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Art History
Narrator
Listen to part of a lecture in an art history class.
Professor
Today we’re going to talk about how to look at a piece of art, how to "read" it—what you should look for... what aspects of it you should evaluate. A lot of people think that if you stand in front of a work of art and gaze at it for a couple of minutes, you’re evaluating it. But truly reading a piece of art, evaluating it properly, is a complex process, a process that takes time.
When we’re confronted with a piece of art, there’re several things we have to keep in mind, for example, its beauty ... that’s where aesthetics comes in.
Aesthetics is the philosophy that deals with the definition of beauty, which goes all the way back to ancient Greece. They, um, the early Greek philosophers said that beauty and art are based on imitation. Their feeling about art was that it’s beautiful when it imitates life; they thought that the truthfulness of an image, how truthful it is to life, determines its value as art. Today we have a broader definition of aesthetics.
Now don’t identify aesthetics as personal taste. Taste is bound by time; taste is tied to a society, a given set of moral values, usually. You may not like a piece of art from a different culture—it may not be your taste—but you appreciate its beauty ’cause you recognize certain aesthetic principles. Art generally adheres to certain aesthetic principles like balance, uh, balanced proportions, contrast, movement, or rhythm.
We’ll discuss aesthetics more in detail when we look at some pieces of art together. Another thing to keep in mind in evaluating art is that art has a purpose, generally determined by the artist. You may not know what it is, and you don’t need to know what it is to appreciate a piece of art, but it helps. For example, if you know what the artist’s purpose is ... if you know that a piece of art expresses the artist’s feeling about a political or social situation, you’ll probably look at it differently.
Now, besides beauty and purpose, what are the other aspects of a piece of art that need to be evaluated? Very simple—you examine a piece of art following these four formal steps. The first step is description . . . describe physical characteristics of the piece—like this painting is large, it’s oil on canvas. Describe the subject—it’s a person, it’s a landscape—or predominant colors like, um, earth colors . .. that’s a description.
OK? So, you’ve described the piece. The next step is analysis. You’re looking at the piece for any universal symbols, characters, or themes it might contain. Certain symbols are universal, and the artist counts on your understanding of symbols. Even colors have symbolic significance, as you may know. And also objects depicted in a piece of art are often used to represent an abstract idea. Like wheels or spheres—they look like circles, right?—so wheels and spheres represent wholeness and continuity. I have a handout, a list of these symbols and images and their interpretations, that I’ll give you later. But for now, the point is that after you describe the piece of art, you analyze its content. . . you determine whether it contains elements that the artist is using to try to convey a certain meaning.
If it does, the next step is interpretation. Interpretation follows analysis very closely. You try to interpret the meaning of the symbols you identified in the piece. Almost all art has an obvious and an implied meaning. The implied meaning is hidden in the symbolic system expressed in the piece of art. What we see depicted is one scene, but there can be several levels of meaning. Your interpretation of these symbols makes clear what the artist is trying to tell us.
The last step is judgment or opinion—what do you think of the piece, is it powerful or boring?— but I give that hardly any weight. If the four steps were to be divided up into a chart, then description, analysis, and interpretation would take up 99 percent. Your opinion is not important in understanding a piece of art. It’s nice to say: I like it... I wouldn’t mind hanging it over my couch, but to evaluate a piece of art, it’s not critical.
OK. Now you know what I mean by "reading" a piece of art, and what it entails. Try to keep all that in mind next time you go to an art museum. I can tell you right now that you probably won’t be able to look at more than 12 pieces of art during that visit.
OK, now let’s look at a slide of a piece of art and try to "read" it together.