Meaning in art can be indeterminate and influenced by context.
Decontextualization in museums can lead to viewers projecting their own conceptions onto the work.
The presentation of art, including its framing, is not neutral and affects its significance.
Aestheticization can depoliticize works, draining them of their original context and political meaning.
Taking non-Western objects out of cultural context can be seen as a Eurocentric colonial act, imposing artistic merit as a new value.
Providing excessive cultural context can demean the object, reducing it to a mere artifact.
Interpretations depend on the viewer's cultural lens, economic forces, and psychological forces.
Artists intentionally shape their work so that their meanings are evident to competent viewers, often supported by historical research.
Effective arguments about art are plausible, coherent, and rhetorically effective.
Persuasive interpretations are inclusive, accounting for more details of the work of art.
The study of art is neither pure science nor random feelings; statements should align with the work itself.
Emotional responses to art should be supported by evidence and qualities within the object.
Personal responses should be accounted for and tied to the object, shared, not eccentric and private.
Writing about art should inform (provide facts) and persuade (argue a viewpoint).
Expressing Opinions
Most writing about art seeks to inform and persuade.
Essays should be prompted by a strong interest, favorable or unfavorable, in the work.
Academic writing about art is chiefly analytic, focusing on relationships within the artwork or historical causes and effects.
Writing about art includes description, interpretation, analysis, and personal report.
Prolonged description can bore readers if the reproduction is already available to them.
Prolonged personal reports are of little interest unless they connect with the reader's responses and evidence in the work.
Writing about art is a mixed sort, blending description, personal report, analysis and evaluation.
Analysis
Analysis involves separating a work into parts to understand the whole.
It accounts for the viewer's experience of the work, synthesizing components.
Analysis is applicable beyond art, used for any complex matter.
Meaning in works of art is communicated through various means.
Subject matter refers to the image represented, while content involves cultural thoughts and attitudes.
Interpretation involves recognizing an image and understanding cultural associations.
Iconology delves into the entire system of images and their cultural contexts.
Content is subject matter transformed or infused by intellect and feeling with meaning.
Form, including size and texture, contributes to the meaning of the work.
Colors, lines, and shapes can be described metaphorically, reflecting personal interpretations.
Getting Ideas
Looking at art requires learning and is not as simple as it seems.
Involves understanding and expressing what a work of art conveys.
Basic questions:
What is your first response to the work?
Who created the work, for whom, and during when?
What are the features and values of the artwork?
What purpose does the form contribute?
Material. Size. Color. Composition.
Where would the work originally been seen?
What purpose did the work serve?
What is the work's title?
Directed looking is the means to decode visual statements.
What is happening in the figure painting?
What are the relations of the figures to each other?
How were their interpretations conveyed?
How much of the figure does the artist show and how much of the available space does the artist cause the figure to occupy?
Consider clothing, furnishings, accessories.
Does the picture advertise the sitter's political importance, or does it advertise the sitter's personal superiority?
What sort of identity is presented, social or Psychological?
If the picture is allegorical, is it an act of appropriation?
What image does the artist present if the picture is a self portrait?
What's the chief interest in a still life?
What is the relationship between human beings and nature?
What do the landscape say about the society for which is was created?
Are the contour lines strong and hard or irregular and indistinct?
What does the medium contribute?
Analysis on Sculpture
For what purpose was the object made?
What is expressed through the representation?
What is the relationship of naturalism to idealism or abstraction?
If the sculpture represents a deity, what ideas of divinity are expressed?
If it represents a human being as a deify, how are the two qualities portrayed?
What does the pose imply?
Are certain bodily features or forms distorted?
To what extent is the drapery independent of the body?
What sort of truncation has the sculptor used for the bust?
What do the medium and the techniques by which the piece was shaped contribute?
Can the material effect, the tactile qualities effect our emotion?
What kinds of volumes are we looking at?
What is the effect of color, either of the material or of gilding or paint?
What is the scale?
What was the original location or site or physical context?
Is the base a part of the sculpture?
Where is the best place to stand in order to experience the work?
Another Look at the Questions
What is this doing?
Why do I have this response?
What is the artist up to?
There are many ways to help yourself to see, helping you to see by asking these questions.
Formal Analysis
A formal analysis is an analysis of the form the artist produces.
What the artist is doing.
How the work means.
Analyzing the structure, organization, and intention of the work's formal design.
Opposition to Formal Analysis
Since about 1970, these assumptions have been stronglycalled into question.
Shift of interest (Context, relationship to person who preceives it.)
Shift from artwork as a thing of value vs political and social realities.
Work that embodies a particular meaning and evokes a pleasurable response in the spectator.
Style as a Shaper of Form
Every one and everything has a style.
When we wear clothes, that is expressive and announces who we are
The word is used neutrally, for everyone and everything made has a style –good, bad, or indifferent.
Every element of style is finally expressive.
Style then, is revealed in form; an artist creates form by applying certain techniques to certain materials, in order to embody a particular vision or content.
A change in style is a change of subject.
Sample Essay: A Formal Analysis
The following sample essay, written by an undergraduate, includes a good deal of description.