GE 1107 – Art Appreciation

PRELIMINARY PERIOD
Course Pack

TOPIC 1: Functions of Art

DIRECTLY FUNCTIONAL ART

▪ the art that we use in our daily lives
▪ tools, architectural structures, furniture, utensils, coins, bills, and clothes
INDIRECTLY FUNCTIONAL ART
▪ Refers to the works of art that are perceived through the senses
▪ Paintings, music, sculpture, dance, plays, literary pieces

▪ There are instances when directly functional art combines with indirectly
functional art.

Four Functions of Art

AESTHETIC FUNCTION
▪ for people to be aware of the beauty of life and nature.
▪ “Therapeutic value”
▪ Listening to relaxing music, watching a movie or reading a poem or
listen to a story

UTILITARIAN FUNCTION
▪ utilized to give comfort and convenience
▪ It is used to serve basic needs like food, shelter, clothing, medicine,
transportation, entertainment and communication.
SOCIAL FUNCTION
▪ Art serves a social function when it bridges connection among people
and encourages good relationship, unity, and cooperation.
▪ singing of the national anthem
▪ the murals that we see in parks and government buildings
▪ statues of our national heroes

CULTURAL FUNCTION
▪ Art helps make a culture’s skills, knowledge, customs and traditions
known to different groups of people.
▪ Art helps preserve, share and transmit a people’s culture from one
generation to another.
▪ This involves methods of catching, cooking and preserving food,
weaving fabric, jewelry-making as well as courtship and wedding rites.

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TOPIC 2: Criticism and Theory

▪ Tony Bennett: The problem of value is the problem of the social production of value; it
refers to the ongoing process whereby texts are to be valued and on what grounds.

▪ Formalism is the study of art by analyzing and comparing form and style—the way
objects are made and their purely visual aspects

▪ Aesthetic disinterest
• A result of “disciplining the senses,” of perceiving something not
as a means but as an end and achievement in itself, of grasping
something for its own sake and not for any other purpose.

▪ Marxism
▪ Proposes that art is a direct reflection of its socio-economic environment,
and so denies art its specific mode of articulation and signification.
▪ Art becomes a mirror that automatically reflects the images of the world at
one particular moment.
▪ The art work has a specific, highly codified social practice with its own
conditions of material production and reception, its own conventions,
devices and histories.

TOPIC 3: Institutions of the Art World

▪ Institution [in·sti·tu·tion]
▪ n. A large group that is influential in the community

▪ Canon
▪ a set of artistic works established as genuine and complete,
e.g. the works of a particular writer, painter, or moviemaker.
▪ Operates according to the inclusion/exclusion principle.
▪ the canon exercises this dominative role from a position of power.
▪ The existence of it spawns a network of problems.

Arthur Danto
▪ An object will be admitted to be art if it can be related to already acknowledged
objects or by way of a theoretical justification.
▪ A theory must validate the existence of the object (e.g. Painting, poem, dance,
film, etc.) that testifies the said object has features which are aesthetically
legitimate.
1. it has a subject
2. about which it projects some attitude or point of view (has a style)
3. by means of rhetorical ellipsis (usually metaphorical) which ellipsis
engages audience participation in filling in what is missing
4. where the work in question and the interpretations thereof require
an art historical context. (Danto, Carroll)

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 5. Clause is what makes the definition institutionalist. The view has been
criticized for entailing that art criticism written in a highly rhetorical
style is art, lacking but requiring an independent account of what makes
a context art historical, and for not applying to music."

George Dickie
▪ Artistic distinction can be conferred by anyone who can conceive of himself
or herself as an agent of the art world and operates within the appropriate
institutional contexts.
▪ Anything can be an art if an acknowledged artist puts it up for sale, a curator
displays it in a museum, an art critic gives it a review, an art historian
includes it in a book etc.
▪ ▪ Placing an art in a different context can also change it’s value.

Agencies of the Art World

▪ Academe, media, the gallery/museum network, the art maker, state cultural
bureaucracies, connoisseurs and collectors, publicists and dealers, culture
industries
▪ Agencies of the art world send off their publics the “signals” of art, locating
them within the proper institutional scheme, and ingraining them the
appropriate aesthetic reception, disposition, or attitude to accept and
include some things as art and reject and exclude others as anything but art.
▪ It is in this context that our notions of art are constructed, validated,
reproduced, and disseminated to “others” whom we think must be guided
by the same principles.
▪ His education, made us part of an art world that privileges specific norms
governing and regulating the production of art.

Training an Artist
▪ In the Middle Ages and Renaissance
▪ Artists learned their trade by undertaking a prolonged period of
technical training in the shop of a master artist.
▪ Reasons why young men became apprentices in their early teens:
▪ They had already shown talent
▪ Their families wanted them to be artists.

▪ The term of apprenticeship varied, but apprentices began learning their trade at the
most menial level. They occasionally worked on less important border areas or painted
the minor figures of a master’s composition.

▪ By the time an apprentice was ready to start his own shop, he had a thorough grounding
in techniques and media. He would probably also have assimilated elements of his
master’s style.

How do people become artists?

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 ▪ Hype, the awards, the publicity, the reputation, the cult adulation, the artistic license,
the hocus-pocus of self-expression.
▪ We must dismantle in order to understand and explain the reasons by which artists are
“recognized,” “assessed,” and gain the credibility and credentials of artistry.

Pierre Bourdieu
▪ The ability to appreciate and enjoy and even to simply recognize is not borne out of
natural intelligence, but rather is learned and is in fact a function of pedagogy (art of
teaching).
▪ Programmes of perception
▪ There is no such thing as “love at first sight” and the act of empathy
in art.
▪ The “eye” is a product of history reproduced by education.
▪ The activity of consuming art is therefore determined by the
distribution of knowledge in an economically and intellectually
uneven social organization.
▪ We cannot remain oblivious to the real constraints of access to
cultural goods, which can be availed of within the system of unequal
distribution of capital/power across social groups and through the
pressures that the artworld.
▪ Art forms are inscribed in conventions and not everyone is “free” to
become privy to these, no matter how the manufacturing sector
insists that the consumer has the option to choose and the market
is all that liberal.
▪ The canon is not to be regarded as a non-changing, all-powerful
empire, a solid grand monolith that overwhelms thoroughly,
massively, completely, and therefore resistant to challenge.
▪ Art is mainly a construct, a category of social activity not justified by
essence but by status which is arbitrarily conferred by the
institutions.

TOPIC 4: Understanding Fernando Amorsolo

Fernando Amorsolo

▪ War time nostalgia for the countryside

▪ Subject matters
▪ rural idylls
▪ harvest and fiesta scenes
▪ dalagang bukid in pretty poses
▪ sunsets.
▪ Style and Technique
• His style tried to capture the glowing effects of the
Philippine sun on the landscape by employing the
contra luz lighting technique and “topping off
composition with chrome yellow lights to accent
contours where the backlight struck.

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 • CHIAROSCURO
▪ use of strong contrasts between light
and dark, usually bold contrasts
affecting a whole composition.
▪ Medium
• He has a preoccupation with the oil-on-canvas and
painterly style that he maximized to simulate the
density, texture, and luster of supposedly natural
surroundings.
▪ Mode of Production
• The situation of Amorsolo as a Filipino artist working
within the American colonial context. During this time,
privately owned gallery became a pivotal node in the
distribution and marketing process.
• an institution of patronage no longer controlled by the
Church and the highly exclusive elite circle as it had
been during Spanish colonial Philippines.

• Amorsolo as a popular artist-celebrity who practically dominated the art scene

for almost three decades (1920s-40s).

• Known for his illustrations in advertisements accused to succumbing to

commercialism

• illustrations for the car Marquette, soap Ivory, movie posters for Ideal Theater

• Artistic Background o Diego Velazquez, Las Meninas o Admiration for the

Velasquez style and his hesitance to embrace modernism.

• “jumping over the rules of good taste and beauty”

• Conservative position in relation to the modernist school of work. o Galo

Ocampo declared that he was already “sick” of the Amorsolo school.

• Amorsolo’s stagnation as an artist at a junction of his career when he would be

swamped with local and international commissions that he had to come up with
a catalogue of photographs from which customers could choose.

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TOPIC 5: Principles of Organization in the Arts

▪ Organization
▪ the purposeful relation of parts to each other and to the whole o
the way the elements are combined into a whole
▪ Unity
▪ the broad, basic concept underlying the total design of an art object
▪ the aim of organization in art
▪ The underlying principle that summarizes all of the principles and
elements of design.
▪ There is unity when the parts are significantly related to each other
and to the whole
▪ A harmony of all parts.
▪ Unity can be achieved through the effective and consistent use of
any of the elements, but pattern-- that is, underlying structure-- is
the most fundamental element for a strong sense of unity.
▪ Consistency of form and color are also powerful tools that can pull
a composition together.

▪ Variety within Unity (‘Unity of Opposites’)

o It is not necessary for all of the elements to be

identical in form providing they have a common
quality of meaning or style.
o Chaos and monotony have no room in artistic form.

▪ Unity in art affects us in several important ways:

▪ It helps focus and hold our attention and interest on
the work of art.
▪ A unified art object is easier to “grasp” or “take in”
than is one marked by uncoordinated diversity.
▪ Unity aids memory because it provides a strong,
clear, dominant purpose or central idea to which
one may cling, leading to a lasting impact.
Basic Principles of Organization
▪ REPETITION
▪ CONTRAST
▪ VARIATION
Principles of Design
▪ The principles are concepts used to organize or arrange the structural
elements of design.
▪ The way in which these principles are applied affects the expressive
content, or the message of the work

RHYTHM
▪ a continuing, recurring, developing pattern of movement.

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 ▪Rhythm or rhythmic continuity sets up patterns of expectedness and
paves the way for the effectiveness of variety, contrast and the element
of surprise.
PROPORTION
▪ the relation with respect to size, degree, quantity -- of part to part and
part to the whole
▪ Harmonious, pleasing or ideal ratios or proportions

BALANCE
▪ refers to an equilibrium of forces or attractions.
▪ Symmetrical Balance - one half of the object is the mirror image of the
other
▪ Asymmetrical Balance - weights or attraction on each side are equated
but not identical

EMPHASIS
▪ (dominance and subordination, focus, unity)
▪ giving the proper importance to the part and to the whole
▪ the process of differentiating the more important from the less
important
▪ Contrast of size and scale
▪ Contrast of color, texture, or shape will call attention to
a specific point.

Few basic ways of gaining Emphasis

▪ Limiting the dominant points to an appropriate number
▪ Unusual or unexpected elements rivet our gaze.
▪ Grouping (arranging) objects, figures, or elements gives
each of them greater strength.

General References:

Canete, R. (ed). 2011. Suri sining: the art studies anthology. Quezon City: Art Studies Foundation. Cunningham, L., Reich, J.
2010. Culture and Values: a survey of the humanities. Boston, MA. Datuin, F. (ed). 1997. Art and society. Quezon City: University
of the Philippines. De Leon, F. Jr, (ed). 1978. On art, man and nature. Manila: G. Miranda. Sturken, M. 2001. Practices of
looking: an introduction to visual culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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