Fundamentals of Humanities

• This module aims to enhance the understanding of humanities and the Arts, covering topics such as fundamental principles and the system of art appreciation.
• It seeks to provide insights and ideas to aid the understanding of humanities and the arts.

Learning Objectives:

• Illustrate knowledge of what humanities is and why study it.
• Characterize art and artistic expression based on personal experiences with art.
• Discuss the nature of art's preliminary expression.
• Characterize the assumptions of the art.
• Define system in art appreciation.
• Categorize works of art by citing personal experiences.

Humanities Defined:

• Derived from the word "HUMANUS" meaning to be truly human.
• In Latin, it means showing qualities of rationality, kindness, and tenderness.
• Being truly human involves cultural enhancement and refinement.
• Culture originates from the Latin terms "Cultus-Colere," meaning to cultivate and develop.
• Culture encompasses the general way of life in human society, including ways of thinking, beliefs, customs, language, art, and traditions.
• Humanities focuses on understanding the ways of life developed by people as expressions of themselves.
• During the Renaissance period, colleges and universities used the word humanities as art appreciation.
• Concerned with human thoughts, feelings, and relations, also known as human expressions.

Importance of Studying Humanities:

• Essential due to the shrinking world caused by the information technology explosion.
• Mastering humanities enables individuals to understand and empathize with others, increasing their marketability.
• Facilitates understanding of the past to comprehend the present, as culture is shaped by the past.
• Enables realization of differing interpretations of life and history.
• Studying the past aids in understanding literature and art, reflecting past cultures and achievements.
• Provides contact with history, music, art, philosophy, and literature, enriching our existence.

Advantages of Studying Humanities:

• Provides the opportunity to examine what it means to be human.
• Promotes recognition of fundamental values and principles like beauty, truth, love, justice, and faith.
• Develops critical thinking and appreciation for cultural heritage in works of art.
• Fosters understanding across barriers of race, class, gender, and ethnicity.
• Helps in seeing the interconnectedness of all areas of knowledge.
• Introduces people, places, and ideas that may be unfamiliar.
• Helps conceptualize a global perspective by studying cultures and traditions through artworks.
• Supports and strengthens local arts communities by learning to value creativity.
• Addresses challenges faced in families, communities, and the nation.
• Emphasizes the dignity of every human being.
• Aims to develop human virtue in its fullest form.
• Reforms social order by understanding what is inherently human, rather than remaking humanity.
• Focuses on man as the central character with aesthetic potentials used for transformation.

Nature of Art:

• The word "ART" comes from the Aryan root AR, meaning "join" or "put together”.
• The Latin terms ARS and ARTIS refer to everything artificially made or composed by man.
• Art requires an artist and the ability to perceive beauty, but not every beautiful thing qualifies as art.
• Art is a product of human creativity, imagination, and expression.
• Spectators of art can distinguish fine and beautiful art from what is not, contributing to art appreciation.
• Cultivating an appreciation of art involves developing a taste for fine and beautiful things.
• Appreciation leads to better choices and consideration of aesthetic and practical value.
• Learning to appreciate art enriches life, regardless of one's profession.

Creativity in Art Making:

• Requires thinking outside the box and sets artwork apart.
• Creativity leads to originality, distinguishing extraordinary works from mere copies or imitations.
• Imagination is not constrained by norms and enables crafting something bold and new.
• Artists use their imagination to bring forth reality through creation.

Art as Expression:

• Artists express emotions rather than induce them, exploring their own emotions to create beauty.
• Art reflects the inner selves of individuals, rather than external realities.

Human Actions and Art:

• Actions directed by the intellect can lead to virtue or art.

Art as Creation:

• Involves making or composing objects for human needs, contemplating its enjoyment, beauty or meaning.
• It is a skillful arrangement of nature's elements to express human feelings, thoughts, or emotions in an enjoyable way.
• Art is the subjective expression of thoughts and feelings.

Assumptions of Art:

• A universal language that evokes emotions, ideas, and thoughts.
• A timeless creation that can be enjoyed and understood by all people, regardless of age or ability.
• Cultural in nature, involving experience, expression, and creation.
• Tends to imitate but expresses nature with clarity and meaning, making it a creative activity.

Art Appreciation:

• Knowledge and understanding of universal and timeless qualities in great art.
• Understanding art movements, styles, and techniques helps in the development, evaluation, and improvement of personal artwork.

Criteria for Judgement:

• Considers description, analysis, content, meaning, and judgment.

Beauty:

• Beauty Lies: in a source of pleasure, making an art beautiful.
• Three ideas on where beauty resides: objective, subjective, and tertiary.
• Beauty depends on the situation.
• Beauty relies on both the object and subject coming together.
• Art depends on feelings and opinions, meaning tastes are relative and personal.

Standards and Objective:

• Art appreciation can be subjective or objective.
• How to form standards: Successive experiences reveal insights, critical study, consensus, judgement/time.

Judgement and Sentiment:

• Everything in nature and art is beautiful.
• Some things appear ugly because of familiarity.

Categories of Beautiful:

• Sublime: astonishment and awe (starry heavens, mountain).
• Nice: sympathy, love, tenderness, and modesty (children, flowers).
• Comic: satire and irony (exaggerated, repetitious etc).

Role of Art:

• A method of verifying artistic works.
• Its a technique to develop artistic or stimulate the understanding of art and sensibility.

Different Forms of Art:

• Visual Arts: appeals to sight (painting and sculpture)
• Literature and Combined Arts
• Performing Arts: Music and Dance, Film and cinematography
• Applied Arts: Fashion and Furniture

Visual Arts:

• Appeals to sight, driven by reproducing viewed things as perceived.
• Involves visual aspects of performance arts, applied arts, etc.
• Mediums include paintings, drawing, sculpture, photography, film and digital imaging.

Film:

• It is created through successions of stills images in order to create momentum.
• Focuses on aesthetics, cultures the industry.
• Techniques for movies, animation and imagery (CGI)
• Simulates imagination beyond the realms of ideas, feelings and beauty.

Performance Art:

• Live, uses humans as a medium with visual or prop support.
• Cannot be traded as a commodity.

Poetry:

• Use of emotional words to emote through expression
• Combination of movements, tone, intensity that adds value to the poem.

Architecture:

• The beauty through creation of the buildings aesthetic
• Functional purposes of a building rather than expressiveness
• Requires Important elements of, Plan Construction Design
• Deserving features with an expressive title

Dance:

• Movement that follows Musical Rhythm.
• Creative Expression that is not bound to any rules but free expression.

Literary Art:

• Using only words through emotions

Divisions of Art:

• With respect to purpose:
• Practical arts: production for artifacts like furniture and utensils.
• Liberal arts: intellectual efforts like psychology or philosophy
• Fine arts: human creativity or expression of beauty through ways of visual art.
• Major arts: actual and potential expressiveness through, dance, music and literature
• Minor arts: practical use like interior design
• With respect to media and forms:
  • Plastic arts – perceived by sight
  • Phonetic arts– based on sound and words
  • Kinetic arts – rhythmic movement
  • Pure arts – which have on medium
  • Mixed arts- uses 2+ median

Classifications of Arts:

Space arts

• 2 dimensional
• 3 dimensional

Time arts

• auditory arts

Synthesis:

• Humanities is art.
• Humanities is the learning branch of learning which is to do with humans expressions.
• Development for humans to have fully understand the fullest form.
• Art is a expression of thought that is universal.
• Depends on opinions or feeling, and are divided for better consideration.