Art Appreciation & Humanities

• Art appreciation involves understanding the universal qualities that define great art.

Purpose of Art Appreciation

• It encourages open-mindedness and thoughtful conversations with diverse perspectives.

Humanities

• Involves studying the human condition through visual and performing arts, architecture, literature, and their historical context.

Human Conditions

• Includes totality of human experiences like birth, death, emotions, reasoning, and awareness of mortality.

Taxonomy

• Homo sapiens are the only human species worldwide, capable of thought, language, object manipulation, art, and bipedalism.

Humanities: Language

• Language is the backbone of humanities; Classical languages help understanding the Greeks and the Romans.
• Latin was used by medieval churchmen.
• Cuneiform, a wedge-shaped writing system, was invented in the Near East.

Humanities: History

• Traditionally, scholars needed classical history knowledge; now, history is a social science.
• Santayana: "Who ignores the past is doomed to repeat it."
• Faulkner: "The past is never dead: it isn't even past."

Humanities: Classics

• Western societies: Greeks and Romans
• Philosophers: Plato (ideal form) and Aristotle (empirical observation)
• Playwrights: Sophocles, Virgil, Horace
• Homer: the epic poet
• Mesopotamia: the epic of Gilgamesh, Hammurabi the lawgiver
• Egypt: The Book of the Dead (Last Judgment)
• China: Confucius; Lao Tzu on the Tao
• Tibet: Own Book of the Dead (karma)

Humanities: Religion

• Religion concerns the supernatural and events beyond the five senses.
• Half the world's religions began with the patriarch.
• Abraham formed the root of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
• Many Eastern religions share samsara (illusion), karma, and nirvana (liberation from samsara): Hinduism and Buddhism.
• Where we go after we die is the fundamental question of mortality

Humanities: Philosophy

• Philosophy means "Love of Knowledge."
• Greeks, especially Plato and Aristotle, founded and developed philosophy.

Humanities: Visual Arts

• Includes sculpture, like Greek and Roman forms, and drawings.
• Paintings use pigment with a medium and binder, such as Mona Lisa by Da Vinci.

Humanities: Performing Arts

• Music combines sound into melody and harmony, like Beethoven's symphonies.
• Drama imitates life on stage, as seen in Shakespeare's plays like Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and Othello.
• Dance expresses human movement on stage, like Swan Lake-Ballet, sometimes in spiritual settings, like Whirling Dervishes of the Sufis (founded by Rumi-Muslim)

Historical Context

• Understanding humankind's biology and prehistoric phases, like Neolithic and Peolithic periods, is essential.
• Formative civilizations like Egyptians, Mesopotamians lead to the Greeks and Romans.
• Transitions from the Classic to Medieval Periods, the role of Islam in preserving Western Culture, and precursors of the Renaissance are studied.

Art

• Art, from the Latin "ars," is skill and craft, expressing human experiences developed within a society.
• It conveys mankind's relationship with the environment, reflecting past, present, and future civilizations.

Characteristics of Art

• Art encompasses more than aesthetics, reflecting experience, individuality, and culture.
• It speaks to human feelings, is dynamic, and always conveys a message.

The Artist Task

• Artists refresh vision and show the world in new ways, creating spaces, extraordinary versions of objects.
• Artists also record, commemorate, and give tangible forms to the unknown and to feelings/ideas.

Classification of Arts

• Visual Arts: create visual works (ceramics, drawing, painting, sculpture, printmaking, design, crafts, photography, video, architecture).
• Literary Arts: written works classified as fiction/non-fiction, poetry/prose, novels, short stories, drama.
• Performing Arts: use body, voice, objects to convey artistic expression: disciplines performed live for an audience.
• Pablo Picasso was a Spanish painter and sculptor (Left: The Weeping Woman, Right: Nude Woman with Turkish Bonne)