ARTAPP1: Lesson 1

INTRODUCTION TO ART APPRECIATION

When one enjoys a work of art, understands it, and finds meaning in it, he or she is engaged in art appreciation. Appreciating art can range from a simple act like listening to popular music or watching a good movie, to a much more complicated act, especially when dealing with timeless pieces of art, like analyzing Picasso’s or Monet’s paintings, listening to Mozart’s Concertos, or evaluating the Byzantine architectures and their relevance in history.

Art appreciation as a course is very important as it gives a view of how these artworks were created, for what purpose they were created, what they mean to a particular audience, and what is their relevance to the student of the arts. Furthermore, the course equips the students with knowledge and theories as well as builds their skills while engaging in analyzing, evaluating, and criticizing a particular work of art, leading to a deeper understanding and appreciation of the arts.

- The Authors

A. DEFINING ART

There is not a single definition of the word art. Famous personalities in history including scholars, artists, and philosophers gave different perspectives about the arts hoping to capture its essence in a single definition that is worth studying. According to Britannica Encyclopedia, art is something that is created with imagination and skill and that is beautiful or that expresses important ideas or feelings. With this definition of art, we assume that the creation of the artist, to be considered art, must exude beauty. However, “beauty” can be subjective and relative. What others see as beautiful may not be the same as the next person. So what is the definition of art then?

Originally, the term “art” is related to the Latin word “ars” meaning, art, skill, or craft. The first known use of the word comes from 13th-century manuscripts. However, the word art and its many variants (artem, eart, etc.) have probably existed since the founding of Rome (Marder, 2019). Therefore, it is safe to say that art is both the process of producing something skillfully and the product of artists’ imagination and creativity.

B. ARTISTS AND THEIR DEFINITIONS OF ART (Marder, 2019)

The following are definitions of the art coming from famous artists perspectives, influenced by their own backgrounds.

1. Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist. -Rene Magritte

2. Art is a discovery and development of elementary principles of nature into beautiful forms suitable for human use. - Frank Lloyd Wright

3. Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time. - Thomas Merton

4. The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls. - Pablo Picasso

5. All art is but imitation of nature. - Lucius Annaeus Seneca

6. Art is not what you see, but what you make others see. - Edgar Degas

7. Art is the signature of civilizations. - Jean Sibelius

8. 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 others are infected by these feelings and also experience them. - Leo Tolstoy

C. ART APPRECIATION

The word appreciate is defined by Merriam Webster Dictionary as - grasping the nature, worth, quality, or significance of something. Therefore, when a person appreciates a work of art, it means that he or she understands the nature and meaning of the work of art, thereby giving it value.

Moreover, Deborah Gustlin & Zoe Gustlin states that art appreciation centers on the ability to view art throughout history, focusing on the cultures and the people, and how art developed in specific periods. It is difficult to understand art without understanding the culture, its use of materials, and a sense of beauty. Art is conveyed by the simple act of creating art for art's sake. Every person is born with the innate desire to create art, and similar to other professions, training is essential in honing skills to produce art. Art education broadens a person's comprehension, development, and visions of art. Art brings an understanding of diversity, how people lived in the past, and connects the issues concerning contemporary life and art today (Gustlin and Gustlin, 2021).

D. CREATIVITY AND IMAGINATION IN THE CREATION OF ART

Creativity and imagination are always tied to the production of the arts. Man’s yearning to experience and explore new things in life fuels his imagination to create something that has never existed before. To further understand creativity and imagination as important ingredients to the creation of art, let us define each.

Richard Foster, a lecturer in management at Yale SOM and emeritus director of McKinsey & Company, has made a study of creativity, both its history and the process itself. He differentiates creativity both from innovation and discovery, which often are used as synonyms. Only creativity, he says, is about making something new, rather than merely applying or discovering something new. “Creative solutions are insightful, they’re novel, they’re simple, they’re elegant, and they’re generative,” he says. “When you find one creative idea, more often than not it triggers other ideas in the same fashion (Foster, 2015).”

Richard Foster’s definition of creativity is easy to understand; however, Berys Gaut thinks that there should be more to be required to be creative than simply salient newness; for we use ‘creative’ as a value term, which refers in people to a kind of excellence or virtue, in the broad sense of ‘virtue’. Creativity is the virtue exhibited most fully by genius. But is the mere possession of originality sufficient to make the original object valuable? Kant, in a related discussion about genius, holds that ‘Since nonsense too can be original, the products of genius must also be models, i.e., they must be exemplary ...’. Kant’s point is that originality can be exhibited by nonsense, and by implication be worthless. Therefore, A process is creative when it is the production of something valuable and original by flair (or, if we allow that a creative process need not always produce a creative outcome, when it is an instance of the kind of process involving flair that usually tends to produce original and valuable things). And artefacts (in a broad sense including the performance of acts) are creative when they are original, valuable and produced by flair. Originality, value and flair are the vital ingredients in creative making (Gaut, B. and Livingston, P.2003).

Albert Einstein said “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” This is statement is true, without imagination life would be boring on earth. But what exactly is imagination?

Cambridge Dictionary defines imagination as the ability to form pictures in the mind. Since imagination can be done by anyone in any day, can a person qualify as having an artistic mind by simply producing mental pictures in their head?

Here's an explication of that difference from a book by Ann Pendleton-Julian and John Seely Brown called Pragmatic Imagination: Single from Design Unbound.

Creative activity aims to do something purposeful. The imagination is something that emerges. While creativity works towards products that exist in the real world and have real-world purpose, the product of the imagination is the "imagined object"; it is the image itself. That image comes with meaning, but any purpose it contains is that which one to rise from it as it intersects with other cognitive processes.

... It is precisely because the imagination is given permission to play without pragmatic intent that it finds connections between things that are not obvious or easy. It finds correspondences that the reasoning mind might never see, might find unlikely. It plays with boundaries. It lets thoughts and partial thoughts jump fences. While not purposeful by intent, or pragmatic by nature, it is precisely this kind of activity that has a pragmatic possibility in a world that is rapidly changing and radically contingent (De Koven, 2016).