Why do we need art?

• Art has played an important part in our search for the meaning of the human experience

• People create rituals to connect with unseen powers and with the past and the future.

• Works of art (statues, masks, chalices) are used in rituals

• Visual arts are sophisticated forms of human communication

A work of art has two components:

• Form (line, color, texture, spatial attributes, etc.)

• Content - aspects that impart meaning (subject matter, representational and nonrepresentational art, the ideas contained in a work, the context in which the work was created, the intention of the artist, the reception of the work by the audience, the meanings of the work to both artist and audience)

Cubi XIXDavid Smith, 1964

example of nonrepresentational art

A work of art is also described and categorized according to style and medium

• Style – the combination of form and content that makes a work distinctive (ex. French Baroque vs. Roman Baroque)• Medium – the material(s) from

which an object is made

What is Beauty?

• Something that brings pleasure to the senses or to the mind or to the spirit.

• We can learn about the cultures and values of various peoples from the way they have represented beauty.

Realistic or naturalistic styles of beauty

The AnnunciationJan van Eyck, c. 1434-36.

Shows the relationship between the Old Testament and the NewTriple windows symbolize the Trinity

Abstraction – the transformation of visible forms into patterns that suggest the original

• Abstraction through idealization – artists represent beauty not as it is but as they think it should be.

Large Plane Trees

Vincent van Gogh, 1889

How to interpret van Gogh’s work?

• Art historians use Freud’s work to suggest that despite its light, bright colors, there is something ominous in the uneasy relationship between the looming trees and the tiny people

How might Marxist art critics view this work?

Humanity’s over-concern with material values

• Van Gogh never achieved material success• The painting didn’t sell in the nineteenth-

century, but now it is worth millions of dollars, so it has become a status symbol of the wealthy elite.

• The workers toiling away to repair the street, underneath the gigantic trees (multinational corporations?)

Bergen-Belsen female guards are being guarded by British soldiers

Irma Grese

Youngest and most hated of the female guards

Herta BotheBothe looks haggard and has dark circles under her eyes after working for weeks in the camp to bury around 17,000 corpses …Herta Bothe is well known because of her defiant attitude and her show of anger when the women were ordered by the British to carry the rotten corpses to mass graves with their bare hands. In interviews years later, Bothe described how she was terrified of contracting typhus because the guards were not allowed to wear gloves or masks.

http://www.scrapbookpages.com/bergenbelsen/BergenBelsen08.html

Calvin Klein ads

Women and men as sex objects

Lara Stone

Sean Opry

Conveying Atrocity in Image

• Kim Phuc• Vietnam• June 8, 1972

Kim Phuc todayMarried, two children, Canadian citizen

Pbs.org