DISCOVERING THE ORIGINAL MEANING OF A WORK OF ART
ART LESSON 2: The aim of the lesson is to teach you to formulate the ideas that are implied rather than expressed in the text. You are to learn to produce arguments that are arguments or may be considered as arguments because they are supported by facts.
What are the three aspects a work of art may be regarded in?
A work of art may be described as the sharing of experience. As such it stands on its own, divorced from everything - even from the man who produced it, although it may mean more to him than to anyone else. (It may not of course: since art is a cathartic activity, once the work of art is produced the artist may lose all interest in it - several artists, indeed, have been known to leave their paintings where they finished them.) The work, then, on its own stands as an object and actually comprehends what the artist has, from his experience, been able to put into it. His technical ability is what has enabled him to give the work the inspirational or emotive quality it has. It is this quality that it may transmit to the observer.
2. The quality of a work of art depends upon the “quality” of the artist who produces it. It is the result of his intelligence, his sensitivity to things that may stimulate him and his technical competence; these derive from his character, his understanding and his temperament. The particular form that a work of art takes arises from the direction that his interests lead him and from his technical sympathy with one method of expression rather than the other.
What else does the quality of a work of art depend upon?
3. The artist becomes a painter or a sculptor because the visible world and the materials of his craft - paint, colour, stone, volume - are the things that move him to express himself in art. A painter paints not because he wants to represent what he sees and is competent to do so but because the visible world stimulates him to satisfy his deep urge to shape his understanding of life and nature. He paints because he cannot avoid it. It is, as a consequence, not an easy or time-passing activity but one that demands his whole concentration and his whole personality, one which may destroy his health and separate him from his fellows. It is apparent that not only talent but dedication is essential and if it is fair and accurate to regard the artist’s life in this way, it is also fair that a work of art should have the serious and careful attention of the observer.
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What can a work of art transmit to the observer? What does the sensitive observer experience when he confronts a work of art? Should he know anything about the artist to appreciate a work of art?
4. But who is the observer? Is it a critic who professionally appreciates? Is it the fellow-artist who may understand the problems, is it the connoisseur, is it the patron or collector, is it “the man in the street” or is it anyone who gives the work anything from a casual glance to a careful study? Of course, in one sense it is all these, but who among these establishes the quality of the work of art? Is the “man in the street” to take the estimate of the critic as his yardstick, is the collector to take “the man in the street” as an adviser? Undoubtedly a hierarchy of quality has been established; how did it come about and on whose authority? Why should we speak of Michaelangelo or Velasquez with bated breath, and who has imposed Picasso or Kandinsky upon us?
Answer the given questions and try to formulate your point of view as far as the complex subject of “appreciation” is concerned.
5. In what cases may the creative intention of the artist and the response of the observer be identical? In what cases may they be not identical?
6. What do we mean when we speak of the problems of art appreciation?
UNDERSTANDING THE ARTS
Bernard S. Myers
OUR PERSONAL ENJOYMENT OF ART
Art may provide certain personal satisfactions, comparable to those we feel in reading books, witnessing plays or ballets, or listening to music. These satisfactions come from physical, intellectual and emotional responses to what the artist has expressed and what he is trying to communicate to us. Our sheer physical sensation of a powerful and monumental work of sculpture, the exaltation inspired by an imposing building, the visual and intellectual gratification of grasping a painting’s compositional arrangement, the emotional surge of awe, pity, rage, or joy aroused by many different types of works - all these leave us with the same feeling of fulfilment as does a great symphony or fugue or a well-performed drama.
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But the function of art goes beyond this. It may project in symbolic (that is, indirect) form certain universal truths. These may ultimately have the greatest potential meaning for us. And then, there will be certain elements on the intuitive (non-rational) level, the existence of which we can point out but certainly not explain. As in the non-plastic arts of music and playwriting, this very circumstance gives an elasticity, indeed an endlessness, to the possible reactions and degrees of pleasure to be derived, depending on our own sensitivity. These added intangible factors, those satisfactions of the soul, make the reaction to art potentially one of the great experiences man can undergo.
DISCOVERING THE ORIGINAL MEANING OF A WORK OF ART
Obviously, the “snap” judgement on a work of art is out of place; more examination is called for. With further study we discover, for example, that the original purpose and the present function of many works of art may be entirely different. This means that a sculpture like Michelangelo’s MOSES, a building like the LOUVRE, and a painting like Gericault’s RAFT OF THE MEDUSA were made for one reason - generally practical in a religious, political, or other sense - and now serve a changed purpose altogether, that of purely aesthetic enjoyment.
With so many works of art from the past in museums, we must often remind ourselves that a particular piece of sculpture or painting was originally part of a temple or church, set in an altogether different kind of light or high up on a different eye level or tinted with colour which it has since lost. These and other changes show how far we may have come from the original function, local, and intrinsic meaning of the work of art.
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