MODULES FOR ARTS APPRECIATION

Credits : 3 Units
Pre-Requisite : None

Course Description :

Art Appreciation is a three-unit course that develops students’ ability to appreciate, analyze and critique
works of art. Through interdisciplinary and multimodal approaches, this course equips students with a
broad knowledge of the practical historical, philosophical, and social relevance of the arts in order to
hone students’ ability to articulate their understanding of the arts. The course also develops students’
competency in researching and curating arts as well as conceptualizing, mounting, and evaluating art
productions. The course aims to develop students’ genuine appreciation for Philippine arts by providing
them opportunities to explore the diversity and richness and their rootedness in Filipino culture.
CHAPTER 1: Orientation to Art

Objectives: By the end of the lessons, the students should be able to:

1. To characterize artistic expression based on personal experiences with art.

2. Differentiate art history from art appreciation.
3. Differentiate Art from nature.
4. Clarify misconceptions about Art

The principal objective of this book is to lead to an appreciation of the arts. Appreciation- profound
appreciation- rest on knowledge and understanding. Appreciation has to do with valuing or loving
something or someone. But as the adage goes: “I cannot love someone I do not know.” Knowing
awakens our affection. What we know, we can value, even love. This valuing, loving and cherishing is
what appreciation is all about. We grow from being detached, poorly informed bystanders, looking at
arts at a distance, maybe making a quizzical face that says “I don’t get the point,” to being an art lover.
Even more deeply, we can begin to incorporate art more consciously in our lives, thus allowing art to
enrich us. We can fill our hours with a variety of music, not just what is current or popular. We can go to
concerts; watch plays or visit museums. We may even work with some art genre and discover that we
have the inclination toward it and may even become good at it; or we can become more sensitive to
what is beautiful and feel uneasy when we see disorder and chaos, and do something about it. Because
that is what art does- it awakens us to what is beautiful; it gives some order to chaotic experience so that
we can grasp it better and live with chaos more resiliently.

This introductory chapter examines the genesis of arts-making in human experience; then moves on to
say something about art genres and their elements- how an artist thinks in a whole brain manner; and
ends with philosophies of art, or what those who have taught deeply about art and pursued answer to
questions that art exposes have said. But before all that, we will build on our previous encounter with
and experience of arts by asking: What is art for me?

● PERSONAL STARTING POINT

Art comes from the Latin word ars, meaning anything humans make, or man-made. The word has been
used for such things as the art of negotiation, the art of diplomacy, or the art of hosting. It has been
applied to sports, and even to governing and to war. The Art of War is a famous book by the Chinese
general Sun Tzu, and very popular today as a book of strategy for business and politics.

Art implies a certain orderliness, rationality, and grace. The boxer Muhammad Ali (Cassius Clay)
described his style as “float[ing] like a butterfly and sting[ing] like a bee.” He looked graceful in the
boxing ring. You can say his boxing was artful. The opposite artless is used to mean something
spontaneous, apparently haphazard, crude, and poorly executed.

There is, however, a category of art called fine that stands apart from the rest of man-made things. While
cultures’ and societies’ specific definition of what qualifies as “fine” vary, we can safely characterize the
fine arts as an expression about our human experience and the reality within us and outside through a
medium. The plural arts is used because there are at least seven genres or media of arts. It is not limited,
as is popularly supposed, to the visual arts, like painting and sculpture.

● Art, Nature, and the World

When looking at a beautiful landscape, we speak of the art of nature. Believers even speak of God as the
greatest artist. But nature is not art, rather it is the context and source for art.

Art begins as a human encounter or experience of nature in all depth and variety. At its most obvious are
the works of landscape painters, who go out in the open, plein air as French call it, and record what they
see. Landscape painters do not just paint anything. They spend time looking, searching, and choosing
until some scene captures their eye. The same is true of photographers who may spend hours looking for
a human face, a tree, or a sunset to photograph. The painter and the photographer capture nature scenes
that are significant for them. “Yung may dating.” As Filipinos say. Even when we take selfies with our
cell phones or take photos of our first meal of the day, we arrange ourselves or our plate to find the right
angle and lighting. We may twirl our plate of tapsilog so it looks best.

Thus, art begins with encountering something primarily outside of us and, applying human inventions,
capturing it as a significant and worthwhile encounter- at least to ourselves. Hopefully to others too, that
is why we post our selfies.

But our encounters are not limited to the natural world. There is the inner or intrapersonal world of our
thoughts, imagination, feelings, and desire. How do we capture that? Many lyric poems are about the
feeling of love, loss, loneliness, grief, attraction, or exhilaration. Even a blatantly nonsense song like
“Pen-Pineapple-Apple-Pen’’ has become popular because of its lyrics, but because it is catchy and fun.
The artist has captured that fun he has discovered within.

Our other encounter is with fellow humans, which may be referred to as interpersonal or societal.
Interpersonal refers to one-on-one encounters and societal to large group encounters. Pop songs whose
main theme is love- love sought, love longed for, love lost and gone, love fulfilled- abound. This is a
one-on-one encounter. Social encounters are recorded in large-scale historical paintings or epic movies
involving a cast of thousands.

Then there is the metapersonal or transcendent encounter. Those who do not believe in reality beyond
our human senses, or our understanding and day to day experience will not recognize this as a category
of encounter. However, as far back as we know, humans have had the sense that there may be something
far greater and beyond. This has been expressed in chants and sacred music. This sense of the beyond is
celebrated in rituals, which is a variety of theatre though simple, and in art labelled and sacred.

● MADE BY HUMAN HANDS

As said earlier, art has something to do with being man-made. A popular term used to designate art
today is design, as in graphic design. This is a narrow use of the term but a wider use of it can equate art
and design.

Design comes from the Italian word designare which means to draw or to draw a line; it also means to
set “boundaries.” And that is exactly what humans do when creating art. To our encounters, we set
boundaries, we frame our experience, we pick and choose. Unconsciously, we are framing, designing.
When I use a digital camera, that very technology has already predisposed me, or more correctly
compelled me to take a rectangular picture whose ratio is based on the golden ratio- of which we will
learn about later. A painter may express a certain terror at a blank canvas as he or she begins to paint or
searches for subject matter to paint. The terror might be rooted in a consciousness that the canvas has set
boundaries for her. Her experience has been designed or designated.

But design is also used in a narrow sense and is identified with commercial art. Design here is related to
a solution for a problem, whether trivial or momentous, limited or wide-ranging. Advertisements are
ubiquitous examples of design. They are geared to selling a product. The images, usually photos of
celebrities endorsing a product or the product itself, combine with text or copy as the ad industry calls it
when selling a product.

Wayfinding is a design system that helps us navigate unfamiliar places. It uses maps, directional arrows,
and signages to assist us. Product packages are also designed to make them attractive and stand out in
the crowded grocery shelf.

Design, understood narrowly, is purposely and practical; but what is known as fine arts need not have a
purpose- usually one that is obvious and immediate. In this sense fine arts, following Gadamer, is
“purposeless”; but that does not mean it has no utility, thus, useless. Gadamer compares art with play:
“Gadamer thinks that art is a kind of play, in which the artist and the audience join.” He elucidates that
“play is not ‘mere diversion’ because activity without purpose need not to be pointless. Play has no
‘output’ but can be structured” thus moving somewhere. Ten players passing, tossing, and running after
a rubber ball may seem useless; but for the players and spectators of a basketball game, what happens in
the 40 minutes or so of the game is quite important. In the context of the game there will be winners and
losers and as long as the games continue, fans will be united through the teams they are cheering for.
Fans and players feel connected. It is an experience of human bonding sparked by a game that seems to
be so purposeless.

Art, fine art, is not pointless. Its utility lies not in immediate solutions but more in opening doors toward
perceiving reality differently and in engaging a creative mind in dialogue, mediated by the artwork.

● ELEMENTS OF ART

Over the millennia, art has evolved certain conventions by which an artist expresses a significant
encounter and communicates it to others. So much that art has been called a language. In fact, art has
many languages, six of which we will discuss in this book. We call these languages genres or an art
form or even a family of forms.

Like any human’s language, the arts have basic building blocks, like words or vocabulary in any human
language. It also has rules on how to construct meaningful and communicative utterances- the principles
of composition.

Art’s basic building block is known as an element. While there are elements that are shared across art
forms, each art genre has its own unique set of elements. An example of a shared element is line. This is
quite obvious in the visual arts where the line is the fundamental design element. Line delineates
boundaries, traces the outline of objects, and can express moods- light and swift to suggest vitality, dark
and deliberate to suggest solidity and seriousness. Line is also used in architecture when an architect
determines the general appearance of a structure. Will the straight lines of the post-and-lintel system or
the curved line of the arch and dome be the controlling element of the design? We speak of the storyline
of a drama or a film, when talking about how a story flows. There is also a line of music, a piece of
longer composition, and the line a dancer traces with the body when performing.

Each genre has principles of putting the elements together. This is composition. The word “composition”
is derived from the Latin word “componere”, a combination of the Latin word “cum” meaning “with”
and “ponere” meaning to put or to place. In the visual arts, composition refers to how lines, volume,
perspective and so forth, are made to interact and pull together as a whole piece. Written music is called
composition and so is literature written down.

● SUBJECT MATTER
The elements of art are mostly about how art is made; but art cannot just be how but also what. The
answer to this is called subject matter or subject of art. Broadly, all art is about the human encounter
with nature. However, specific artworks narrow the subject matter. A landscape painting is about
scenery. A portrait is about people’s faces and bodies. A historical painting depicts a moment in history.
Drama and film portray what the storyline is. When we ask what a play or a movie is about, we are
inquiring about its story. But what about architecture, music, or dance? Broadly, architecture’s subject is
space- how space is delineated and confined, how space interacts with solid, how elements like light and
air interact in space. Music is about sounds, whether instrumental music or sung music with lyrics.
Dance is about movement. In describing a work of art, we will deal with the subject and the use of the
elements of art.

● PHILOSOPHIES AND THEORIES OF ART

The nature of art, what it is and where it figures in human life has been subject of concentrated
reflection in the discipline called philosophy. Philosophy comes from two classical Greek words philos,
meaning love and Sophia, meaning wisdom. Therefore, philosophy is the quest to know, spurred by the
love for truth. When first used by the Greeks, the term was applied to all branches of knowledge that
seek. The study of nature was known as natural philosophy, but over time philosophy has come to mean
the branch of knowledge that seeks for answers to life's basic questions like, why are we here on earth?
What is the purpose of life- of my life? What does it mean to be good? What is beauty? What makes
something beautiful? Philosophy is identified with metaphysics, what is beyond the physical. Questions
that cannot easily be answered by investigating what we can apprehend through our senses are
legitimate questions in philosophy.

Philosophies of Art

-Art is an imitation for Plato, the work of the artisan is to copy or imitate the idea, eternal, immutable,
for one thing. The artist proceeds by imitation but also what copy is the sensible thing is to say an
already imperfect reproduction of the Idea. Instead of approaching the truth, it increases the distance that
separates her.

– The Judgement of Taste: Kant, is the art of reflective judgment opposing the ruling factor. The latter is
used in scientific discourse and is to apply concepts (universal) prior to singular objects. Reflective
Judgement (eg, “How beautiful”) may instead assume universality. The beautiful is disinterested (the
utility and fun do not take part) it pleases universally without a concept (universal subjective) well, it’s a
finality without end (it shows in order, a plan, but does nothing beyond itself)

– The Science of Art: Hegel criticizes Kant for having retained a subjective point of view on art. But a
science of art is possible in that art is a production of the spirit (Geist), it is not unlike the individual
consciousness. The science of art is historical, because the idea of ​art unfolds itself in history until the
modern era that marks the end of art.

– The powers of the imagination: Delacroix and Baudelaire assert the primacy of the imagination
(constructive) in art. The primary subject of art is not nature but the artist himself, the depths of his soul,
emotions, etc. Alain critiques this view by stating that the imagination is an illusion and that nothing is
given, in the human psyche, an emotional disorder. Art is the externalization, the act of ordering and
discipline of the passions.

– The artist as a work of art: For Nietzsche, the aesthetic categories are metaphysical categories. The
figure of Dionysus, which is essential to tragedy, is terrifying and disproportionate in nature. Nature,
only an artistic vision can support and embellish, is the power of metamorphosis, becoming, creation
and destruction. The artist, one man (or superman) is the one that truly manages to order the chaos of
impulses that inhabit it. Aesthetics is an “Applied Physiology”.

– Art and technology: The question of the future of art in an age where technology acquires a dominant
position is essential. Benjamin shows as well as the reproducibility of art (photography, for example),
they tend to lose their aura, their sacred nature.

– The work of art and the tool: For Heidegger the traditional conception of the natural thing, the tool and
the work of art as composed of matter and form comes from human activity in manufacturing where a
material is worked to fit a function, and thus becomes a tool. But daily use tools mask their being, their
truth because the tool is effective only in strict as it is forgotten. The work of art is what reveals the
being of the tool, membership in a human world and a primitive nature (the Earth).

Theories of Art

1. Mimetic theories: art as imitation or representation of nature "mimes" - a basic theoretical principle in

the creation of art. The word is Greek and means "imitation" (though in the sense of "re-presentation"
rather than of "copying"). Plato and Aristotle spoke of mimesis as the re-presentation of nature.
According to Plato, all artistic creation is a form of imitation: that which really exists (in the "world of
ideas") is a type created by God; the concrete things man perceives in his existence are shadowy
representations of this ideal type. Therefore, the painter, the tragedian, and the musician are imitators of
an imitation, twice removed from the truth. Aristotle, speaking of tragedy, stressed the point that it was
an "imitation of an action"--that of a man falling from a higher to a lower estate. Shakespeare, in
Hamlet's speech to the actors, referred to the purpose of playing as being " . . . to hold, as 'twere, the
mirror up to nature." Thus, an artist, by skillfully selecting and presenting his material, may purposefully
seek to "imitate" the action of life.

2. Expressive theories: art viewed as a representation or manifestation of the inner state of the artist

3. Formalist theories: the work of art viewed as an organic unity; i.e., a self-contained, self-justifying
entity

4. Processional theories: the making of works of art because the creative process is an inherently
self-contained, self-justifying process.

5. Aestheticism: late 19th century European movement based on the idea that art exists for the sake of
its beauty alone.

6. Pragmatic theories: art conceptualized in terms of its effects on its audience, to accomplish purposes
such as the creation of specific shared experiences.

References:
● (2018) Understanding, Valuing and Living Art; Art Appreciation for College, Talayan, Quezon
City; Vibal Group, INC
● Myth Mimesis and Magic in the Music of Tboli, Mora 2005
● The role of the Art Critic, Flores in Paleta 5: A Handbook for Visual Artist, Hernandez, 2002
● The Humanities, Dudley Farcy and Rice, 2013