Why do we need art?
• Art has played an important part in our search
for the meaning of the human experience
• People create rituals to connect with unseen
powers and with the past and the future.
• Works of art (statues, masks, chalices) are
used in rituals
• Visual arts are sophisticated forms of human
communication
A work of art has two components:
• Form (line, color, texture, spatial attributes,
etc.)
• Content - aspects that impart meaning
(subject matter, representational and
nonrepresentational art, the ideas contained in a
work, the context in which the work was created,
the intention of the artist, the reception of the
work by the audience, the meanings of the work
to both artist and audience)
Cubi XIX
David Smith, 1964
example of nonrepresentational art
A work of art is also described and
categorized according to style and
medium
• Style – the combination of form
and content that makes a work
distinctive (ex. French Baroque vs.
Roman Baroque)
• Medium – the material(s) from
which an object is made
What is Beauty?
• Something that brings pleasure to the senses
or to the mind or to the spirit.
• We can learn about the cultures and values of
various peoples from the way they have
represented beauty.
Realistic or naturalistic styles of beauty
The
Annunciation
Jan van Eyck, c.
1434-36.
Shows the
relationship
between the Old
Testament and the
New
Triple windows
symbolize the
Trinity
Abstraction – the transformation of
visible forms into patterns that suggest
the original
• Abstraction through idealization –
artists represent beauty not as it
is but as they think it should be.
Large Plane Trees
Vincent van Gogh, 1889
How to interpret van Gogh’s work?
• Art historians use Freud’s work to suggest that
despite its light, bright colors, there is
something ominous in the uneasy relationship
between the looming trees and the tiny
people
How might Marxist art critics view this
work?
Humanity’s over-concern with material
values
• Van Gogh never achieved material success
• The painting didn’t sell in the nineteenthcentury, but now it is worth millions of dollars,
so it has become a status symbol of the
wealthy elite.
• The workers toiling away to repair the street,
underneath the gigantic trees (multinational
corporations?)
Bergen-Belsen
female guards
are being
guarded by
British soldiers
Irma Grese
Youngest and
most hated of
the female
guards
Herta Bothe
Bothe looks haggard and has dark
circles under her eyes after working
for weeks in the camp to bury around
17,000 corpses …
Herta Bothe is well known because of
her defiant attitude and her show of
anger when the women were ordered
by the British to carry the rotten
corpses to mass graves with their bare
hands. In interviews years later, Bothe
described how she was terrified of
contracting typhus because the guards
were not allowed to wear gloves or
masks.
http://www.scrapbookpages.com/berg
enbelsen/BergenBelsen08.html
Calvin Klein
ads
Women and men
as sex objects
Lara Stone
Sean Opry
Conveying Atrocity in Image
• Kim Phuc
• Vietnam
• June 8, 1972
Kim Phuc today
Married, two children, Canadian
citizen
Pbs.org