Exploring Aesthetics: Definitions, Theories, and Perspectives

1. Art Ed 4900/6900 Raymond Veon, Instructor artrev@langate.gsu.edu rveon@atlanta.k12.ga.us www.igniteart.weebly.com 404-271-0152

2. Aesthetic Experience • The term “aesthetic” is a moving target; it is used in many ways and there is no final agreement on what it means among art professionals. We shall attempt to define it in a broadly inclusive, clear, and educationally useful way.

3. Small Group Discussion and Sharing • What is aesthetics? • What is your personal aesthetic? • What is Postmodernism? • Is it an aesthetic theory? • What is art? (Write individually and share) • List some criteria

4. Art?

5. We’ll be exploring many ideas and approaches in this class • Some will conflict • Your job will be to figure out where you stand while learning multiple approaches that, when implemented in the classroom, will result in student achievement

6. Why are these people naked?

7. Are these artworks original? Are these artworks creative?

8. Speculate • The Naturalistic Interest • The Pragmatic or Instrumental Interest • The Formalistic Interest • The Postmodern Interest • The Intellectual or Cognitive Interest

9. The Naturalistic Interest • Art as a mirror or window through which we look at a copy, reflection, or transformation of the world • The Pragmatic or Instrumental Interest • Art as an instrument or tool for something non-artistic • The Formalistic Interest • Art as autonomous creation without referent to the real world • The Postmodern Interest • Art as purely contextual sign, essentially linguistic, and typically an instrument of ideology…among other things… • The Intellectual or Cognitive Interest • The arts as the creation (not reflection) of knowledge and intellect

10. The Naturalistic Interest • Art as a mirror or window through which we look at a copy, reflection, or transformation of the world: • Realism: The arts as a reflection of the actual world • Idealism: The arts as a reflection of an ideal world • Perfectionist Idealism • Anti-Idealism • Normative Idealism • Metaphysical Idealism • Fictive/Imaginative: The arts as reflecting imaginative actuality or the unachievable ideal

11. The Pragmatic or Instrumental Interest • The arts as an instrument of • of education or improvement • of religious or moral indoctrination • of expression or the communication of expression

12. The Postmodern Interest • The arts as purely contextual, an ever-changing sign without a stable referent, instrumental role, or formal purpose • The visual in service of the essentially linguistic • Art as always the instrument of ideology • Etc. • The Intellectual or Cognitive Interest • The arts as the creation (not reflection) of knowledge and intellect

13. Back to the Greeks • What do we typically mean when we use the term Classical or Ancient Greek Art? • Need to understand Naturalism if we are to understand Modernism and Postmodernism • The Naturalistic Interest (or Naturalistic Theory of Art and Aesthetics): Art as a mirror or window through which we look at a copy, reflection, or transformation of the world

14. It is inherent and central to the naturalistic outlook/interest that attention is diverted from the work of art itself to what it represents—we do not see a beautiful statue but a beautiful body skillfully imitated—attention is deflected as through a glass window to an image that reflects the actual world in some way

15. 6th-4th Century bce: First time a cycle of techniques developed to produce convincing facsimiles of the visible appearance of things instead of the forms/characteristics that they were known to have • Convincing foreshortening and perspective techniques on vase painting • Brunelleschi and Alberti rediscovered linear perspective; Vitruvius (1st c. bce) talks of “the correspondence of all lines to the vanishing point,” as does Agatharcus in the 5th c. bce; but they never quite mastered it’s practice as did Brunelleschi and Alberti

19. Canon of Polyclitus Chrysippos holds beauty to consist not in the commensurability or "symmetria" [ie proportions] of the constituent elements [of the body], but in the commensurability of the parts, such as that of finger to finger, and of all the fingers to the palm and wrist, and of those to the forearm, and of the forearm to the upper arm, and in fact, of everything to everything else, just as it is written in the Canon of Polyclitus. For having taught us in that work all the proportions of the body, Polyclitus supported his treatise with a work: he made a statue according to the tenets of his treatise, and called the statue, like the work, the 'Canon.‘ -Galen

20. The Canon vs. OriginalityImportant distinction in art and aesthetic theory

21. Aesthetic Experience • Modern aesthetic trend: beauty is the quality in an object which enables it to arouse and sustain non-theoretical contemplation in an attitude of direct awareness. • Why is this particularly modern?

22. Share: What can you tell About Ancient Egyptian Art?

24. “Conceptual” vs." Naturalistic” • Egyptian, Mesopotamian vs. Classical Greek Art • Egyptian art not conceptual in the contemporary sense • Egyptian mortuary art: a magical surrogate for reality to be used in the afterlife—a rational ideal of truth independent of time/space (ideas that influenced Plato)

25. Ancient Egyptian Art • Conceptual in that they represented what they saw as objectively true forms beyond sense perceptions • The last thing they wanted was to reproduce the accidental and changing appearance of things • “The last thing they wanted…” This leads to a working definition of aesthetics…

26. Aesthetics: A working definition • Aesthetics consists of the ideas and ideals (values, aspirations) of a culture, group, or movement that are embodied in their definition, use, or making of art • The Canon vs. Originality—different values • Similarly, a personal aesthetic consists of the ideas and ideals of an individual as they influence or are expressed through their art making or worldview

27. Plato objected to perspectival distortions used for monumental sculpture to make them look correct from far below because this was about how things look to the senses—not how they metaphysically are • Like the Egyptians, he was interested in the unchanging—not the perceptual, which always changes • Plato: Views not typical of Greek aesthetic thought • Egyptian art: literally “figure writing” • “Signs” whose meaning is to be read, not something that reflects or refers to what we see in everyday reality. • Note: Signs/symbols will become important Postmodernism

28. Naturalism of Classical Greek Art • Revolutionary for its time • Greek naturalism important because it determined main course of European art from antiquity up to 20th century • Gombrich “The Greek Miracle” (His famous book reflects naturalism in its title, “Art and Illusion”) • Other historians: naturalism is the exception rather than the rule (As we shall see when we look at instrumentalism and Chinese art aesthetics)

29. Other periods/cultures also had a naturalistic interest, sometimes combined with an instrumental outlook: Mochica in pre-Columbian art

30. The Grand Theory • Lasted 2,500 years—up to the present • THE tests of art in the Western World: • Fidelity to nature • The artists power to create illusive imitations of nature, i.e. the artist’s skills in making it appear to be not what it is but the reality of what it represents • To what extent do you plan on assessing students according to the Grand Theory? (i.e. try to see yourself in the overarching aesthetic views that shape us) • To what extent can you JUSTIFY doing this by proving it is educationally valuable? • For your journal/notebook: • What are the criteria you will use to judge student accomplishment? Where do these criteria come from and how do they assure student achievement?

31. Aesthetics of the Average Greek • Aesthetic naturalism is reflected vividly in folktales and stories about what the average educated man expected artworks to be like, what standards he applied, and what qualities he admired in artists: • Parrhasius painted a heavily armed soldier in a race so realistically that he seemed to sweat as he ran • Zuexis painted a boy carrying grapes so real that birds tried to eat them • Zuexis felt this was a failure: if he had painted the boy as realistically as the grapes, the birds would have been too scared! • The mythical Deadulus was the first to make a statue with open eyes; it seemed so real that they had to tie it by the foot to keep it from running away

33. Value of these Legends • Significance of these stories: Indicate new standards of judgment and new ways of looking at graphic art • Accepted attitudes and beliefs, the raw material of inarticulate philosophy, are reflected in these legends and stories • What do art philosophers and critics do to this raw material that makes it different? • A well reasoned, consistent framework in which the major terms are well defined, areas of ambiguity/vagueness are identified, empirical, conceptual, and normative statements are distinguished

34. Value placed on the meticulous accuracy of detail • Ancients admired anything in the nature of a visual tour de force

35. The Renaissance • In Renaissance, accuracy again became commonplace of appreciation—with similar anecdotes and folktales: • Giotto painted a fly on the nose of a portrait so realistically his teacher, Cimabue, tried to swat it away • Giotto stood out because of his talent and because he drew from life • In his day, Giotto was hailed as the greatest painter who ever lived and who brought the art of painting back to the true path that had been lost since antiquity—then, using the same standard, this honor was given to Masaccio, then Botticelli, then Leonardo, then Raphael…

36. How are they different? What does this mean?

37. To us it seems incomprehensible—but this is because of the filters and millennia of artwork we have at our disposal. Greek artists and Giotto do not seem strikingly illusionistic to us—but did so at the time. WHY? • We admire Giotto’s work for other aesthetic qualities: WHAT ARE THEY??

39. Techne • The Greeks did not distinguish between what we call art and other kinds of making things—techne, or human planned production, covered them all and had to do with the idea of teleology • In the 21st century, we conceive the mind to be active. We actively expand our understanding of the world to control our lives. • The Greeks lacked our attitude that “the future is wide open and yet to be written;” instead, they tended to believe that nature had immanent, predetermined ends, and that the best that humans could do was help nature achieve those ends.

40. The Greek Mindset • So, for the Greeks, “Human planned production or techne was an instance of nature at work, an example of a natural process enlightened by the rationality of nature become explicit in human understanding.” • We, as humans, operate within a closed, teleological system that has rational, predetermined ends (Aristotle). The pinnacle of mental and artistic prowess is not to break free of these constraints, since this would have no meaning for the Greeks, but to align ourselves in such a way as to embody and further these ends—this requires that we investigate external nature. • The natural world is already perfect, even as the perfection of the oak is already present in the acorn; the only “active” help required from us, in any help was required at all, is to fertilize it. Today, in contrast, we don’t stop at just fertilizing, but actively manipulate the genetic code to suit our own ends.

41. Naturalism and the Depiction of Emotion • In Ancient Greek art, the representation of emotion or character by direct visual imagery instead of symbolically by traditional convention (as in Egyptian art) was innovative and novel—the Greeks called this the “imitation of the soul.” • It was held that people experienced pleasure when they see the inner workings of the mind/character/passions represented in artworks….this attitude staged a comeback in the Renaissance

42. Naturalism and the Depiction of Emotion • Leonardo filled innumerable notebooks with physical manifestations of emotion drawn from life, studied gesture and facial expressions of the mute who he thoughts had more vivid expressions than those who can talk

43. Representation of the physical signs of emotion systematized by the Academies—also in the theater of Shakespeare’s day • Charles le Brun, A Method to Learn to Design the Passions (1667)—French Academy; • Darwin: The Expression of the Emotions of Man and Animals • Now doubtful the extent to which facial expression can communicate emotion universally and unambiguously—but see Daniel Pink—the issue is still with us

44. Naturalist impulse or interest was a main impetus for the technical developments in the art of Classical Greece • This shows a direct, practical connection between the large, overarching, or “deep” aesthetic interests of a culture and what they do in their art. • What is the main aesthetic impetus for developments in art today???

45. Detour: How to think about layers of aesthetic depth • Litany: Legends, folktales, and “Average Joe’s” response to art • Systemic/Disciplinary: Art Critic, Aesthetician • Worldview: Deep cultural beliefs that influence what can and can not be conceived or valued (Naturalism, Instrumentalism) • Myth and Metaphor: Even deeper archetypes, perhaps some of which are “hardwired” into us • The Hero's Journey • Sherlock Holmes—Action Hero?

46. Critical Criteria of Naturalism • Value placed on subject that is depicted (Is the woman pretty? Is the story moral?) • Correctness in comparison to actual world • Artistic skill in imitating • Within naturalism, the only criterion we have of assessing the artwork itself as distinct from what it imitates is Plato’s standard of correctness and the craftsmanly skill of the artist.

47. From the Greek’s Homer to our own Winslow Homer naturalism has cultivated a tendency to describe and respond to the subject rather than artwork itself • HBO Special on Winslow Homer: “Why would someone paint a dead fish?” Kids and parents respond naturalistically • 2,500 years, artists are still responding to this tendency—even in the present day

49. As an art teacher, you will have to contend with naturalism on a daily basis; you will have think about it in planning lessons, in art advocacy, and in working with administrators and understanding their expectations • Provide examples of each • Are their ways in which the naturalistic aesthetic attitude could be a hindrance?