L03 - Modernism vs Postmodernism

Modernism

Modernism began in the 19th century and continued into around the 70's. Modernism's approach to art is all about stripping down a piece of art into the most simplistic form of just basic lines and colours without containing anything else. Below an example of modernism being as a chair, you can see the clear similarities with the basic colours and lines. 

Some may find these pieces of work as pleasing to their eye but that is based on every person's personal taste and opinion and not as a whole. There is not much emotion that is being conveyed in any of modernism's pieces but the idea of simplicity is very dominant. The pieces themselves are designed to be simple and supposed to do exactly where they are supposed to, but in doing so they have stripped themselves of the emotions that are supposed to be felt within the art work. This art follows a strictly cognitive approach but can that truly be called art?

Post Modernism

Post-modernism began around the 1960's and is still going on today. It takes the same approch in the terms of the way it looks as modernism but without stripping out the emotions of the artists. It looks to keep each artist's individual style which are usually form their past experiences which takes it away from the cognitive approach and keeps it more as a piece of art with emotions and experiences.

L02 - Media Discussion

"Pencil vs Camera  - 64" by Ben Heine

This piece is trying to put across the idea of routine and breaking out of it. The use of the monkey reinforces the idea that everyone is the same and following this same thing day in and day out. The use of the subway in the image is also well done as it talks about working and commuting. It does all this by being very metaphorical in what it is conveying.

The pencil part of the image is the main part of the whole piece. This part of the image is the metaphor which is the most central part of the image and the artist wants to draw your attention to it and convey across the meaning of no more routine. The artist even uses the words 'No More Routine' in order to get the meaning that he wants to convey across to his audience. This helps people who do not have a very wide area of experience in art to still understand the full meaning that he wishes to convey. Anyone with experience in artwork would still be able to understand what the image was trying to convey without those words.

The emotions that the artist is trying to convey within the image is such a common emotion that has been clearly felt from past experiences or even an emotion that he felt at the time of creating the piece of artwork. The emotion is very commonplace and is felt by not just the artist but by many others on a daily basis which makes it a lot easier for the audience to understand the message. The common saying of "break free" is the metaphor being used and the image of the money dashing out the subway car with the banana and suit which symbolises the daily routine of work and eating. The idea of breaking free, which the image shows, is the feeling that we all get when we wish to just break free, to just run when we are being laden with daily routine. This again helps the audience understand the emotion that the artist is trying to show as the artist has given us a common emotion in his piece of art.

Art and Understanding

1. Hegel states that art is dead. How does he arrive at this viewpoint? Answer by giving a brief summary of his philosophy. 

Hegel is said to have been the most closely identified with the cognitive theory of art. He states that there are 5 different types of art but also gives us a philosophical view of art in general. He states that  art in the modern period is dead. Unlike other philosophers who see philosophy as the intellectual study of a set of universal and timeless problems, Hegel sees it as more of a progressive development over time in which the human mind comes to understand itself better. Human understanding is different depending on time and place but at the heart of it all is Religion or the life of the spirit. This is because essential human nature is subjective and not objective. Within our bodies, lies an object had the ability of thinking, willing and feeling. It the self-knowledge of this that make up our true nature. This knowledge also free us from the causal and biological forces that we share with other physical and animal natures.

Throughout the ages we have seen human development marked through the progression of art through religion to philosophy. Philosophy is the conceptual grasp of truth and art is the presentation and understanding of truth by the means of images of sight, sound and touch. This pattern of 'art-religion-philosophy' is not just found within history but also within each history of these successive cultures. His example is that of the Greeks whose dominant aspect of culture was art and within Medieval Christendom was religion and within the 'modern' world, it is philosophy, art and religion. He ranks the five arts, architecture at the bottom, then sculpture, painting, music and at the top, poetry. This hierarchy is based on the diminishing need for material and space that each of these takes. The development of human understanding consists in a move from art to philosophy so it is easy to see why Hegel believes that modern art is dead. Only if we find a new art medium that does not involve these materials then it could continue this theory.

2. What is the difference between art and propaganda?

Most art contains messages that the artists wishes to convey across. But there needs to be a clear distinction between art and propaganda. The aim of propaganda is to secure belief and assent and it is very good at doing that through various media attributes such as words, images, film, sequences, narrative structures and music. Each of these pieces of media are very effective in conveying and affirming that message which makes a very powerful impact.

Art must do more that convey and assert a message in the way that propaganda does. Like other knowledge such as history, science and philosophy, art must secure belief through understanding. The claim that we learn from art is not that paintings, poems and plays can provide us with information or opinions in attractive ways but they help in our understanding by enhancing that information.

3. Give two arguments supporting aesthetic cognitivism.

The first argument is that art does enrich human understanding, which explains why it is easy to understand the place of art in our culture. It plays a major role in schools and universities and it's easy to see why. The purpose of educations is to develop and increase understanding and art is one form of this understanding meaning that art belongs as part of educations. More attention and resources are given to art that amusement or sport but that makes perfect sense given the positive impact that it has.

Secondly, cognitivism can help us understand someone's lifetime commitment to art as a painter, poet or 

composer. We must see this commitment to art as the artist's pursuit of pleasure. We must also see 

expressivism as an amateur just wallowing in emotion turbulence. This dedication to art, much like the same 

dedication to science can can be understood by the Delphic ideal 'Man, know thyself!'

4. Give two problematic aspects associated with aesthetic cognitivism.

We understand science generally but we are not just confined to natural sciences but are instead taking aboard the huge variety of different subjects such as mathematics, economics, philosophy, astronomy, physics, chemistry and biology etc. One way of characterizing these subjects is as a movement of thought. Moving from an established basis towards a potential conclusion using logic or a set rule of reasoning. The terminology for this often different between subjects but all of the share the same structure. In art however there is no structure or conclusion which lead us to see that works of art are done using imagination which stem from the artists mind which is very different from the sciences.

Again, looking at sciences and how they draw conclusions through experiments and working thoughts. These explanations that they arrive at can help you understand better but the same does not happen with art, each piece is different and unique and the same feeling or conclusion cannot be replicated into another piece of art, even a small difference can completely change the meaning or lose the meaning of the piece altogether. 

5.  How can a work of art enhance our experience? Give a brief answer.

We have many different experiences in life such as science, maths and sport. They are all the same whereas a work of art is a piece of imagination of the artist and therefore the opinion and taste will differ from person to person. This enhanced our experiences of the world by the way in which we use our imagination and being able to see the world differently.

Art and Emotion

1. In your own words give a definition of the term "Expressivism"

Expressivism is a form of "Expressionism" with is a school art in which the artists convey their various emotions and feelings into their art. Expressivism is applied to all art but does is not just applied to the visuals of art itself. It is very similar to the 19th Century "Romanticism" which implies that all art is closely related to feelings and emotions. Emotions and expressing those emotions to inspire their pieces of works is important for these artists.

2. How does Tolstoy define expressivism?

Tolstoy says:

'Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that others are infected by these feelings and also experience them.'

What he is saying in this quote is that all artists use experiences and the emotions in life and bring that out in the pieces of art that they create. The way that you can determine the success of the painting is if these same emotions are felt by the audience looking at it.

3. Give an example of an argument against emotional experience being the root of artistic production.

When looking got an emotion in a single piece of art, we seem to be ignoring the differences between complex and simple pieces of art. There are cases however where a lot of emotion in a piece of work is easily done. However the same cannot be said about more complex pieces of art. Art such as a play has a lot of different characters with various relationships with each other that change throughout the play which makes it impossible to say if there is just one emotion at work. An example of Othello by Shakespeare is given in which if the character Othello symbolizes jealousy and Iago symbolizes malice then what is the emotion being portrayed in the play. This range of emotions is found commonly in tragedies and the same can be said for his other tragedies as well.

4. Does the portrayal of emotion in a work of art require that emotion to be actually felt by the

audience.

There is an important gap in the idea of expressivism that exists between the audience and 

the artist. Should we be feeling the same emotions that the characters or the artist is feeling when he created the play? No, which may not seem that obvious given the fact that we do sometimes feel sadness when reading or watching something saddening but this does not we have failed to appreciate the film because we have failed to feel these emotions. An example of this is that if a character is racist, do we need to be racist in order to feel the same emotions? The point that this makes is that a play or work of art is not successful based on whether the audience feels the same emotions.

5. Compared to Tolstoy, in what way does Collingwood's theory offer a more sophisticated 

view of expressivism? Give at least two examples.

Collingwood says that expressivism is not about art work being influenced by the emotions of the artists. He also says that art itself, is not an emotion experience of something that has happened before the piece has been created but rather that the emotion has been gradually refined and identified during the creation of that piece of art. The artist would create this piece of art layer by layer until it was finished and only then would the emotion that the artist was trying to convey, would be seen. 

‘Every imaginative experience is a sensuous experience raised to the

imaginative level by an act of consciousness’ Collingwood

He is saying that every thought and emotion that if felt from the piece of art is not from raw emotion but instead the imagination and thoughts of the artists.It also further proves the point about the simple version of expressivism that Tolstoy came up with that fails to understand the imagination of the artist which he feels plays a very central role. Imagination is part of 'art proper', as equally as expression. A piece of art cannot me made entirely from emotions as it must go through the imaginative process in order to become an imaginative discovery. This means that each piece of art is all about self-discovery and going through the entire process of creating a piece of work.

Art and Beauty

1. Describe the concept of the “aesthetic attitude” according to Bullough. Give two objections to the concept.

Bullough stated that there was two concepts that made up  "aesthetic attitude", contemplation and distance. He also talked about "physical distance" which was used to describe a specific psychological trait, "a factor in art and an aesthetic principle". He uses as an example of fog which is usually associated with anxiety and fear but if you view this fog from a far distance, then you take yourself out of the fog and therefore the emotions that you would feel.

The first argument against this concept is George Dickie's essay called "The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude" He scrutinizes the idea of "distance" and "disintrestedness". He says that there is not a discernable difference between "being distanced"  in which we are induced "when the curtain goes up, when we walk to a painting or when we look at the sunset" and if we are distanced from this then we are effectively means "focussing our attention on" and needs no special term to describe it.

The second argument is that if the aesthetic attitude is about applying a distinct attitude towards an object, then this has no necessary affiliation with art forms. Kant takes this idea to show us his own comparisons, for example, delight is not just limited to art, sunsets, mountainsides or a rose, but those aesthetics would require a judgement in the form of taste, beauty etc. With Kant's argument, 'The aesthetic attitude' does not explain that there is a connection between art and the aesthetic.

2. What are Kant's three propositions about aesthetic taste?

German Philisopher Hans-Georg Gadamer aims to explain Kant's concept of the aesthetically beautiful. He claims firstly, the aesthetic taste is not based on someone's opinion but rather on the universal approval of what is aesthetically tasteful. Secondly, he states that this comes from your personal emotions felt from these pieces of art or the sunset etc and not on your understanding of art. The final thing that he claims is that the a genius is productive but not necessarily useful. The free creativity is not bound by any rules so is more effective in the creation of art.

3. How does Gadamer make a connection between art and the aesthetic?

By looking at the Mona Lisa is the example given. It can be seen from three different levels, the first being the piece as an object at it's basic level of a wooden frame with a canvas made from various materials but it is obvious that Leonardo did not mean for us to view it as such. Our judgement on it's aesthetic beauty is based on ourselves and we don't need any guidance in order to come to a conclusion. If we fail however in seeing the representation that this then the artist has failed, therefore the artist's creativity actually needs an audience to mean anything.

4. What are the main ideas behind the theory that art is a form of play?

Play is characterised as an activity without purpose. We as humans, do engage in play, as well as many different animals along with our basic physical instincts as well but we 'play' as well. Gadamer tells us that it's a mistake to think that play is a trivial matter.  Play is not an activity without purpose and does not need to be pointless. Game such as chess or soccer, have games and rules within the play itself but if we take chess, as an example, taking an opponents pieces from the game serves no purpose to the game but within the rules, it serves as an achievement. Play is also serious in the way that it demands a lot of skills which humans are more than capable of and Gadamer believes that humans are more than capable of art as well, as it is also a form of play where audiences and artists join. 

Kendall Walton's book on aesthetics, agrees that art is a kind of play. This idea is developed by him by imagining arts as different 'props' in a game of make-believe. The art value lies within the value of the game. As an example, he believe that it's a brilliant invention of letting the bad guys win or letting the good guys win as we are unable to do these activities in real life because of the consequences. 

'The play of art is not real life, but it has to do with real life and so many that enrich it'

5. In terms of how he distinguishes aesthetic judgement, what was Kant thinking about when he came up with the expression "purpose without purposefulness"?

Kant refers to aesthetic judgement as 'disinterestedly free'. He uses the example of a jacket and how you may like the way it looks and this is all a matter of taste, however another judgement may be made of how well it's design works. Does it keep out to cold or the rain? This is an example of how a purpose does not apply to art, as art is not design. He does agree that art work is intentionally created to engage an audience by conveying it's own symbolic hidden meanings but it is not design and does not have a purpose. This is the the thinking behind this expression, 'purposefulness without purpose'. This phrase can be used to support his arguments on sport that the essay discusses.

Art and Pleasure

Taste and Tragedy

Tragedy explains how an audience gains pleasure from negative feelings such as despair and fear. These feelings would not normally give you pleasure but it is because of when the negative feelings stop, you are pleased that they have stopped which is what you delight in. When the mind is bored, it will look for anything that will take it out of this moment of emotionless boredom such as plays or public executions.

Storytellers use as much emotions as possible, especially negative emotions to grasp their audience as much as possible. The audience enjoys these negative emotions more when it is placed in front of them as they see them as safe emotions, they are not real and therefore cannot truly harm them.

Collingwood on Art as Amusement


Collingwood gives us his view on what pleasure is and how it is defined. Many people enjoy work or reading books but means that they take value in it and nothing more. The term pleasure needs to be defined more as something that is enjoyable, what makes it enjoyable?

Happiness and pleasure are only just synonyms and the polar opposite of pain. Both of these tendencies can be found in Utilitarianism which has had a huge impact on society, allowing these ideas to develop further.

Collingwood states that 'art as amusement' is very different to 'art proper' and the two should never be confused. He does not say that people cannot find amusment in art but simply that people who look to go to the cinema or read a book for pleasure are more than likely to read or see something much simpler rather than people who would go see an independant film or read a far more challenging book. The simpler pleasure seems to be the most common.

Mill on Higher and Lower pleasures


Under the assumption that we gain pleasure for art, we cannot all value art to the same extent. Different people have different views on what is pleasurable, for example, people may enjoy listening to Queen whilst other people may not, even more complexly someone who enjoys Queen more than others. Should we use pleasure as a measurement for how good something is as people have different opinions on different things.

David Hume: The Enlightenment

The Scottish Enlightenment was an intellectual movement that happened during the 18th Century. It covered a wide range of ideas in the areas of philosophy, chemistry, geology, architecture, poetry, engineering, technology, economics, sociology, medicine and history.

David Hume believed in hard evidence, if you could not use facts or proof then it was not true. He stood firmly against the church for that same reason, they could not provide a shred of evidence to support their claims of god or heaven and hell, and that they used these ideas to take a hold of the faithful.