NSW Year 11 Visual Arts Vocabulary

Vocabulary flashcards covering core terminology, frames, and conceptual framework definitions for Stage 6 Visual Arts.

Agencies of the artworld

The four elements of the conceptual framework: artist, artwork, world and audience.

Appropriation

Borrowing an existing image or idea and placing it in a new context, changing its meaning.

Art criticism

The practice of describing, analysing, interpreting and judging artworks, usually contemporary, for a public audience.

Art history

The practice of situating artworks in relation to time, place, culture and other artworks, and constructing accounts of their development.

Artmaking practice

The way an artist works, comprising material practice and conceptual practice.

Artworld

The network of galleries, museums, dealers, curators, critics, collectors, institutions and prizes through which art circulates and gains value.

Body of Work

The collection of artworks submitted for external assessment in the HSC course.

Canon

The set of artworks and artists traditionally treated as the most important; a construction that the postmodern frame examines critically.

Case study

An in-depth investigation of an artist, artwork, movement, critic, historian or idea, accounting for practice, the conceptual framework and the frames.

Chiaroscuro

The strong contrast of light and dark, used to model form and create drama.

Code

The shared system of understanding that allows an audience to correctly decode a sign.

Conceptual framework

A model of the artworld as a network of relationships between artist, artwork, world and audience.

Conceptual practice

The ideas, intentions, beliefs, research and meanings that drive an artist's work.

Contemporary audience

The audience encountering an artwork now, as distinct from the audience of its own time.

Convention

An established way of doing things within a medium, genre or field.

Cultural frame

An interpretive position through which meaning is understood in relation to cultural and social context: class, race, gender, politics, religion, economics, technology.

Expressive form

The category of artwork a piece belongs to; twelve are recognised for HSC submission.

Focal point

The area of a composition to which the viewer's attention is primarily directed.

Frames

Four interpretive positions (subjective, cultural, structural, postmodern) through which artworks and practices can be understood.

Genre

A category of subject matter, such as portraiture, landscape, still life, or history painting.

High culture / popular culture

A hierarchical distinction between art regarded as serious and refined and the products of mass culture; postmodernism collapses this distinction.

Humanism

The Renaissance emphasis on humankind and nature, replacing the God-centred focus of medieval art.

Hybridity

The mixing of forms, media, styles or cultural sources in a single work.

Iconography

The study of the subject matter and symbolic content of images.

Intended audience

The audience an artwork was made for, which may differ sharply from later audiences.

Intertextuality

The idea that texts derive meaning from their relationship to other texts rather than from an individual author or from the world.

Irony

A device in which the apparent meaning is the opposite of the intended meaning.

Material practice

The physical and technical side of artmaking: materials, tools, techniques, processes, scale and expressive form.

Modernism

A movement grounded in idealism, belief in progress, formal experimentation, and the search for universal truths; the position postmodernism reacts against.

Motif

A recurring element or image within an artwork or across a practice.

Parody

A humorous or satirical imitation of something serious, usually making a statement about the source.

Pastiche

A work built from motifs borrowed from one or more artists or works, imitating a style without making a critical statement about it.

Postmodern frame

An interpretive position that challenges traditional conventions, canons, values and histories of art, and treats artworks as texts that reconfigure other texts.

Practice

The way artists, critics and historians work and think; one of the three syllabus concepts.

Readymade

An ordinary manufactured object selected and designated as art, associated with Duchamp.

Representation

The way an artwork stands for or depicts something in the world; also the artist's chosen mode of depicting it.

Satire

The use of irony, sarcasm or ridicule to expose something as foolish or corrupt.

Semiotics

The study of signs and how meaning is constructed and communicated.

Sign

Something that stands for something else.

Simulacrum

A copy without an original; an image that refers only to other images.

Structural frame

An interpretive position through which art is understood as a visual language: a system of signs and symbols read by artists and audiences.

Subjective frame

An interpretive position through which meaning is understood in relation to personal and psychological experience: emotion, imagination, memory, intuition and the subconscious.

Symbol

A sign whose meaning is established by convention and must be learned.

Visual language

The way meaning is communicated in an artwork through its visual qualities and through signs, symbols and codes.

VAPD

Visual Arts Process Diary; the mandatory record of ideas, research, experimentation, reflection and development in artmaking.

World

Both the time and place in which an artist, artwork and audience exist, including the ideas of that time, and the institutional artworld.