Module 1: Art History, Art Appreciation, Art Creativity, Imagination and the Expression
Lesson 1: Art Appreciation and Criticism
"What is art?" Few questions provoke such heated debate and provide so few satisfactory answers. If we cannot come
to any definitive conclusions, there is still a good deal we can say. Art is first of all a word—one that acknowledges both
the idea and the fact of art. Without it, we might well ask whether art exists in the first place. The term, after all, is not
found in every society. Yet art is made everywhere. Art, therefore, is also an object, but not just any kind of object. Art is
an aesthetic object. It is meant to be looked at and appreciated for its intrinsic value. Its special qualities set art apart, so
that it is often placed away from everyday life—in museums, churches, or caves.
What do we mean by aesthetic? By definition, aesthetic is "that which concerns the beautiful." Of course, not all art is
beautiful to our eyes, but it is art nonetheless. No matter how unsatisfactory, the term will have to do for lack of a better
one. Aesthetics is, strictly speaking, a branch of philosophy which has occupied thinkers from Plato to the present day.
Like all matters philosophical, it is subject to debate. During the last hundred years, aesthetics has also become a field of
psychology, a field which has come to equally little agreement. Why should this be so? On the one hand, people the
world over make much the same fundamental judgments. Our brains and nervous systems are the same because,
according to recent theory, we are all descended from one woman in Africa a quarter-million years ago. On the other
hand, taste is conditioned solely by culture, which is so varied that it is impossible to reduce art to any one set of
precepts. It would seem, therefore, that absolute qualities in art must elude us, that we cannot escape viewing works of
art in the context of time and circumstance, whether past or present. How indeed could it be otherwise, so long as art is
still being created all around us, opening our eyes almost daily to new experiences and thus forcing us to readjust our
understanding?
We all dream. That is imagination at work. To imagine means simply to make an image—a picture—in our minds. Human
beings are not the only creatures who have imagination. Even animals dream. Cats' ears and tails may twitch as they
sleep, and sleeping dogs may whine and growl and paw the air, as if they were having a fight. Even when awake, animals
"see" things. For no apparent reason a cat's fur may rise on its back as it peers into a dark closet, just as you or I may get
goose bumps from phantoms we neither see nor hear. Clearly, however, there is a profound difference between human
and animal imagination. Humans are the only creatures who can tell one another about imagination in stories or
pictures. The urge to make art is unique to us. No other animal has ever been observed to draw a recognizable image
spontaneously in the wild. In fact, their only images have been produced under carefully controlled laboratory
conditions that tell us more about the experimenter than they do about art. There can be little doubt, on the other
hand, that people possess an aesthetic faculty. By the age of five every normal child has drawn a moon pie-face. The
ability to make art is one of our most distinctive features, for it separates us from all other creatures across an
evolutionary gap that is unbridgeable.
Art History in the 21st Century
Art historians study the visual and tangible objects humans make and the structures humans build. Scholars traditionally
have classified such works as architecture, sculpture, the pictorial arts (painting, drawing, printmaking, and
photography), and the craft arts, or arts of design. The craft arts comprise utilitarian objects, such as ceramics,
metalwares, textiles, jewelry, and similar accessories of ordinary living. Artists of every age have blurred the boundaries
between these categories, but this is especially true today, when multimedia works abound.
From the earliest Greco-Roman art critics on, scholars have studied objects that their makers consciously manufactured
as "art" and to which the artists assigned formal titles. But today's art historians also study a vast number of objects that
their creators and owners almost certainly did not consider to be "works of art." Few ancient Romans, for example,
would have regarded a coin bearing their emperor's portrait as anything but money. Today, an art museum may exhibit
that coin in a locked case in a climate-controlled room, and scholars may subject it to the same kind of art historical
analysis as a portrait by an acclaimed Renaissance or modern sculptor or painter.
The range of objects art historians study is constantly expanding and now includes, for example, computer-generated
images, whereas in the past almost anything produced using a machine would not have been regarded as art. Most
people still consider the performing arts—music, drama, and dance — as outside art history's realm because these arts
are fleeting, impermanent media. But recently even this distinction between "fine art" and performance art has become
blurred. Art historians, however, generally ask the same kinds of questions about what they study, whether they employ
a restrictive or expansive definition of art.
LESSON 2: Art History with Art Appreciation
Lesson 3: Art History
Art history has historically been understood as the academic study of objects of art in their historical development and
stylistic contexts, i.e. genre, design, format, and look.[1] This includes the "major" arts of painting, sculpture, and
architecture as well as the "minor" arts of ceramics, furniture, and other decorative objects.
As a term, Art history (also history of art) encompasses several methods of studying the visual arts; in common usage
referring to works of art and architecture. Aspects of the discipline overlap. As the art historian Ernst Gombrich once
observed, "the field of art history [is] much like Caesar's Gaul, divided in three parts inhabited by three different, though
not necessarily hostile tribes: (i) the connoisseurs, (ii) the critics, and (iii) the academic art historians".
As a discipline, art history is distinguished from art criticism, which is concerned with establishing a relative artistic value
upon individual works with respect to others of comparable style, or sanctioning an entire style or movement; and art
theory or "philosophy of art", which is concerned with the fundamental nature of art. One branch of this area of study is
aesthetics, which includes investigating the enigma of the sublime and determining the essence of beauty. Technically,
art history is not these things, because the art historian uses historical method to answer the questions: How did the
artist come to create the work?, Who were the patrons?, Who were his or her teachers?, Who was the audience?, Who
were his or her disciples?, What historical forces shaped the artist's oeuvre, and How did he or she and the creation, in
turn, affect the course of artistic, political, and social events? It is, however, questionable whether many questions of
this kind can be answered satisfactorily without also considering basic questions about the nature of art. Unfortunately
the current disciplinary gap between art history and the philosophy of art (aesthetics) often hinders this.
Art history is not only a biographical endeavor. Art historians often root their studies in the close scrutiny of individual
objects. They thus attempt to answer in historically specific ways, questions such as: What are key features of this style?,
What meaning did this object convey?, How does it function visually?, Did the artist meet their goals well?, What
symbols are involved?, and Does it function discursively?
The historical backbone of the discipline is a celebratory chronology of beautiful creations commissioned by public or
religious bodies or wealthy individuals in western Europe. Such a "canon" remains prominent, as indicated by the
selection of objects present in art history textbooks. Nonetheless, since the 20th century there has been an effort to re-
define the discipline to be more inclusive of non-Western art, art made by women, and vernacular creativity.
