Extra-Credit Project

The deadline of submission will be on the second of April. However, the matrix for the point deduction has been changed. To be fair of course...

*the new values are one picture=1, music=5 (3-5 minute recording), and videos=10 (for every 15 minutes of video).

*100 media= .1 deduction from your final grade, 200 media=.2 deduction from final grade, 300 media=.3 deduction....so on and so forth...

*dance, opera, or live musical performance can be included.

*for more information...

Notes on Interpreting Art II

Expression Theory: Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy, the Russian novelist (1828-1910), advocated this view in his famous essay, “What is Art?”. Tolstoy believed an artist’s chief job is to express and communicate emotions to an audience: 

“To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced and having evoked it in oneself then by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so transmit this feeling that others experience the same feeling—this is the activity of art…”

Notes on Interpreting Art I

Does art bear a message in the way language does? What must we know to clarify an artwork’s meaning? Can’t we just look at an artwork for enjoyment?

Good News for the Graduating Students

THE DEADLINE FOR THE SUBMISSION Of EXTRA-CREDIT PROJECTS HAS BEEN MOVED TO MONDAY!

Extra-credit Project

Look for the appropriate media (pictures for architecture and painting, while recordings for music) belonging to the mentioned art movements below. Aside from the media, please include the necessary information such as artist, composer, or architect responsible for the artwork; art movement it belongs; year it was made, constructed, exhibited, shown or performed in public for the first time; medium, and dimensions.

Notes on Artemesia Gentileschi

Notes on Genius

In a study of how the notion of genius evolved, Gender and Genius, Christine Battersby argues that ‘genius’ came into its modern use only towards the end of the eighteenth century. In this time period people revised both Renaissance and ancient views of men’s and women’s natures. The late medieval picture of lustful woman was replaced by a view of woman as pure and gentle. Perhaps strangely, the male became more associated with a set of qualities including not just reason but also imagination and passion. Genius was now seen as something ‘primitive’, ‘natural’, and unexplained by reason. As the notion of genius got tied with men, there were peculiar shifts and diagnoses: Rousseau denied that women could be geniuses because they lack the requisite passion, but Kant reversed things by insisting that genius obeys a sort of law or inner duty, and claiming that women lacked such discipline in their emotions.

 Freeland, Cynthia. Art Theory: A Very Short Introduction.Oxford U Press: New York, 2001.

Notes on Gender Issues in Art

*This for my MWF 1:30-2:30 and 5:30-6:30, and TTH 1:30-3:00 and 3:00-4:30 classes.

Is gender relevant to art, to the work an artist makes, or to meaning? What about sexual orientation? It seems some people think it matters—though why, and for what good reasons, remains to be seen.

Notes on Abstract Art

*This is for the 12:00-1:30 TTH graduating students...

Abstract art uses a visual language of form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world. By the end of the 19th century many artists felt a need to create a new kind of art which would encompass the fundamental changes taking place in technology, science and philosophy. The sources from which individual artists drew their theoretical arguments were diverse, and reflected the social and intellectual preoccupations in all areas of Western culture at that time.