The arts IIAreas of knowledge

3 theories for exploration:• Art as communication • Art as education• Art as imitation

What is the purpose of art? How does it contribute to knowledge?

Art as communication

• The ‘language of art’ • Artist communicates a message in their own language• Spectator needs to ‘learn the language’ in order to interpret

the message as it was intended

By words one transmits thoughts to another; by means of art, one transmits feelings.

A conductor has to know how to translate music into a communicative force that makes the listener want to hear what he has to say.

Isaac Stern

Leo Tolstoy

If an attunement or sensory response can be evoked from the viewer, a most exquisite form of communication has been established, and the artist's role has been truly fulfilled.

Irving Shapiro

Art as communication

Picasso’s Guernica (1937): a perpetual reminder of the tragedies of war, an anti-war symbol, and an embodiment of peace

Art as communication

But what message is being communicated?

Art as educationBy opening our eyes we do not necessarily see what confronts us. We are anxiety-ridden animals. Our minds are continually active, fabricating an anxious, usually self-preoccupied, often falsifying veil, which partially conceals the world. Our states of consciousness differ in quality, our fantasies and reveries are not trivial and unimportant, they are profoundly connected with our energies and our abilities to choose and act. And if quality of consciousness matters, then anything which alters consciousness in the direction of unselfishness, objectivity and realism is to be connected with virtue.

Iris Murdoch (1919-1999), writer

We have never lived enough. Our experience is, without fiction, too confined and too parochial. Literature extends it, making us reflect and feel about what might otherwise be too distant for feeling. The importance of this for both morals and politics cannot be underestimated.

Martha Nussbaum (1947-), philosopher

Art as education: task

Worker and Collective Farm Girl, Vera Mukhina, 1936

The Wide Expanse, Aleksandr Deineka, 1944

Private Lessons, Svetlana Bondarenko,1972

Socialist Realist books and films

Art as education

North Korea

China

Vietnam

Laos

Art as education

• Art as moral guide/educator• Emotional response influence on behaviour• Art used as a force for good / bad?– to raise awareness, increases knowledge– to forge consciousness (e.g. ideological art)

Art as imitation: the mimetic theory of art

• Renaissance: imitation of art of Classical antiquity • Art was driven by desire to achieve the perfect likeness (portraits, sculptures, novels), since doing so required considerable skill.

• 18th century Romanticism: reversal of this idea with focus on originality

• 19th century invention of the camera revolution in the visual arts; why devote art to imitation?

• 20th century: ‘art as imitation’ seen as limiting, unless it seeks to pursue other goals…

Visitor to Matisse’s studio: ‘Surely the arm of that woman is too long?’Matisse: ‘Madame, you are mistaken. That is not a woman; that is a picture.’

Michelangelo (1475-1564)

Art as imitation: the mimetic theory of art• 20th century: mimesis is reconfigured to serve other

purposes / reveal different truths

• Homage, where• an author shows respect to an event/topic by alluding to

it in their own work (e.g. Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia)• an artist shows respect to a veteran of the field or to an

admired practitioner by alluding to or imitating their work

Purpose: to acknowledge the quality or superiority of the work of another artist; to act as a reminder to society of eternal values/ truths presented in the original work and which are still relevant in the present.

Art as imitation: the mimetic theory of art

Execution by Yue Minjun, 1995

Execution of Maximilian by Manet, 1867

The Third of May, 1808, by Goya, 1814

Art as imitation: the mimetic theory of art• 20th century: mimesis is reconfigured to serve other

purposes / reveal different truths

• Parody, where an imitative work is created to mock, comment on or trivialise an original work, its subject, author, style, or some other target, by means of satiric or ironic imitation)• James Joyce's Ulysses, which incorporates elements of

Homer's Odyssey in a 20th-century Irish context• T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland, which incorporates and

recontextualizes elements of a vast range of prior texts, including Dante's Inferno.

• Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildernstern Are Dead – minor characters from Shakespeare’s Hamlet transformed for comedic effect

Purpose: to provide a new perspective on / defamiliarise the present by drawing, mimetically, on the past.

A 1943 poster promoting patriotism and suggesting that careless communication may be harmful to the war effort, showing the American flag.

A parody of the original that works both as a playful critique of Western consumerism, and perhaps as a more serious comment on the meaning(lessness?) of patriotism in modern America

A 1960 Soviet state propaganda poster produced at the height of the Cold War space race. It adheres to the official aesthetic doctrine of ‘Socialist Realism’ and reads: ‘Man’s path is open before him!’ (Yuri Gagarin was the first man in space the following year).

A 1989 reworking of the original by Russian artist Alexander Kosolapov, member of the Sotsart (or ‘Soviet pop art’ movement, founded in the early 1970s as a reaction against Socialist Realism and the unceasing heroism it depicted).

Anish Kapoor’s re-appropriation of ‘Gangnam Style’ to draw attention to Ai Weiwei and other prisoners of conscience all over the world.

The arts and truth

• Can truth be based on a ‘lie’, as Picasso suggests? If science gives us truth that is verifiable, what kind of truth do the arts give us?

• Do we risk diminishing the value of art if we reduce it to a series of truth statements?

‘Hamlet and Socrates spoke of art as a mirror held up to nature. Socrates saw mirrors as but reflecting what we can already see…and [therefore] of no cognitive benefit whatever. Hamlet, more accurately, recognised a remarkable feature of reflecting surfaces, namely that they show us what we could not otherwise perceive – our own face and form…and so art, in so far as it is mirrorlike, reveals us to ourselves.’

Arthur Danto

‘Art is a lie that gives us the truth, at least the truth we are given to understand.’Picasso