardo filled innumerable notebooks with
  physical manifestations of emotion drawn from
  life, studied gesture and facial expressions of
  the mute who he thoughts had more vivid
  expressions than those who can talk

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• Representation of the physical signs of emotion
  systematized by the Academiesalso in the theater
  of Shakespeares day
• Charles le Brun, A Method to Learn to Design the
  Passions (1667)French Academy
• Darwin The Expression of the Emotions of Man and
  Animals
• Now doubtful the extent to which facial
  expression can communicate emotion universally
  and unambiguouslybut see Daniel Pinkthe issue
  is still with us

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• Naturalist impulse or interest was a main impetus
  for the technical developments in the art of
  Classical Greece
• This shows a direct, practical connection between
  the large, overarching, or deep aesthetic
  interests of a culture and what they do in their
  art.
• What is the main aesthetic impetus for
  developments in art today???

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Detour How to think about layers of aesthetic
depth

• Litany Legends, folktales, and Average Joes
  response to art
• Systemic/Disciplinary Art Critic, Aesthetician
• Worldview Deep cultural beliefs that influence
  what can and can not be conceived or valued
  (Naturalism, Instrumentalism)
• Myth and Metaphor Even deeper archetypes,
  perhaps some of which are hardwired into us
• The Hero's Journey
• Sherlock HolmesAction Hero?

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Critical Criteria of Naturalism

• Value placed on subject that is depicted (Is the
  woman pretty? Is the story moral?)
• Correctness in comparison to actual world
• Artistic skill in imitating
• Within naturalism, the only criterion we have of
  assessing the artwork itself as distinct from
  what it imitates is Platos standard of
  correctness and the craftsmanly skill of the
  artist.

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• From the Greeks Homer to our own Winslow Homer
  naturalism has cultivated a tendency to describe
  and respond to the subject rather than artwork
  itself
• HBO Special on Winslow Homer Why would someone
  paint a dead fish? Kids and parents respond
  naturalistically
• 2,500 years, artists are still responding to this
  tendencyeven in the present day

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• As an art teacher, you will have to contend with
  naturalism on a daily basis you will have think
  about it in planning lessons, in art advocacy,
  and in working with administrators and
  understanding their expectations
• Provide examples of each
• Are their ways in which the naturalistic
  aesthetic attitude could be a hindrance?

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Story Telling and Aesthetic Development

• As we shall see, finding and speculating about
  the story going on in an artwork is a powerful
  tool for developing aesthetic literacy and
  cognitive skills
• Central to Visual Thinking Strategies