Art Appreciation

What is Art?

Art is the process or product or deliberately arranging elements in a way that appeals to the
senses or emotions. It encompasses a diverse range of human activities, creations, an models of
expressions including music an literature.

Art is an expression of thought through a visible medium. It is about looks an appearance. It is

about pleasing or displeasing the eye. – Anne91 Airaudi

Art is a form and content. Form means (1) the elements of art, (2) the principles of design, (3) the
actual, physical materials that the artist has used. Form, in this context is concrete an fairly easily
describe – no matter which piece of art is under scrutiny. “Content” is idea-based and means (1)
what the artist meant to portray, (2) what the artist actually did portray and (3) how we react, as
individuals, to both the intended and actual messages. It also includes ways in which a work was
influence – by religion, or politics, or society in general, or even the artist’s use of hallucinogenic
substances – at the time it was created. – Shelley Esaak

Art is the expression or application of human creative skill or imagination, typically in a visual
form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciate primarily for their beauty or
emotional power.

What is Art Appreciation?

Art appreciation is the knowledge and understanding of the universal and timeless qualities that
identify all great art.

Art appreciation involves having an understanding of all the qualities that comprise a great work
of art.

Art appreciation involves learning about certain time periods, movements, styles and techniques
so that a person has a better understanding of the basis for the art as well as of the art itself.

What is Aesthetics?

Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and appreciation of beauty; deals
with the question of beauty an artistic taste.

Types of Art
A. Major Arts

1. Architecture – is the art of science of building; specifically, the art or practice of designing and
building structures and especially habitable ones.

2. Dance – is a sport and art form that generally refers to movement of the boy, usually rhythmic,
and used as a form of expression, social interaction or presented in a spiritual or
performance setting.

3. Fashion Design – is the applied art dedicate to clothing and lifestyle accessories created within
the cultural and social influences of a specific time.

4. Literature – comes from Latin word littera which means letter. In broad sense, it means any
written work.
5. Music – is an art form whose medium is sound organized in time. Common elements of music
are pitch (melody and harmony), rhythm (tempo, meter and articulation), dynamics, and
the sonic qualities of timbre and texture.

B. Minor Arts

1. Decorative Art – is concerned with the design and decoration of objects that is chiefly prized
for its utility, rather than for its purely aesthetic qualities, like ceramics, glassware,
basketry, jewelry, metal ware, furniture, textiles, clothing and many others.

2. Graphic Art – refers to the art of drawing or painting or printmaking which focuses on visual
communication and presentation.

3. Industrial Art – is tantamount to practical arts,, such as engineering, metalworking or

carpentry.

4. Plastic Art – includes those visual arts that involve the use of materials that can be mole or
modulate in some way, often in three dimensions. Examples are clay, paint and plaster.

5. Popular Art – refers to any dance, literature, music, theatre, or other art form intended to be
received and appreciated by ordinary people in a literate an technologically-advanced
society dominated by urban culture.

6. Painting – is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface like
wall, paper, canvas, wood and glass.

7. Sculpture – comes from the Latin word sculpere, which means to carve. It can be defined as
the art or practice of creating three-dimensional forms or figures through carving,
modeling and casting.

Types of Artists

A. The Visual Arts B. The Performing Arts C. The Literary Arts

1. Architect 1. Actor 1. Essayist
2. Designer 2. Composer 2. Novelist
3. Painter 3. Dancer 3. Poet
4. Photographer 4. Instrumentalist 4. Playwright
5. Sculptor 5. Singer 5. Scriptwriter

The Importance of Art

1. Art communicates feelings and emotions expressively and forcefully.

2. It connects people around the world.
3. It stimulates our thoughts when recreating the message of the artist.
4. It is a great tool for learning.
5. It reminds us of people’s selfless actions and what they believe in.
6. It serves as a source of inspiration and aesthetic pleasure.
7. It makes the surrounding look better an complete.
8. It commemorates certain occasions.
9. It transforms us into highly cultures an respectable human beings
10. It makes us human.
 The Different Theories of Aesthetics

1. Imitationalism – The aesthetic which applies to artwork that look very realistic. These
artworks contain recognizable, realistic looking objects and scenes that closely imitate
what we see in the real world.

2. Formalism – The aesthetic theory which focuses on the effective arrangements of lines, colors,
shapes, and other elements of art. They are not intended to look realistic. A formalist
artwork is considered to be successful if the artist has created a visually interesting
design.

3. Emotionalism – The aesthetic theory which stresses the expressive qualities in an artwork. The
primary purpose of an emotionalist artwork is to vividly communicate moos, feelings an
ideas to the viewer. The main focus is to get the viewer’s attention in a dramatic way to
impact the viewer’s emotions.

VISUAL ARTS
The visual arts are art forms which focus on the creation of works, which are primarily visual in
nature such as drawing, painting, photography, printmaking, and filmmaking.

The following are elements which are used in the development of visual arts:

Medium – the material used to make a work of art. Different mediums have different effects.
Example: Coffee, sand, oil, acrylic, mud, clay, etc.

Tension – a controlled dramatic quality or pairing of opposites in works of art.

Example: Contrasting white and black; Asymmetrical formations of sculptures.

Perspective – the two to three dimensional quality of artwork, and its successful use draw a
viewer more deeply into the artwork. Seeks to create a form, distance and makes the art look
real.

Plan – the pattern, organization, or map system of art, how its parts or divisions are arranged
such that the viewer’s divisions are arranged such as their eyes drawn to the key parts.

The Subject of Art

In any art form- painting, music, sculpture, architecture, or dance – there is always a subject that
serves as the foundation of the creation of the work of art. The subject of art is varied. A subject
of art is usually anything that is represented in the art work. It is varied- it may bee a person,
object, scene or event.

Artworks that depict something easily recognized by most people are called representational or
objective arts. Painting, sculpture, graphic arts, literature, and theatre arts are generally classified
as representational, although some paintings and sculptures are without subjects, Music and
dance may or may not have subjects.

Artworks that have no resemblance to any real subject are called non-representational or non-
objective arts. They do not represent anything and they are what they are. They rather appeal
directly to the senses primarily because of the satisfying organization of their elements.

Some contemporary painters have shifted their interest to the work of art as an object in itself, an
exciting combination of shapes and colors that fulfills the aesthetic need without having to
represent images or tell a story. Many modern paintings have a purely visual appeal; so difficult
that literal-oriented spectators cannot appreciate them.
On the contrary, traditional sculptures and paintings have subjects. When looking at a traditional
painting or a statue, one expects to recognize the subject- a man, a dog, a landscape.

The Function of Art

Every art has a definite function since it satisfies a particular need.

Four main functions:

1. Aesthetic function – through art, man becomes conscious of the beauty of nature. He
benefits from his own work and from those done by his fellowmen. He learns to use,
love, and preserve them for his enjoyment and appreciation.

2. Utilitarian function – With the creation of the various forms of art, man now lives in
comfort, and happiness. Through art, man is provided with shelter, clothing, food, light,
medicine, beautiful surroundings, personal ornamentals, entertainment, language,
transportation, and other necessities and convenience of life. Art not only enriches man’s
life but also improves nature through landscape gardening, creation of superhighways,
and through propagation and conservation – of natural resources.

3. Cultural function – through the printed matter, art transmits and preserves skills and
knowledge from one generation to another. It makes man aware of his/her cultural
background, making him/ her more knowledgeable and his/her life more enduring and
satisfying.

4. Social function – through civic and graphic arts, man learns to love and help each other.
International understanding and cooperation are fostered and nations become more
unified, friendly, cooperative, helpful and sympathetic.

The Scope of Arts

1. Fine arts or Independent Arts – made primarily for aesthetic enjoyment through the
senses, especially visual and auditory.
Examples: Visual arts: painting, sculpture, literature, dance, drama, etc.
2. Practical arts or Utilitarian Arts – intended for practical use. It is the development of raw
materials for utilitarian purposes.
Examples: Architecture, Industrial art, household art, civic art, commercial art, graphic
art, etc.

The Process of Art Appreciation

1. Description – In this step, objective observations about what is seen is noted. Describe only
the facts such as the name of the artist, his or her nationality, and information about
him/her; the name of the artwork or the year/s it was made. Describe as well the details
that is seen in the art work such as the line shape, form, space, texture, color and value.

2. Analysis – In this step, a consideration for the most significant art principles used in the
artwork should be noted. Principles like, Balance, Contrast, Emphasis, Harmony, Variety,
Unity, Gradation, Movement, Rhythm, Proportion, Depth, and Composition.

3. Interpretation – Based on the artwork, what have you learned so far? What do you think was
the artist trying to say? Why did the artist create this artwork? What do you think does
this mean? What feelings do you have when looking at the artwork? Do you think there
are things in the artwork that represent other symbols?
4. Judgment – Do you like the artwork? Is it a good artwork? Is it important? Then justify your
opinion, explain why you feel the way you feel about the artwork. Always present a
criteria in judging/ appreciating the artwork.

The Artist’s Medium

Concepts:

 Medium refers to the material used by an artist. (Media – plural).

 Technique is the manner by which an artist manipulates the medium.
 Combined arts or Mixed media are those whose mediums can be both seen and
heard and which exist in both space and time.
 Painting is the art of creating meaningful effects on a flat surface by the use of
pigments.
 Sculpture is the construction of a figure by putting together module segments of
the material.

Medium are the materials which are used by an artist to interpret his/ her feelings or
thoughts. Painter  pigments on wood, canvas; Sculptor  steel, marble, bronze, wood,
metal; Musician  instruments; Literary Writer  words.

On the basis of medium, the arts are primarily classified as visual and auditory.
Visual arts are those whose medium can be seen and which occupy space.
Auditory arts are those whose medium can be heard and expressed in time.
Assumptions of Art
 
I. ART IS UNIVERSAL
Literature has provided key words of art.
 Illiad and the Odyssey are the two Greek Epics that one’s being taught in school.
 The Sanskrit pieces Mahabharata and Ramanaya are also staples in this fields.
 
In every country and in every generation, there is always art. Often times, people feel that what is
considered artistic are only those which have been made long time ago. This is a misconcepcion.
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)
 
In the Philippines, the works of Jose Rizal and Francisco Balagtas are not being read because
they are old.
 
Florante at Laura never fails to teach high school students the beauty of love, one that is
universal and pure.
 
Ibong Adarna, another Filipino masterpiece, has always captured the imagination of the young
with its timeless lessons.
 
When we recite the Psalms, we feel in communion with King David as we feel one with him in
his conversation with God.
 
When we listen to a Kundiman or perform folk dances, we still enjoy the way our Filipino
ancestors while away their time in the past.
 
II. ART IS NOT NATURE
 
In the Philippines, it is not entirely novel to hear some consumers of local movies remark that
these movies produced locally are unrealistic. They contend that local movies work around
certain formula to the detriment of substance and faithfulness to reality of movies.
 
Paul Cezanne, a french painted a scene from reality entitled Well and Grinding Wheel in the
Forest of the Chateau Noir .
 
III.       ART INVOLVES EXPERIENCE
 
Getting this far without a satisfactory definition of art can be quite weird for some. For most
people, art does not require a full definition. Art is just experience. By experience, we mean the
“actual doing of something”(Dudley et al., 1960) and it also affirmed that art depends on
experience, and if one is to know art, he must know it not as fact or information but as an
experience.
 
A work of an art then cannot be abstracted from actual doing. In order to know what an artworks,
we have to sense it, see and hear it.
 
An important aspect of experiencing art is its being highly personal,individual, and subjective. In
philosophical terms, perception of art is always a value judgment. It depends on who the
perceive is, his tastes, his biases, and what he has inside.
THE ART WORLD

Art Market – Economic entailment of arts which includes production, selling, competition, rise
and fall of monetary value of arts.

Art Adviser – an art connoisseur/ expert;

Art Dealer – may be an art cannoissuer/ expert, who deals within the art market; maybe a “re-
seller” or an agent for art pieces sold within the art market.

Art Market and The Press – the influence and power of the press in marketing arts ( art exhibits /
galleries / artists)

Auction – an activity where pieces of arts are sold either by artists themselves or by dealers.

Art Markets
Darius A. Spieth, Professor of Art History, College of Art and Design, Louisiana State University
 
Enlivened by ever-higher record prices attained at auction and in private sales, interest in art
markets has dramatically increased during recent decades. Since exceptionally high prices attract
commensurate media attention, the subject has attained a new level of public interest. Scholarly
consideration of art markets, too, has intp ensified. The investigation of art markets has always
been embedded in art historical studies but previously presented itself in different guises: as the
history of collections, as art connoisseurship, or as provenance history, to name but a few.
Art markets can be divided into a primary and a secondary market. The primary market is where
works are first sold after they were created by an artist; the secondary market deals with any
subsequent re-sales, whether through a dealer’s private transaction or at auction. Auctions are
often regarded as the only viable benchmark for an object’s worth, as the price formation process
can be openly observed and results are generally accepted as objective.
Auctions have existed since Classical antiquity, although they fell into disuse by the Middle
Ages. During the Renaissance period in Italy art patronage blossomed, but there was hardly a
liquid market for portable art objects of the type that defines art markets as we know them today.
A key historical moment in the formation of such liquid markets for portable objects was the
emergence of a collector-base within the mercantile middle-class of Flanders, Holland, and some
parts of Italy during seventeenth century. A network of private dealers and auctions now created
synergies, which allowed for a flourishing market of mostly paintings. However, especially in
Protestant Holland, art markets could not openly operate as a formca of luxury consumption.
Antoine Watteau: L'Enseigne de Gersaint, oil on canvas, 1.63x3.08 m, 1721 (Berlin, Charlottenburg Palace); public
domain
This attitude changed in eighteenth-century France. Edmé-François Gersaint was a French art
dealer who traveled frequently to the Low Countries to acquire exotic shells and, later,
Netherlandish art. His trips inspired him to hatch the idea of auctions as a marketing tool that
transformed art markets into venues of luxury consumption for a general audience. He was the
first to conceive, for instance, lavishly illustrated auction catalogs to inspire the fantasy of his
buyers. By the middle of century, Paris functioned as a leading international clearinghouse at the
crossroads of several art markets (Italy, Holland, etc.), but London was already on the rise as a
major competitor, where auction companies like Christie’s and Sotheby’s emerged. The French
Revolution made London’s ascent over Paris as the most highly capitalized art market center
irreversible: while in France noble collections were confiscated and dispersed, the value of art
dropped by more than half, and inflationary money and wars destroyed confidence of both
buyers and sellers, British aristocrats and dealers took advantage of the situation and rose to a
leadership position as international market makers.

Lithographic poster for Galeries Bernheim-Jeune, 1903; public domain

Over the course of the nineteenth century, art markets expanded exponentially. Art by living
artists was frequently sold side-by-side with Italian Renaissance and Baroque or Netherlandish
seventeenth-century masters. Barbizon School painters became the first living artists to directly
sell their works at auction. Expansion of global trade and colonialism made the arrival, on a
larger scale, of antiquities from the Middle East, of porcelain from China and Japan, or even of
African artifacts possible. By the time of the Impressionists, the Parisian Salon’s monopoly for
the display of contemporary art was challenged by private dealers, such as Bernheim-Jeune and
Durand-Ruel. After the end of the Civil War, the United States emerged as the first major non-
European center of demand. Early American industrialists―the “robber barons”―built mansions
mimicking Versailles and bought European art, old and new, at above-market levels, culminating
in the American dealer James F. Sutton’s acquisition of Millet’s Angelus at the 1889 Secrétan
sale for more than half a million francs, and, in 1911, in Peter A. B. Widener’s purchase of
Rembrandt’s The Mill from England for the same amount in dollars.

Catalog of the sale of the collection of Jacques Doucet, Paris, 1912, public domain

The art markets of the twentieth century were defined by the vicissitudes of two world wars, the
triumph of modern and contemporary art, as well as the chase for record prices and the rise of the
internet by the very end of the century. Old masters still held a seemingly unassailable position
in the international art markets at the beginning of the twentieth-century. An early trailblazer of
the shift in taste towards modern aesthetics was Jacques Doucet, the first owner of
Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, who sold his Rococo and neo-Rococo interior at auction in
1912 to replace it with modern art and furniture, such as Modigliani paintings and Eileen Gray
sofas. Picasso’s and Braque’s Cubism was also at the center of the first known art fund, the Peau
de l’Ours, which realized its speculative gains just before the outbreak of World War I.
During the “roaring twenties,” the art markets of the United States, England and France
recovered quickly, but this development was brutally cut short by the Black Tuesday of 1929, the
subsequent rise of totalitarianism, World War II, and the Holocaust. Until 1945, Old Masters,
from Raphael to Rembrandt, occupied the top of the price pyramid of art markets. But after the
war, modern and contemporary art would take this place. The rallying cry of the avant-garde to
“make it new” resonated not only with critics and other art world insiders, but also with an ever-
larger segments of the general public so that suddenly the demand for works by artists ranging
from Monet and Cézanne to Picasso and Dalí seemed unlimited. For living artists, there were
also unprecedented opportunities in the sale of multiples, such as prints and bronzes, as Picasso’s
and Dalí’s cases demonstrate. American modern masters, from Pollock to Warhol, could claim
their place in history largely because they fetched prices comparable, if not exceeding, that of
their European counterparts.
The triumph of modern art in the art markets finally reached its point of consolidation with the
appearance of Japanese buyers in the auction rooms of Christie’s and Sotheby’s during the late
1980s. Paper manufacturer Ryoei Saito, for instance, spent, in May 1990, more than $160
million dollars on van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet and Renoir’s Moulin de la Galette during
two consecutive evening sales. After the collapse of the Japanese bubble economy a few months
later, the art markets calmed down, but embarked on another, more extensive rally during the
early twenty-first century.
Christie's sale of the collection of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé at the Grand Palais in Paris, Feb. 25, 2009; photo
credit: AP Photo/Jacques Brinon

Leonardo da Vinci: Salvator Mundi, oil on walnut, 656 x 454 mm, c. 1500; public domain

Art Markets today are more globally interlinked, technology driven and eclectic then they have
ever been. Undoubtedly, the rise and expansion of the internet played a significant part in this
twentieth-first-century success story. One can cite the exponential growth of art markets in
China, or the 2017 purchase, through Middle Eastern buyers, of the Salvator Mundi painting
attributed to Leonardo da Vinci for $450 million, as instances of these developments. Over the
last couple of decades, art markets have grown into a global industry with an annual turnover of
about $60 billion dollars that employ hundreds of thousands of individuals. It must be
remembered, however, that the dynamics of art markets are not driven by record prices, but by
the almost infinite number of small transactions that happen every minute and in every corner of
the world.