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What is art? Adapted from: Sylvain Barnet’s A Short guide to writing about art, 10 th ed.

What is art? Adapted from: Sylvain Barnet’s A Short guide to writing about art, 10 th ed. Art is culturally significant meaning, skillfully encoded in an affecting sensuous medium. (Richard L. Anderson) Art is the objectification of feeling. (Suzanne K. Langer)

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What is art? Adapted from: Sylvain Barnet’s A Short guide to writing about art, 10 th ed.

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  1. What is art?Adapted from: Sylvain Barnet’s A Short guide to writing about art, 10th ed.

  2. Art is culturally significant meaning, skillfully encoded in an affecting sensuous medium. (Richard L. Anderson) • Art is the objectification of feeling. (Suzanne K. Langer) • Isn’t it a man’s name? (Andy Warhol, responding to the question, “What is art?”

  3. Ordinary viewers of today, hoping for coherence and beauty in their imaginative experiences, confront instead works of art declared to exist in arrangements of bare texts and unremarkable photographs, in industrial fabrications revealing no evidence of the artist’s hand, in mundane commercial products merely transferred from shopping mall to gallery, or in ephemeral and confrontational performances in which mainstream moral values are deliberately travestied. (Thomas Crow, The Rise of the Sixties: American and European Art in the Era of Dissent 1955-1969 (1996), 7 as cited in Barnet)

  4. Perhaps we can say that art is anything that is said to be art by people who ought to know? But who are these people? Teachers? Historians? Artists? • Is Tracey Moffatt’s video of surfers in a parking lot changing into swimwear, shielded by towels, art? (Heaven, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQAYBzgvS6E) • Are Mona Hatoum’s videos of the inside of her body art? (Foreign Body, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qsci0WAd_Lk) • Is video art? • Why do you think on September 10, 2007 some 1,700 people paid to see ten motorcyclists ride for seven minutes over plywood panels, leaving track-marks? (The performance was the idea of Aaron Young, a conceptual artist)

  5. This idea that something – anything at all - is art if artists and the public (or a significant part of the public, “the art world”) say it is art, it is called the Institutional Theory of art. • Philosophically speaking, in this view artworks do not possess properties (let’s say “beauty or truth”) that are independent of their historical and cultural situations; they are artworks because people in certain institutions that are called the art world (museums, universities, art galleries, publishing houses, government bureaus, etc.) interpret them as artworks.

  6. So is art what artists do?

  7. Fountain (1950) by Marcel Duchamp (1887 – 1968)Downloaded from : http://www.google.ca/imgres?q=fountain+duchamp&num=10&um=1&hl=en&biw=1280&bih=644&tbm=isch&tbnid=to7XdinAv632lM:&imgrefurl=http://www.sfmoma.org/explore/collection/artwork/25853&d on June 13, 1013

  8. Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970)Downloaded from: http://www.google.ca/imgres?q=spiral+jetty+robert+smithson&um=1&hl=en&biw=1280&bih=644&tbm=isch&tbnid=9rUeJG5w1UVSpM:&imgrefurl=http://jessbens.wordpress.com/2011/06/16/robert-smithson-spiral-jett on June 13, 2013

  9. Why Write About Art?

  10. We write about art in order to clarify and to account for our responses to works that interest or excite or frustrate us. • Picasso said, “to know what you want to draw, you have to begin drawing”; similarly, writing is a way of finding what you want to write, a way of learning. • To respond sensitively to anything and then to communicate responses, we must possess: • some understanding of the thing and • some skill at conveying responses into words

  11. Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait with Saskia, 1635-39 Downloaded from: http://www.google.ca/imgres?q=rembrandt+self+portrait+with+saskia&um=1&hl=en&sa=N&biw=1280&bih=687&tbm=isch&tbnid=myqPAQDgXAtJwM:&imgrefurl=http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/rembrandt/self/&docid=pYc12UA_B on June 13, 2013

  12. Whistler’s Arrangement in Black and Grey: The Artist’s Mother. 1871Downloaded from: http://www.google.ca/imgres?q=arrangement+in+black+and+gray+the+artist%27s+mother&um=1&hl=en&biw=1280&bih=644&tbm=isch&tbnid=VlVlQ7GhuxE4pM:&imgrefurl=http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/whistler on June 13, 2013

  13. Work on the handout on critical writing: Barnet, 10-21

  14. What is interpretation – and are all interpretations valid? • An interpretation sees the work of art as representing something, or expressing something, or doing something. In short, an interpretation tries to make sense of a work of art by setting forth its meanings: the meaning it had for the artist the meaning(s) it had for its first audience the meaning(s) it had for later audiences, and the meaning(s) it has for you today.

  15. Michelangelo’s David. 1503

  16. A picture is not thought out and settled beforehand. While it is being done it changes as one’s thoughts change. And when it is finished, it still goes on changing, according to the state of mind of whoever is looking at it. A picture lives a life like a living creature, undergoing the changes imposed on us by our life from day to day. This is natural enough, as the picture lives only through the man who is looking at it. (Conversation with Christian Servos, 1935, reprinted in Picasso on Art, ed. Dore Ashton (1972), 8 and cited in Barnet’s A Short Guide to Writing about Art, 2011)

  17. Artists’ intentions and viewers’ perception: what not to say in your essay • Do not say the following: “The designers of the stained glass windows at Chartres were trying to show us…” “Mary Cassatt in this print is aiming for…” “In his most recent photographs Hiroshi Sugimoto seeks to convey…”

  18. how to look at a painting: traditional criteria • Composition • Movement • Unity and balance • Color and light / dark contrast • Mood NB: for more details see the following handout: Introduction: How to Look at a Painting (excerpted from Strickland, Carol. The Annotated Mona Lisa. A Crash Course in Art History from Prehistoric to Post-Modern. Kansas City: Andrews McMeel Publishing, LLC, 2007. Print)

  19. Géricault, “the raft of the medusa,” 1818-19downloaded from: http://www.google.ca/imgres?q=the+raft+of+the+medusa+gericault&hl=en&biw=1280&bih=687&gbv=2&tbm=isch&tbnid=SiIRKb7K14ozSM:&imgrefurl=http://www.ownapainting.com/the-r on june 13, 2012 Traditional criteria • Composition • Movement • Unity and balance • Color and light/dark contrast • Mood

  20. COMPOSITION Two overlapping triangles (the left one, defined by the mast and the two ropes, includes the dead and dying; the right one, whose peak is the standing man waving a shirt, is composed of dynamic figures, with arms outstretched to indicate their surging hope)

  21. MOVEMENT The impression of motion is created through contrasting the postures of the figures. The effect of surging upward from the prone figures at lower left to the upper right is created by the concentration of sitting and reaching figures. The waving man at the peak of the right triangle is the climax of this mood of rising hope and advancing motion.

  22. UNITY AND BALANCE To prevent the two triangles – one of despair, the other of hope – from splitting the picture into unrelated halves, G. overlaps the triangles, with transitional figures appearing in both. An arm cuts across the rope (the strongest line of the left triangle) to point to the peak of the main triangle and unify the two halves.

  23. COLOR AND LIGHT/DARK CONTRAST Menacing mood (the storm clouds, cresting dark waves) The bright point (the horizon where the rescue ship is located = a beacon of salvation) The extreme light/dark contrasts imply the alternating emotions of hope and hopelessness

  24. MOOD A mood of turbulence (jumbled lines of the writhing bodies; the theme of titanic struggle against the elements)

  25. Works Cited • Barnet, Sylvan. A Short Guide to Writing about Art. 10th ed. Boston: Pearson, 2011. Print • Strickland, Carol. The Annotated Mona Lisa. A Crash Course in Art History from Prehistoric to Post-Modern. Kansas City: Andrews McMeel Publishing, LLC, 2007. Print

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