Fine Arts 2 Application: Intro To Visual Aud. & Perf.

Fine Arts
Fine Arts 2
Application: Intro to Visual Aud. &
Perf. Arts
BO 303
1 Shane Ryan A. Diaz 11/21/09

An Introduction Overview
 Art, the product of creative human activity in which materials
are shaped or selected to convey an idea, emotion, or visually
interesting form.
 The word art can refer to the visual arts, including painting,
sculpture, architecture, photography, decorative arts, crafts,
and other visual works that combine materials or forms.
 We also use the word art in a more general sense to
encompass other forms of creative activity, such as dance,
drama, and music, or even to describe skill in almost any
activity, such as “the art of bread making” or “the art of
travel.” In this article art refers to the visual arts.

Defining Art
Difficulties
 Definition of art that seems correct to many Americans in
the 21st century is likely to differ greatly from definitions of
art in non-Western cultures, in tribal societies, and in other
historical periods.
 Our rather open-ended definition may even sound strange
to those in contemporary Western society who expect art to
be limited to familiar categories such as painting and
sculpture.
 Defining art raises problems also in that since the
beginning of the 20th century some artists have sought to
challenge the very definition of art.
 Their art objects may lack the qualities long associated with
art, such as beauty, skilled craftsmanship, and clear
organization.

Difficulties
am! by American painter, sculptor, and graphic artist Roy Lichtenstein was painte
enstein was one of the first artists to develop a style known as pop,
hich images from advertising and comic books became the subject matter of ser
painting is part of the collection at the Tate Gallery, London.
Difficulties
The Navajo people of

the Southwest were
accomplished
weavers. Until the late
19th century, most of
their weavings were
blankets intended for
wearing. They then
turned to weaving
rugs. This 19th-
century chief's blanket
incorporates the
Difficulties
In addition, during the last quarter of the 20th century,
critics and art historians considered many more types of
objects as art.
Today, these authorities often speak of “visual culture”—

which may include motion pictures, television, advertising,
and comic books—instead of giving special attention to
sculpture, painting, or architecture.

Difficulties
 Perhaps the major difficulty in defining art lies in the fact that art
implies value—monetary, social, and intellectual. Large amounts
of money may be involved when an object is regarded as art.
 Items like Navajo blankets by anonymous weavers were long

classified as crafts or as cultural artifacts (objects made by
humans) rather than as art because of their seemingly non-
artistic materials as well as their usefulness, the anonymity and
female gender of their makers, and their origins in tribal culture.
 That we are beginning to consider such objects as art is a

reflection of our changing social values.

Difficulties
This 1959 sculpture by
American artist Richard Stankiew
shows his characteristic use of
discarded metal and machinery.
Stankiewicz’s use of these materi
influenced many subsequent arti
Untitled is part of the collection o
National Museum of American Ar
in Washington, D.C.

Difficulties
Regarding useful objects made in tribal cultures as
crafts or artifacts would not seem inappropriate if we
did not think of these categories as essentially
different from painting, sculpture, and other
categories considered “high art.”
Critics and art historians today often try to avoid this

division between high and low art, substituting for
“high art” terms such as “art with a capital A,” “art-
as-such,” and “serious art.” But these terms still
make a distinction.

Difficulties
We could speak instead of “art that is
displayed in museums,” “art that is taught
in art history classes,” or “art that art
critics can interpret.”
These expressions would encompass tribal

objects and give them an intellectual value,
no matter who made them or what their
intent may have been.

Is definition necessary?
Despite the difficulty in forming a definition for
art, we go to an art museum expecting to see
paintings and sculpture, not comic books,
loaves of bread, or works by amateurs.
Many objects we call “art” represent significant

ideas, but some do not. Someone considered a
“serious artist” might even be more interested
in marketing his or her products than a designer
of industrial products is.

Is definition necessary?
Artists are generally more concerned with how best to
use materials to convey their ideas than with deciding
what is or is not art, whereas museum curators and art
historians are busier looking for examples of particular
types of objects, such as Greek vases or Rembrandt
drawings.
 It is most important to remember that art is a category
with changing boundaries, not only in its general
definition but also in its subdivisions. People not only
make art, but also choose which objects should be called
art.

Historical View of Art
Antiquity: Skill or Technique
In ancient Greece, the word techne is the closest
equivalent to art. Techne, which means work or
technical skill, can be applied to the fashioning of
any sort of object. But the Greeks had a special
appreciation of mimesis (the imitation of reality) in
painting and of especially pleasing proportions in
sculpture and architecture.
The ancient Romans used the word ars, but ars still
referred to a technique or a method of working, not
to the expressive, creative activities that we now
associate with art.

Historical View of Art
Antiquity: Skill or Technique
Roman writer Pliny the Elder provides most of our
knowledge about artists from the classical (ancient Greek
and Roman) period.
He wrote about the arts of painting and sculpture in the
section on metallurgy in his Natural History.
Although Pliny praises the skills of particular painters and
sculptors, he does not single out painting or sculpture as
being better than pottery, metalwork, or other crafts.

The Greek temple of Poseidon at Paestum,
was constructed in the mid 5th-century BC.
Its massive, closely spaced columns are
characteristic of the Doric order.

The Middle Ages:
Craftsmanship
During the Middle Ages (about 350 to 1450), Christianity
dominated Western culture.
Thus the main purpose of the visual arts was to teach people,
many of whom could not read, about religion.
Art taught by means of delight, drawing people’s attention
and helping them understand the spiritual through
fascinating forms (whether delicately refined saints or
monstrous devils), ornately carved and painted decoration,
precious materials (including gold, ivory, and gems), and
colored light pouring forth from stained glass.

Medieval
Reliquary
During the
Middle Ages,
the bones and
other remains
of saints were
frequently
venerated as
relics.
Artists would
often
create elaborate
No particular form of art was considered superior
during the Middle Ages.
High value was placed on small-scale luxury objects
such as illuminated manuscripts, jewelry, and metal
objects used in church services.
The great medieval cathedrals—buildings that
required the skills of hundreds of craftsmen—became
the pride of entire cities.
Wealthy people decorated their homes with huge
tapestries that told stories from mythology.
 Even clothing could be elaborately decorated and
express a person’s status and moral views.

The Lady with the Unicorn
The Lady with the Unicorn is the name of a series of Franco-Flemish tapestries executed in the late
1400s that constitute an allegory of the five senses. Woven of silk and wool with silver threads, they are
remarkable for their profusion of realistic detail. This panel, the sixth, is called “À mon seul désir” (“To my
only desire”) after the words written at the top of the tent. The tapestries are in the Cluny Museum in
Paris.
The Middle Ages:
Craftsmanship
 Craftsmen, carefully trained in specialized medieval
workshops, made the objects we now call art.
 Our word masterpiece comes from this medieval

workshop tradition.
 The term refers to an object made by a craftsman at

the end of his training to show he had acquired the
skills to be called a master.
 During the Middle Ages a masterpiece could be a

statue, a stained glass window, or a pair of shoes.

The Renaissance: Genius and
Design
The importance of skill and craftsmanship continued
well into the Renaissance, a period of artistic and
literary revival that began in the 1400s.
During the Renaissance, the visual arts were often
associated with other trades based upon the type of
material they used.
For example, in the guilds (trade associations) of
15th-century Italy painters were grouped with
doctors because both used chemicals, and sculptors
who worked in bronze were grouped with makers of
armor.

The Gates of Paradise are bronze doors
created by Italian Renaissance sculptor
Lorenzo Ghiberti between 1425 and 145
for the east entrance to the
baptistery of the Florence Cathedral in It
This detail, showing Isaac and Esau,
is from one of the doors' ten panels,
each of which illustrates a story
from the Bible.

Design
However, the position of artists began to
change in the 15th century.
Painters and sculptors associated informally
with poets, who occupied a higher social
status because poetry had long been
considered a higher art.
Books were written to explain the theory of
art and architecture, and artists claimed that
they were inspired geniuses and not merely
workers.

Design
 During the 16th century, Italian theorists began to group
architecture, painting, and sculpture as the arts of disegno
(“design”)—that is, as creative activities that required an artist to
visualize an idea and to transfer this idea to a drawing.
 (The Italian word disegno means both design and drawing.) .
 Narrative painting told a story—mythological, historical, or

religious—and thus could teach morals just as literature could.
 This type of painting, called istoria in Italian or history painting in

English, was considered the highest form of painting until the late
19th century.

The 17th to the 19th Century: The Fine
Arts
By the 17th century, artists across Europe were
seeking more creative freedom.
They viewed the workshops of the Middle Ages and
Renaissance as restrictive.
Some artists gained freedom by working at the courts
of monarchs and the nobility, while others made art
to sell directly to individual collectors. Such freedom
could mean a loss of artistic quality, however.
As a result, art academies became increasingly
important as a way to enter into the profession
without conforming to guild regulations.

arles I in Hunting Dress
ish artist Anthony van Dyck was serving

ourt painter to King Charles I of England
n he painted this portrait in 1635.
Dyck’s elegant, refined style had a
ng influence on English portraiture.
piece is in the collection of the Louvre,
ris, France.

The 17th to the 19th Century:
The Fine Arts
 Academies emphasized ideas, particularly ideas that
connected the visual arts to the sciences or to literature,
fields that enjoyed much higher status than the visual arts.
 At the same time, the academies wanted to separate

themselves from the workshops, where sign painting and
figure painting were seen as two variations on the same
craft.
 The Académie des Beaux-Arts (Academy of Fine Arts),

founded in 1648 in Paris, France, especially emphasized this
distinction; it gave the arts of painting, sculpture, and
architecture the name beaux-arts, meaning “fine arts.”

The 17th to the 19th
Century: The Fine Arts
The French Academy of Fine Arts made drawing from the
nude the cornerstone of its program, and it had enough
influence to force passage of a law that prohibited figure
drawing in any workshop other than the Academy.
 It considered those visual arts that did not use the human
figure as crafts or mechanical arts, with much lower prestige
than painting or sculpture.
Although the Academy held classes in other subjects, such as
perspective, geometry, and anatomy, the working methods
of painting and sculpture were taught in the studios of
individual academy artists.

Venus
Italian neoclassical artist Antonio Canova is noted for
his marble sculptures based on classical models. He
created the Venus Italica (1804-1812, Pitti Palace,
Florence) to replace an ancient Roman statue known
as the Medici Venus, which French emperor
Napoleon I had seized from the Uffizi Gallery in
Florence in 1802. The Venus Italica was hailed
immediately as Canova’s masterpiece.

The 19th Century: Self-
Expression
The French Academy of Fine Arts enjoyed special favors from the
French government, and because of this connection it became
part of the establishment (dominant institutions).
During the 19th century artists in France fought against these
institutions. In the early 19th century artists of the romantic
movement (Romanticism), such as Eugène Delacroix,
emphasized passionate expression.
They often chose subjects that criticized the government,
although their method of painting generally followed academic
principles of composition and technique.

ading the People
tic painter Eugène Delacroix was inspired to paint Liberty Leading the Pe
tion of 1830, which ended France's absolute monarchy.
Expression
At mid-century Gustave Courbet and other French
artists promoted their individuality:
They not only chose subjects that the government
might see as offensive, but also used techniques and
compositions that went against academic teaching.
Starting in the 1860s Édouard Manet and the
painters who became known as impressionists (see
Impressionism) broke away from the Academy and
established alternatives to government-sponsored
exhibitions and competitions.

Expression
These alternatives eventually evolved into the modern
commercial gallery system in which artists provide works
to dealers who exhibit and sell the works to any buyer
who can afford them.
The idea that artists should express their own subjective
experience—what they personally feel about a theme or
subject—became firmly established in the 19th century.
Already in the 18th century some artists had reacted
against the lack of feeling in most of the art of their time.

Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe
Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Luncheon on the Grass) by Édouard Manet was painted
in 1863. When it was first displayed, the rough brushwork and undefined areas of
color were as distressing to the public as the nude woman who was neither a
classical goddess nor a symbol in an allegory. Manet claimed that the real subject
of the painting was light, and it was that philosophy that gave birth to
impressionism.

Expression
The romantic movement continued this

antiestablishment trend through its
emphasis on passion, imagination, and
escape from reality.
Around the middle of the 19th century
artists of the realist tradition (see Realism)
reacted against the subjective expression
of romanticism and demanded a return to
depicting the actual appearance of things.

Expression
This response led in the 1860s and 1870s to efforts by
the impressionists to record light and color as we see
them.
Their interest in light and color provided a way for
artists of the next generation to express what they felt
—not what they saw—through even purer (unmixed),
bolder colors (see Postimpressionism).
The idea that art should be a form of self-expression
has remained an important part of our definition of art
to this day.

The 20th and 21st Centuries:
New Media, New Art Forms
In the 20th and 21st centuries many trends have developed,
including some that seek to destroy our definitions of art.
Artists of the dada movement, which flourished in the early 20th
century, created works and sponsored events that pointed out the
absurdity of all definitions.
One of the most famous dada works was exhibited in 1917 by
French-born artist Marcel Duchamp: a urinal turned on its back,
titled “Fountain,” and signed with a fictitious name (R. Mutt) that
plays on the urinal manufacturer’s name (J. R. Mott) rather than
Duchamp’s own name.

Smithson’s Spiral Jetty
Robert Smithson was one of the pioneering artists of the earthworks movement
of the 1960s and 1970s. In Spiral Jetty (1970), one of the best-known
earthworks, Smithson explored time and entropy—the tendency toward disorder
in nature. Spiral Jetty, a narrow coil of black rock edged in salt, extends about
460 m (500 yds) into the Great Salt Lake in Utah and is periodically submerged
by water.

Pop artists revived the dada spirit during the
1960s, with Jasper Johns’s painted flags and
Andy Warhol’s painted soup can labels.
Contemporary artists, aware of earlier
traditions, can choose to work in traditional
media (including painting, sculpture,
printmaking, and now photography),
combine media (collage and assemblage), or
avoid the traditional categories entirely.

For example, some artists create so-called

environments that we can walk around or
through.
Others, such as Bulgarian-born Christo and
American Robert Smithson, have rearranged
the natural landscape in ways that cannot
really be called architecture, landscape
architecture, or sculpture.

Bicycle Wheel
French-born artist Marcel Duchamp
changed the course of modern art in 19
by exhibiting a bicycle wheel turned up
down and mounted on a kitchen stool.
Bicycle Wheel was the first of Duchamp
so-called ready mades, ordinary objects
he turned into objects of art by changin
their context and exhibiting them as
sculpture. Shown here is a 1964
replica of the original, which is now los
Art critics have coined the terms land art and earthworks
for such endeavors.
Still other artists have focused attention on the monetary
value we give to what we call art, by creating works that
cannot be sold, as some conceptual artists did in the last
decades of the 20th century (see Conceptual Art).
Artists today can ignore the line that the academies drew
to separate fine art from craft, or they can affirm
essential differences between one art form and another
according to their beliefs.

ART IN NON-WESTERN
SOCIETIES
Other Purposes
While the study of world art can broaden our way of
thinking about art in general, it can also present
difficulties to those trained in the Western tradition.
First, Westerners tend to impose Western categories and
Western values on the art of other cultures.
African masks, for example, have been admired for at
least a century by Western collectors, who see them as
forms of sculpture to be hung on walls and admired for
their powerful abstract qualities.

ART IN NON-WESTERN
SOCIETIES
Other Purposes
But in an African society, masks are only one part of a
ritual dance, which involves elaborately costumed
performers who take on specific roles that dramatize
important social interactions.
For these societies the mask has value and symbolic
meaning only while it is used in the dance.
The mask has no special distinction as a sculpture, while
the ritual dance does not distinguish between the visual
arts, dance, music, and theater within it.

Bwa Masked Dancers
Several different masks are
shown here in a Bwa dance
ceremony. The Bwa, who live in
Burkina Faso and Mali, perform
mask ceremonies on occasions
such as market days, funerals,
or the initiation of young people
into adulthood. Each mask
takes the form of an animal,
and represents a spirit that is
thought to inhabit the
surrounding forests, rivers, and
bush country. A Bwa performer
dances to drums while wearing
a mask and a costume made of
raffia. The mask dance honors
the spirits, and thereby helps
enlist the spirits' help in
protecting the village against
evil forces.
ART IN NON-WESTERN
SOCIETIES
Other Values
Even when the art of a non-Western culture
seems quite similar to Western art, aspects
of it may be valued quite differently.
For example, during the Northern Song
period in China (960-1126), respected
artists with individual styles made brush
paintings of landscapes and other subjects
comparable to those found in Western art.

ART IN NON-WESTERN
SOCIETIES
Other Values
Western viewers might note differences in
brushwork or in the illusion of three-
dimensional space in the Chinese works but
would tend to overlook other differences that
have no counterpart in the Western tradition.
Yet in Chinese art, individual strokes of ink
themselves conveyed meaning and were not
simply a way to represent the subject, as in
Western art.

Other Values
Artists in China were carefully trained to form a variety of
strokes, a skill very close to the art of calligraphy.
This skill points to another fundamental difference between
Chinese art and Western art: Chinese writings about art set
calligraphy above all other art forms, rather than painting (as
Westerners think of it), sculpture, and architecture.
Chinese artists even thought of the ink stone on which they
prepared their inks as an art object in itself, whereas Western
painters give little thought to how their tubes of paint or
palettes look.

Bird and Flower Painting
Emperors of the Northern Song
dynasty established an imperial
academy of painting, and were
active patrons of the arts.
Paintings of birds and flowers
were especially popular with the
court. Hawk and Pheasant
(early to mid-12th century,
Seattle Art Museum, Seattle,
Washington) is by Li Anzhong,
a painter in the imperial
academy who was known for
his detailed renderings of birds.

Avoiding Misconceptions
Another difficulty in looking at the art of other cultures
is a tendency to oversimplify—that is, to see all the art
of a wide area as the same or else to see it as
fundamentally opposite from ours.
In thinking about Chinese art and Western art, we
should keep in mind that art in China forms a
continuous tradition dating back about 5,000 years.
The Western tradition, in contrast, is generally said to
start with Greek art in the 8th century BC, making it
little more than half as old as Chinese art.

Soldiers of the Imperial Bodyguard

These terra-cotta figures form part of 6,000 life size models of soldiers and horses
that were made in 210 BC for the tomb of Emperor Shi Huangdi of the Qin dynasty
in China. They were originally painted in bright colors. The burial mound, in the
northern province of Shaanxi, was discovered in 1974 and was designated a
UNESCO World Heritage site in 1987.

Whereas Western viewers might regard Chinese art as
unchanging, Chinese art in fact reflects the many changes
in cultural centers, political systems, and religious beliefs
through the centuries.
With African art, Westerners tend to think solely of the art
of Africa south of the Sahara, omitting Egyptian art and
the Christian art of Ethiopia.
Another tendency is to think of all the different cultures of
Africa as the same—and totally unlike the so-called
civilized cultures of the European tradition.

Until recently, anthropologists studied African art more
often than art historians did, and scholars compared it
to the art of prehistoric people or children.
In several African languages, however, words used to
describe art translate into English as “accomplishment,
skill, and value,” “things made by hand,” and “things to
look at.”
The first two definitions are quite comparable to
European definitions of art until the Renaissance,
whereas the last is closer to Western definitions of art
from the 18th century on.

Benin Bronze Plaque
The kingdom of Benin (12th century to 17th
century), in what is now Nigeria, produced
some of Africa’s finest artwork. A bronze
plaque from the kingdom shows military
figures in high relief.

Africa has famous individuals who make
art, just as Europe and the Americas do,
and African art over the centuries has also
displayed stylistic change and innovation.
Some aspects of African art remain similar
from one culture to another, such as a
tendency to create abstract (simplified and
generalized) forms or a preference for
three-dimensional art over painting.

There are, however, great differences in
the arts of the different African regions and
cultures.
A number of books on African and other
non-Western cultures have addressed
Western misconceptions and raised
awareness of the vast variety and richness
of art traditions throughout the world.

That’s all for tonight class!
 Thank you for listening
Introduction
Historical View of Fine Art
Anitquity: Skill or Technique
The Middle Ages: Craftsmanship
The Renaissance: Genius and Design
The 17th to the 19th Century: The Fine Arts
The 19th century: Self-Expression
The 20th and 21st Centuries: New Media, New Art Forms

Defining Arts
Difficulties
Is a definition necessary
Art in non-western societies
Other Purposes
Other values
Avoiding misconceptions

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Fine Arts

1 Shane Ryan A. Diaz 11/21/09

2 Shane Ryan A. Diaz 11/21/09

3 Shane Ryan A. Diaz 11/21/09

The Navajo people of

Today, these authorities often speak of “visual culture”—

6 Shane Ryan A. Diaz 11/21/09

 Items like Navajo blankets by anonymous weavers were long

 That we are beginning to consider such objects as art is a

7 Shane Ryan A. Diaz 11/21/09

8 Shane Ryan A. Diaz 11/21/09

Critics and art historians today often try to avoid this

9 Shane Ryan A. Diaz 11/21/09

These expressions would encompass tribal

10 Shane Ryan A. Diaz 11/21/09

Many objects we call “art” represent significant

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 Our word masterpiece comes from this medieval

 The term refers to an object made by a craftsman at

 During the Middle Ages a masterpiece could be a

20 Shane Ryan A. Diaz 11/21/09

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 Narrative painting told a story—mythological, historical, or

 This type of painting, called istoria in Italian or history painting in

24 Shane Ryan A. Diaz 11/21/09

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ish artist Anthony van Dyck was serving

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 At the same time, the academies wanted to separate

 The Académie des Beaux-Arts (Academy of Fine Arts),

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The romantic movement continued this

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For example, some artists create so-called

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Soldiers of the Imperial Bodyguard