Reading #4: But is it Art? Handout

Expression Theoury of Art//
Art communicates something in the realm of feelings and emotions. Art can only express emotions (whether conscious or unconscious).

Cognitive Theoury of Art//
Art helps provide knowledge.

Context//
To understand a piece of art's meaning you need to have knowledge of context and culture behind the piece.

Psychobiographical Interpretation//
The opposite of a formalistic interpretation. A piece of art's interpretation is heavily based on the background/history of the artist.

Formal Interpretation//
The opposite of a psychobiographical interpretation. A piece of art's interpretation is heavily based on the composition, colours, and overall form of the piece itself. Knowledge of the artist or their background is not taken into consideration.

Unconscious Feelings//
Feelings that the artist may not be aware of and become apparent through a piece of art.

Croce, Collingwood, Langer//
A group of people who developed a revised version of expression theoury: art can express or convey ideas as well as feelings.

Tolstoy//
He believed an artist's chief job is to express and communicate emotions to an audience.

Authour-Function//
Becoming too locked into the search for correct interpretations by deferring to 'what the authour intended'.

Episteme//
Interpretating the work not in terms of what was mean by it's 'authour', the artist, but as exemplifying the view of its time period.

Foucault//
A guy who interpreted Velazquez's Las Meninas as a 'representation of 'representation'. He also wrote an influential article, 'What is an Authour?'
He rejected the claim that we should interpret art by looking into the artist's mind.

Social-Historical//
Art has a meaning grounded in both culture in general and in the specifics of a historical context.

Dewey//
A leading advocate of the philosophical approach of pragmatism.

Pragmatism//
A new theoury of truth that emphasised usefulness or even 'cash value' rather than abstract ideals, such as a correspondence with 'Reality'.
They defined knowledge as more than a matter of espousing propositions and truths. There can be 'knowledge how' and emotional knowledge, for example.

Art as Experience//
Art's role in enabling people to perceive, manipulate or otherwise grapple with reality.

Art as Source of Knowledge//
Art conveys knowledge of how to perceive the world around us. What we learn from art depends upon our aims, situations, and purposes, and it is always 'active' or relevant to a lived experience.

Goodman//
Championed art's role in our lived experience. Developed the pragmatist view of art.

Art as Language//
The complex structures of symbols that achieve meaning and reference in art.