Assignment submitted for the subject of Art Appreciation

Art Appreciation,
Importance &
functions of Art
Supervisor: Madam Sohaina Elia

Submitted by: Mishal Nadeem

Date: 4 October, 2018
 ART APPRECIATION
Art is something we do. Art is an expression of our thoughts, emotions, intuitions and desires but
it is even more personal than that: it’s about sharing the way we experience the world. It is the
communication of intimate concepts that cannot be faithfully portrayed by words alone.

What is art? Art is an expression and application of one’s creativity, typically in the form of
something visual. The definition of art is in the eyes of the beholder. Many dig far too deep into
the ambiguity of the definition of art itself that they forget to appreciate the significance of art in
their lives.

I think in order to fully understand the definition of art; one must picture what life would be like
without art. Consider the effect of existence without your favorite pictures hanging above your
bed; your favorite computer game without graphics; that graffiti on the side of the bridge that
you have grown so fond of; the song that you religiously play on your iPod. Art is even proven to
stimulate certain parts of our brains to make us giggle, cry and all emotions in between.

Art is a way of grasping the world. Not merely the physical world, which is what science
attempts to do; but the whole world and specifically the human world of society and spiritual
experience. For me this concept is very complex. It can be acknowledged in all the possible
spheres of life. If I try to generalize, art for me is a kind of thing that warms my heart and
influences me to think.

The topic of art appreciation is vast. An Internet search of art appreciation produced about
3,540,000 results. Appreciation is interlocked with beauty and beauty to aesthetic experience.
Art appreciation is generally assumed and often explicitly claimed to exemplify acts of
appreciation in the visual arts and briefly explore the history of teaching for art appreciation.

Stein Olsen's defined appreciation as:

"The act of apprehending a work of art with enjoyment”.

The teaching of art usually focuses entirely on composition, artistic technique, and skill
development. There is no evidence that studying art provides students with an appreciation for
art. If art classes teach only the knowledge and skills necessary for self-expression and do not
prepare the student for reflection on and discussion about art, they do nothing more than teach a
trade.
Aesthetic education, commonly known as art appreciation, aims to explain viewers to aesthetic
elements (line, shape, color) and such that the viewers may place value on art and aesthetic
experience. For example, the plight of the Jews during WWII can be felt through the design
elements of Ben Shahn's Warsaw 1943. Sharp pointed lines, stinging in feeling, make up the
tortured hands in this print reminding the viewer of the many acts of barbarism. It is hard to
remain unaffected by this dramatic representation of human pain and suffering. The amount of
sensitivity to these elements directly affects the quality of the viewer's response.

Figure: Warsaw 1943 by Ben Shahn 1963

This sensitivity is determined by the viewer's awareness of the design elements. For me this
sensitivity provokes me to go beyond a superficial summing of the picture. In essence this makes
me want to get something out of a work of art, probably where the artist has left off. That is, to
give the work the time and thought the artist’s effort deserves.
When you taste food, you detect its goodness with your tongue. When you hear music, you
detect its goodness with your ear. When you look at art, detect its goodness with your eye. Art
objects can have many numbers of virtues. Good taste doesn't appear as often as you might think
in the art world. Talent for looking at art occurs commonly than talent for making art, but it
operates in a relatively small number of people
Because the category of art has blurry boundaries, people with questionable taste often think that
objects that lie in front of them has stylish properties, even though no such trait exists. You will
find it impossible to prove that something presented as art doesn't belong in the category of art.
Its appearance in an art context proves that someone is using it for artistic purposes. It can feel
strange, to accept objects that lack visual qualities as art. Some artists strive for that reaction
deliberately.
 As Jerzy Kosinski said
● ● ●

“Art Appreciation, like “The principles of true art is not to portray, but to evoke”

love cannot be done by

There is a difference between understanding art and appreciating art. You
proxy. It is a very appreciate art with your eye and your taste. You understand it with your
personal affair and is intellectual capabilities. You may like something and not understand it.
necessary to every You may understand something and not like it. You may have good taste
individual”. and poor knowledge, or the converse. But if you know general movements
and their intentions, color and other art-related topics, your powers of
-By Robert Henri recognition improve.
Art Appreciation as pointed out earlier is the awareness and understanding
● ● ● of the widespread and undying qualities that identify great art. That is to
say that art appreciation is like speaking a second language. There is an
assumption that if this language of art is learnt it would make for a better
understanding of what many great artists were trying to express. Art
Appreciation could simply mean being able to look at works and form
your own opinions.

IMPORTANCE OF ART EDUCATION

Art education is often underestimated by many who believe that school
was created to teach only analytical concepts such as mathematics and
literature. However, research shows that art courses are important even
necessary for students in elementary, middle and high schools. Whatever
your age or career knowledge of arts can have tremendous benefits for
you.
As Barbara Streisand said

“Art does not exist only to entertain, but also to challenge one to think,
to provoke, even to disturb in a constant search for the truth”.

What is the role of the arts in molding a person? The question assumes
great significance today in the backdrop of a culture; especially in
Pakistan where arts is seen as unimportant, perhaps even waste of time, as
compared to ‘strategic” subjects.
Obviously it is impossible to separate art or the arts from life they are
part of it. For some people, art is the entire reason they get out of bed
in the morning. You could say "Art is something that makes us
more thoughtful and well-rounded humans." Art stimulates
different parts of our brains to make us laugh. Art gives us a way to be ● ● ●
creative and express ourselves. “We often take for
The idea can also be expressed by saying that when life declines and
granted the very things
the standards of living deteriorate, art also declines. On the other
hand, when life marks upward swing, such a swing inevitably gets that most deserve our
reflected in the arts. gratitude”
To say that art is the only confined to the artist, the painter, the
sculptor, the dancer, the musician, the singer or craftsman is to take a -Cynthia Ozick
needlessly rigid and restricted view. Real art is all-round
● ● ●
enlightenment and adds importance to life. The object of art, has been
said, is to crystalize human emotions into thought, and then fix it in a
concrete form.

Life itself is an art. The swing of the pendulum may raise art to the
skies or bring it down crashing to the earth. The progress in art reveals
the progress of a country and its innermost character. In a nutshell we
must value the importance of arts education as it develops the young
learners in a fun and engaging manner. It helps to look into the child’s
growth in the different areas such as self-esteem, self-discipline,
cooperation, self-motivation and problem solving.

As in the words of Gil Dellinger:

“Art is important. We tend to think it is a luxury, but it gives people

deep pleasure because beauty is the personification of hope that
something grander is at work.”

FUNCTIONS OF ART
Function refers to the intended effect of the artwork. That is, how it
functions in the world. However all works of art perform a social
function, since they are created for an audience. Likewise art performs
a social function when it influences the shared behavior of people; or
it is created to be seen or used primarily in public situations; and it
expresses or describes collective aspects of existence as opposed to
individual and personal kinds of experience.
Artists may try to make us laugh at the same phenomena; to accept economic, religious, or social
ideologies; to identify with a class or ethnic interest; or to see our social situation in ways which
had not previously been apparent.
Throughout history the role of the artist has changed greatly. We have stepped over the slope of
the twentieth century, still bloody from wars and the myriad sacrifices made in the name of
progress. Presently we are falling through the twenty-first century, floating in a culture that
makes it simple for us to feel what that in power wants us to feel. The artists are only part of our
society who have not fallen over the cliff, but are instead climbing taller mountains. They are
pulling themselves up towards cultural truths by their fingertips, struggling to pull the rest of
man behind them.

In my opinion artists tell stories. They help us make sense of our world and they broaden our
experience and understanding. The artists enable us to imagine the unimaginable, and to connect
us to past, the present and the future sometimes simultaneously. They offer a lens by which we
can view the world. The one that are remembered are usually those who colored our lives with a
shade we hadn’t seen before, or imagined could exist. I believe artist have a unique ability to
prevent us from being fed-up about the material and immaterial worlds we live in by drawing our
attention to their qualities. Historian and social activist, Howard Zinn accurately describes the
artists as ‘transcendent’, someone who thinks “outside of the framework that society has
created”. By acting outside of that framework and in many cases outside of society itself, artists
are free to be the most honest and constructive members of humanity.

Thus art is a valuable tool for processing social modes of feeling on a large scale. It is “an
important way of arriving at an opinion without the rationalist form of legal argument.” Because
artists are transcendent to the socialization of their time, they are free to explore their experience
within humanity instead of within its institutions. The cultural conclusions reached by artists are
therefore more accurate.

The Swiss artist Olaf Breuning was born 1970 in Schaffhausen. He has gained recognition
through his films, staged photography, and colourful, huge-eyed, infantile sculptures and
drawings, which comment on reality in an ironic manner. On the one hand, he aims to deal with
the large existential questions of life. In his childlike drawings and sculptures, the artist wants to
speak about life in a very simple and direct way. On the other hand, Breuning’s work deals with
popular culture and consumerism. He does not recognize a difference between mass culture and
the art world. For him popular culture is the reality we all live in. He somehow plays with the
hierarchy between so-called high and low culture, between high and low art forms. He aims to
find a language that anybody can understand.

There are certainly many more functions of art to discover and to discuss. Nevertheless one
function of art which seems to be quite important is art as a promoter of life skills. Often the
teaching of life skills is linked to topics like health care and food organization. It could also be
connected to art. Notable artistic expression is not bound to riches; it also matters in the context
of underdevelopment. From this perspective it is widely accepted today that artists and the
cultural community help to bring about social change and economic development. Creative
people are able to trigger interaction between communities or to stimulate general debate and
dialogue in a society. Art can have a vital impact on self-managed development.

Art has influenced the time, place, and culture from which it evolves. Many artists have seen
their art as a laboratory to develop tools for changing society. Philosopher and mathematician
Alain Badiou comments on the artist’s purpose in relation to truth when examining the concept
of cultural change. He argues that we live in a constructible universe where all people across all
cultures and time periods belong to a generic set. The artist’s problem is to communicate truth to
this generic set. Without truth, we are “imprisoned by differences because truth is difference
with the freedom of something that is beyond the difference.” Societies are distinctive as both
apartheid South African and capitalist America prove that true freedom cannot exist where
individuals are defined merely by their place in the group. In a generic society, “you must
recognize the place of the other and be free to go to that place.” Although universal truths do
not change itself, but today’s society needs artist to bring about change more than ever before.

ANALYSIS
Appreciation is a complex act of perception that is dependent on relevant knowledge of what is
appreciated. Full appreciation involves engagement with what is appreciated, and such
engagement involves knowledge of various sorts. Art appreciation has as one of its foremost
objectives to train a student in observing his immediate surroundings and contrast, and
effortlessly relate new forms or visual experiences to already learned ones. This skill if properly
developed by a student makes him competent in analyzing a visual experience.
Hence appreciation must not to be assumed to be a natural and inevitable outcome of art
education. Likewise teachers are ought to design their curricula so that appreciation is taught and
assessed. Moreover art education opens up the mind of students to appreciate works of art and
nature. They will learn enjoy colour simplicity of line, patterns and forms of many kinds found in
nature. A student who has been able to learn these qualities through creative experiences carries
the knowledge over to the other levels and areas of learning like architecture or different form of
art in respective sphere of life. Nevertheless in the end this quote by Mikhail Baryshnikov sums
it up:
“I think art education, especially in this country, which government pretty much ignores, is so
important for young people.”