Culture, Art, and Aesthetic Values in Western Civilisation Vocabulary

The development of the concept of aesthetics from the Primitive to Modern times

• Key Topics

  • The development of the concept of aesthetics from the Primitive to Modern times: description, analysis, form, expression, interpretation, and judgment.

  • The relationship between Art and: Culture, Morality, Politics, and Religion.

  • Art through the ages: Primitive, Classical, Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Neo-Classical, Romantic, Modern, and Post-Modern.

• Aesthetics: A set of principles concerned with the nature and appreciation of beauty.

• Introduction:

  • Questions to analyze the nature of art and its appreciation in aesthetics:

    • What is art, exactly?

    • Does art serve a purpose?

    • What makes art deserving of appreciation—its aesthetic appeal or its monetary worth?

    • Is the experience of art cognitive or emotional?

    • What connection exists between art and beauty?

    • The criteria for art: are they subjective or objective?

    • Is the concept of beauty objective or subjective?

The relationship between Art and: Culture, Morality, Politics, and Religion

• Art: The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.

• Culture:

  • 'Culture is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.' - Edward B. Tylor, Primitive Culture.

• Three Concepts of Culture:

  • Culture referred to special intellectual or artistic endeavors or products, what today we might call “high culture” as opposed to “popular culture”.

    • By this definition, only a portion – typically a small one – of any social group “has” culture.

    • This sense of culture is more closely related to aesthetics than to social science.

  • Culture referred to a quality possessed by all people in all social groups, who nevertheless could be arrayed on a development (evolutionary) continuum from “savagery” through “barbarism” to “civilization”.

    • Tylor’s definition of culture is “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society”.

    • In contrast to Arnold’s view, all folks “have” culture, which they acquire by virtue of membership in some social group – society.

    • The greatest legacy of Tylor’s definition lay in his “complex whole” formulation.

  • The last usage of culture developed in anthropology in the twentieth-century work of Franz Boas and his students, though with roots in the eighteenth-century writings of Johann von Herder.

    • Boas emphasized the uniqueness of the many and varied cultures of different peoples or societies.

    • one should never differentiate high from low culture, and one ought not differentially valorize cultures as savage or civilized.

• Art and Culture

  • The Arts in most, if not all, cultures are integral to life: function, creation, and learning are intertwined.

  • UNESCO basically promotes two main approaches to Arts Education, which can be implemented at the same time and need not be distinct.

    • The “learning through the arts/culture” approach demonstrates how we can utilize artistic expressions and cultural resources and practices, contemporary and traditional, as a learning tool.

    • The “learning in the arts/culture” approach stresses the value of cultural perspectives, multi and inter-cultural, and culturally-sensitive languages through learning processes.

Art through the ages: Primitive, Classical, Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Neo-Classical, Romantic, Modern and Post-Modern.

• Primitive Art

  • Reading Task

    • http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-43115488

• Classical Art: Greek Art

  • Reading Task

    • Greek Art

    • https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ancient-art-civilizations/greek-art/beginners-guide-greece/a/introduction-ancient-greek-art

  • The Parthenon

    • Of surviving monuments, none characterises this Classical moment in Greek art better than the Parthenon

• Classical Art: Roman Art

  • Reading Task

    • Roman art

    • https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ancient-art-civilizations/roman/beginners-guide-rome/a/introduction-to-ancient-roman-art

  • The Colosseum

    • The arch became the essential element in Roman architecture, emphasizing the strength and massiveness of the masonry structure as if to symbolize the sustaining power of the empire itself

    • The Colosseum is an outstanding work of Roman engineering as well as of architecture.

    • The invention of concrete. Roman concrete was a combination of mortar and pieces of aggregate laid in courses

  • The Portrait bust

    • The portrait bust was the most notable Roman contribution to the sculptural form.

• Medieval Art

  • Early Christian Art

    • From the worship of God in the catacombs, Christian community was awarded by Constantine in 313 an imperial palace and a piece of land on which to erect a church.

    • From this elementary foundations, emerged the basic elements which were to construct the Christian basilica

  • Romanesque and Gothic architecture

    • The High Gothic interior reached its apogee at Amiens. The Romanesque mass gave way to a huge, soaring interior space

• Renaissance Art

  • Early Renaissance Art

    • FILIPPO BRUNELLESCHI

      • Brunelleschi with another achievement of equally great and far-reaching effect: the invention of linear perspective.

      • The key to his system lay in the observation that all parallel lines running into space at right angles to the ‘window’ will seem to converge on a central vanishing point at the viewer’s eye-level.

    • GIOTTO – The Lamentation of Christ

      • In this painting, we see the sharp moment of mourning, ‘where each figure is individually and uniquely expressive, the Virgin clasps her dead son and gazes at his closed eyes, creating an unforgettable image of desolation and bereavement

  • High Renaissance

    • Leonardo da Vinci - Last Supper

      • Leonardo was the first to gather the apostles in groups of three to suggest an emotion and formal connections to each other and to Christ at the centre.

      • The sfumato (misty, soft blending of colours).

  • Keywords

    • Sfumato: vague, indefinite, hazy – blurred edges.

    • Chiaroscuro: contrast of light and dark

    • Perspective: Artists use perspective to represent three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional surface

  • Michelangelo Buonarroti

    • Reading Task

      • https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/renaissance-reformation/high-ren-florence-rome/michelangelo/a/michelangelo-sculptor-painter-architect-and-poet

    • Writing Task

      • Write short assignments on Michelangelo’s: (i) The sculpture of David, (ii) The Creation of Adam and (iii) The Last Judgement.

  • Raffaello Sanzio (Raphael)

    • Reading Task

      • https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ap-art-history/early-europe-and-colonial-americas/renaissance-art-europe-ap/a/raphael-school-of-athens

• Baroque Art

  • Caravaggio

    • Caravaggio created the style of art called ‘tenebrism’

  • Rembrandt

    • Rembrandt was a genius in how he painted his paintings by the style of tenebrism.

  • Writing Task

    • Write short assignments on the following works of art:

      • Gian Lorenzo Bernini – The Ecstacy of Saint Teresa, Cornaro Chapel altar, S. Maria della Vittoria, Rome.

      • Diego Velázquez – Las Meninas

      • Peter Paul Rubens – Peace and War.

• The Enlightenment, Romanticism and Realism

  • Neoclassical Art

    • Writing Task

      • https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/monarchy-enlightenment/neo-classicism/a/neoclassicism-an-introduction

  • Romantic Art

    • https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/becoming-modern/romanticism/romanticism-intro/a/a-beginners-guide-to-romanticism

• Modern Art

  • http://www.theartstory.org/

  • THE INVENTION OF PHOTOGRAPHY

    • The development of photography was seen more as preserving the real world by providing instantaneous records of reality.

  • IMPRESSIONISM

    • MONET

      • The realists believe that artists should deal with the world around them. They should invent nothing.

      • Claude Monet in the Sunrise and many other paintings captures this ‘fleeting’ moment.

  • POST-IMPRESSIONISM

    • Gaugin and Van Gogh

      • The concept of art as a new religion, as a way of life to which the artist is called and to which he gives himself up utterly, was an article of faith for Gaugin as much as for van Gogh.

      • Both were inspired by a similar quest to recover the sincerity and purity of simple, unspoilt pe

        ople, uncorrupted by civilization and modern urban life.

  • Writing Tasks

    • Write short essay on the following works of art.

      • Paul Cézanne – Card Players

• TWENTIETH-CENTURY ART

  • Difference Between Modern and Postmodern Art?

    • https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/ask-an-expert-what-is-the-difference-between-modern-and-postmodern-art-87883230/

  • Pablo Picasso-Les Demoiselles

    • Picasso had turned to various sources for inspiration, notably to Cézanne and Iberian (pre-Roman Spanish) culture, before African art opened his eyes to new ways of regarding the visual world.

    • So, abandoning the single viewpoint and normal proportions, reducing anatomy largely to geometrical lozenges and triangles, he completely re-ordered the human image.

  • Research on

    • The Fauves - Henri Matisse – ‘Madame Matisse’

    • Expressionism – Edvard Munch – ‘The Scream’.

    • Wassily Kandinsky, particularly what he said about color, that it is a means of ‘exerting a direct influence upon the soul. Colour is the keyboard. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano with its many strings. The artist is the hand that purposefully sets the soul vibrating by means of this or that key’.

      • https://www.theartstory.org/artist/kandinsky-wassily/

  • SURREALISM

    • One of the most unnerving of Dali’s work is The Persistence of Memory.

    • In this painting, time stands still within the dreamer’s mind, as in Freud’s timeless unconscious, so that in Dali’s arid, airless landscape the metal watches go limp and stop forever.

  • POST-WAR TO POST-MODERN

    • Jackson Pollock -

      • https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-1010/post-war-american-art/abex/a/jackson-pollock-mural

    • Pop Art -

      • https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-1010/xdc974a79:pop-art/xdc974a79:pop-art-a-beginners-guide/a/pop-art

    • Damien Hirst – The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of someone living.

      • https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/damien-hirst-2308

    • Ai Weiwei

      • https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/ai-weiwei-8208

• Concluding remarks

  • Fountain is one of Duchamp's most famous works and is widely seen as an icon of twentieth-century art.

  • Can we apply to Duchamp’s Fountain Grayling’s claim about beauty, in the sense that we consider it as an, ‘example of beauty which expresses the best of human desire to make something lovely for the amelioration of ordinary life’?

• Reading Tasks

  • Unit 2: Art Works: Prehistoric, Pre-classical and Classical

  • Unit 4: Art Works: Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque

  • Unit 6: Art Works: Modern and Postmodern

• Writing Tasks

  • Write short assignments on the review questions of Units 2, 4, and 6.