Stories of Art, chapter 1 (original) (raw)
This course is an introduction to art history as a field of cultural production. The readings and conference discussions will be directed towards exploring not only the paradigmatic works of art and architecture from antiquity to post-modernity but also the interpretive texts produced about them. Emphasis will be placed on the shift of practices of artifact production with skilled crafting in pre-industrial societies towards modern definitions of art and visual culture with their distinctive socio-cultural status in the contemporary world. Case studies are thus drawn from ancient Near Eastern and classical antiquity as well as the Western post-industrial art. While the development of the discipline form 18th century onwards will be problematized, core discursive issues in art history such as representation, iconography, narrative, technology, style, museum studies will be addressed.
History of art: the Western tradition
2004
Survey course of historical periods of ancient to contemporary Western art including painting, sculpture, architecture and music. The life, artistic style and technique of influential artists are studied. By observing famous works and creating their own artworks, students learn the principles of organization of form.
The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, 2010
The paper argues that something is art only if (i) it belongs to a special kind of internal history and (ii) needs to be understood and appreci ated in the light of such history. This goes against both the traditional view that art has a timeless, ahistorical essence and the historicist view that there can be no ahistorical perspective for understanding art. The paper draws on Hegel's view that art needs to be understood through its history, but rejects the idea that the history of art has an end in the double sense of a goal and an end point. It also rejects Arthur Danto's Hegelinspired claim that the ahistori cal essence of art is revealed at the end of its history and opens the door to a natural alliance between philosophers of art and art historians.
TEACHING THE HISTORY OF ART WITHIN THE CURRENT STATE OF EDUCATION AND TEACHING.
Da compreensão da arte ao ensino da história da arte, hoje.
Though we may think of History as taking note of change and documenting it, and sociology more as revealing change, as far as I am concerned, history is simply about why, about questions, whereas sociology is much more about functions that actual artistic facts and phenomena as historic-social facts play out in the human-social process of becoming. One and the other must provide, in turn, a causal explanation and/or a functional one, respectively, to use Durkheim’s terminology. In fact, these distinctions are important from an operative viewpoint only. The human does not yet find it easy to assume multiple standpoints, the circularity of the gaze. Yet bit by bit under the more or less intuitive or enlightening effect of theories we haveb been looking at, such as deconstruction and neoperspectivism, cross-disciplinarity gains momentum: analysis in the history of art become the fruit of multiple perspective and unitary perspective, combining multiple durations, synchrony and diachrony, and gleaning knowledge—inevitably—from aesthetics, a discipline without which art cannot be studied, no matter what the perspective. The History of Art is therefore, in Fernández Arenas’s opinion, “…history, technique, philology, sociology, psychology [and more]. It is an eminently humanistic discipline, that demands plurality in the choice of method.” Simultaneously riding the crest of the wave and surfing the tunnel, to pick up on Braudel’s metaphor, “there is not one history, the trade of an historian, but trades, histories, a sum of curiosities, points of view, possibilities…”3 either in general history or in the history of art. So, you will find a few things attached to the structural form of the history of art: analyses that would fit micro-history, events disseminated across historic structures and conjunctures, piecing together fine, fine strands that should be drawn together, tighter and tighter, to capture the human in their net. Not an easy task, to be sure, seeing as it is “…the ability to imagine that makes the past concrete…scientific imagination…manifesting through the power of abstraction”4. As historical narration, it “…dies, because the sign of history is [as Le Goff reminds us, quoting Roland Barthes] …not so much the real as the intelligible…” (see note 3 on Braudel below) and thus changes with the growth of the human itself.