LECTURE 1: INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF ART
BSMT 2 |ART APPRECIATION
PREPARED BY BEEFCORNEXX AND EERIEJIE
TOPIC 1: HISTORY OF ART AND HUMANITIES
WHAT IS ART? ETYMOLOGY OF THE CONCEPT
• ART - Latin word ars,which means “skills.”
Greek techne, from which our modern word “technology”
is derived (Ortiz et al., 1976).
There are various definitions of art, according to history:
a) Ancient Latin
Ars is a craft or specialized form of skill.
b) Medieval Latin
Ars is considered as any special form of book-
learning, such as grammar or logic, magic or
astrology.
c) Renaissance Period
The word ars required the meaning that was inherent in its
ancient form of craft.
d) Seventeenth-Century
In this era, the problem and idea of aesthetics, which is the
study of beauty,began to unfold distinctly from the notion of
technical workmanship.
e) Eighteenth-Century
Art evolved to distinguish fine arts from useful arts.
THE HUMANITIES
Humanities, according to Dudley et al. (1960), constitute
one of the oldest and most important means of expression
developed by man.
Humans have long been exercising what it means
to be a human long before he was even aware of his being
one (Caslib et al., 2018)
• started even before the term itself has been coined.
The Galloping
Wild Boar in
Altamira,
Spain
• This cave painting was claimed to belong to the Upper
Paleolithic Age.
•found by aSpaniard and his daughter while they were
exploring the cave (saw pictures of hind and bison).
•proved that pre-historic men, with their tools, already
manifested earliest attempts at recording their innermost
thoughts and interest (Caslib et al., 2018).
TOPIC 2: ASSUMPTIONS OF ART
1. ART IS UNIVERSAL
-Art is timeless and universal, spanning generations and
continents through and through.
-Regardless of origin, time, place, art stayed on because it
is liked and enjoyed by people continuously.
Common misconception: Age is not a factor in determining
art. “An art is not good because it is old, but old because it is
good” (Dudley et al., 1960)
2. ART IS NOT NATURE
-Art is man’s expression of his reception of nature.
-Art is made by man, whereas nature is given around us.
-Artists are not expected to duplicate nature; they can only
reinterpret it or even distort it.
3. ART INVOLVES EXPERIENCE
-Unlike fields of knowledge that involve data, art is known
by experiencing and cannot be abstracted from actual doing.
-we have to sense it, see or hear it, and see
and hear it.
-experiencing art is its sense of being highly
personal, individual, and subjective.
-In philosophical terms, the perception of
art is always a value judgment.
-depends on perceiver’s tastes, biases, and what he has
inside him.
Dudley et al. (1960) affirmed that “all art depends on
experience, and if one is to know art, he must know it not as
fact or information but as experience.”
4. ART IS CULTURAL
-A culture of particular people is expressed in art forms.
-material culture referring to:
tangible facets of a culture where a community or ethnicity
expresses their beliefs, sociopolitical structure, concepts of
gender and sex, and worldviews, among others.
- Art is a facet of culture, ritual dances are part of
performative art, motifs in clothing are art, and traditional
music is art.
TOPIC 3: ART AS CREATION, IMAGINATION, AND
EXPRESSION
ART APPRECIATION AS A WAY OF LIFE
•Art is not the manner of solely depicting realities and what
we find in nature. Rather it is the creation of new,
unconventional, sometimes disturbing, and
irrational perspectives of the world and human
realities.
JEAN PAUL SARTRE
-famous French philosopher of the 20th century
-“The role of art as a creative work is to depict the world in
a completely different light and perspective, and the source
is due to human freedom (Greene, 1995 as cited in Caslib
et al., 2018 p. 14).
HUMAN FREEDOM
- practice of art is possible.
1) freedom of the mind to imagine
2) freedom of the hands to create,
3) freedom of the individual to showcase their art, and
4) freedom of the peoples to marvel at a particular work of
art
