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Visual Art: Human Figure Unit 4 Close Reading

BEAUTY Vocabulary Close Reading Questions NOTES: Application, etc.

1. What is Beauty?By Andrea Borghini

“Beauty itself is but the sensible image of the infinite” said once the historian George Bancroft. The nature of beauty is one of the most fascinating riddles of philosophy. Is beauty universal? How do we know it? Nearly every major philosopher has engaged with these questions and their cognates, including the great figures of ancient Greek philosophy such as Plato and Aristotle.

The Aesthetic AttitudeThe appreciation of beauty takes place in an aesthetic attitude. This is the state of contemplating a subject with no other purpose than appreciating it. For most authors, thus, the aesthetic attitude is purposeless: we have no reason to engage in it other than finding aesthetic enjoyment. 

Now aesthetic appreciation can be carried on by means of the senses: looking at a sculpture, some trees in bloom, or Manhattan’s skyline; listening to Jay-Z’s raps; tasting a mushroom risotto; feeling some fresh water on a hot day; and so on. However, senses may not be necessary in order to obtain an aesthetic attitude: we can rejoice, for instance, in imagining a beautiful house that never existed; in discovering or grasping the details of a complex theorem in algebra. In principle, thus, the aesthetic attitude can fall under any subject via any possible mode of thought –senses, imagination, intellect, or any combination of them.

Sensible : practical

Universal : used or understood by all

Cognates : of the same or similar nature : generically alike

Aesthetic : concerning the appreciation of beauty or good taste

contemplating : to view or consider with continued attention : meditate on

1. Why is the aesthetic attitude without purpose?

2. What is the major way we have an aesthetic experience or appreciation?

3. What is the method of aesthetic appreciation when we grasp a “complex theorem in algebra”?

Michelangelo’s David

Is Beauty Universal? The question arises of whether beauty is universal. Suppose you agree that Michelangelo’s David and a Van Gogh’s self-portrait are beautiful; do such beauties have something in common? Is actually the one and the same quality, beauty, that we come to find in them? And is this beauty the very same that one experiences gazing on the Grand Canyon from its edge or listening to Beethoven’s ninth symphony? 

If beauty is a universal, as for example Plato maintained, it is reasonable to hold that we do not know it through the senses. Indeed, the subjects in question are quite different and are also known in different ways (gaze, hearing, observation); so, if there is something in common among those subjects, it cannot be what is known through the senses. 

But, is there really something common to all experiences of beauty? Compare the beauty of watching a horror movie or visiting a haunted house with the one of picking flowers in a Montana field over the summer or surfing a gigantic wave in Hawaii. It seems that in each of those cases there is no single common element: not even the feelings or the basic ideas involved seem to match. It’s on the basis of those considerations that some prefer to believe that beauty is a label we attach to different sorts of experiences.

Beauty and PleasureDoes beauty necessarily go along with pleasure? Do humans praise beauty because of its pleasure? Could it be the other way round, instead? Is a life dedicated to the quest for beauty one worth being lived? These are some fundamental questions in philosophy, at the intersection between ethics and aesthetics. 

If on the one hand beauty seems linked to the aesthetic pleasure, seeking the former as a mean to achieve the latter can lead to one of the worst consequences: egoistic hedonism, the typical symbol of decadence. 

ethics : A set of principles of right conduct.

egoistic : One devoted to one's own interests and advancement; an egocentric person

hedonism : the doctrine that pleasure or happiness is the sole or chief good in life

Decadence. behavior that shows a love of self-indulgence, pleasure and money, or the process of decline or decay in society's ethical and moral traditions

protagonist : the leading character, hero , or heroine of a drama or other literary work

ballad : Short narrative folk song,

4. What is the most important question asked in the first paragraph under “Is Beauty Universal”?

5. If beauty is universal, how did Plato say we cannot know it?

6. Based on the reading, why might Plato be wrong?

7. How is beauty and pleasure connected to ethics?

Van Gogh’s Self Portrait

But, beauty can also be regarded as a value, one of the dearest to humans. In Roman Polanski’s movie The Pianist, for instance, the protagonist escapes the desolation of WWII by playing a ballad by Chopin. Art therapy offers another example of the importance of beauty to our lives. The appreciation of beauty, to sum up, is something that is worthwhile to cultivate, for its consequences and in itself.

2. Does beauty still belong in art?Beauty is no longer about what's pretty, symmetrical, or harmonious. It's about what stirs viewers to grapple with the world as it really is.

By Carol Strickland / December 20, 2007

Is beauty dead? The answer that springs from much of contemporary art is an unapologetic "yes." Grime, grit, death, destruction, flesh, and flaws have replaced pretty models, still-lifes, and pastoral scenes.

In the past 500 years, the opalescent beauty of "La Pietà" has become the urine-soaked effrontery of "Piss Christ." It's no wonder crowds prefer the cheer of Van Gogh's sunflowers to such cheekiness. But history is surely laughing at this irony.

Impressionism, now beloved, was considered an assault on beauty when first exhibited in the 1860s. Critics scoffed that the paintings were sloppy, stupid, and meaningless – the same complaints one often hears about art today. As art critic Clement Greenberg famously said, "All profoundly original art looks ugly at first."

So perhaps it is premature to declare beauty obsolete. Instead, what's needed is a more nuanced appreciation of contemporary art's aesthetic. Today, beauty is no longer

cultivate: To improve and prepare

Unapologetic : containing NO apology; as a brag

Opalescent : exhibiting a play of colors like that of the opal

Effrontery : shameless boldness

Cheekiness : arrogantly self-confident

Irony: The use of words to convey the opposite of their literal meaning

Impressionism : art movement in late 19th century focusing on color and light

Profoundly : having deep insight or understanding

Premature : uncommonly or unexpectedly early

Obsolete : no longer useful;

Nuanced : made or done with extreme care and accuracy

Complacency : A feeling of

8. How does “beauty” have a value?

___________________________

9. What is the irony discussed in the second paragraph?

10. What example reveals how tastes have changed since the 19th century?

11. Why can’t we say that “beauty” is obsolete just yet?

Serrano’s Piss Christ

Van Gogh’s Sunflowers

Monet’s Impressionist Sunrise

about what's pretty, symmetrical, or harmonious. It's about what stirs the viewer to grapple with the world as it really is. Art is not a cosmetic to prettify reality or provide escapist pleasure but a hammer to smash our complacency.

The philosopher George Santayana described beauty as "a living presence or an aching absence." In contemporary art, it's quite often an aching presence. As Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa pointed out, "Contemporary aesthetics has established the beauty of ugliness, reclaiming for art everything in human experience that artistic representation had previously rejected."

This challenge to convention reflects artists' "I cannot tell a lie" honesty. After the savagery of World War I, art turned to the dark side with wrenching paintings of brutality by German Expressionists such as George Grosz, Otto Dix, and Max Beckmann. "We had found in the war," the Dada artist Richard Huelsenbeck said in 1917, "that Goethe and Schiller and beauty added up to killing and bloodshed and murder." After World War II, Theodor Adorno said that "to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric."

No wonder today's art reflects an unsettling sense of disturbance. Check out Anselm Kiefer's charred landscapes. Or Lucian Freud's clotted canvases grotesquely exaggerating each crease and fleshly flaw in his models. It shouts: What a broken, saggy, ruined piece of work is man! If we don't want to be blind to reality, it behooves us to look at contemporary art, think about it, register its message, and understand its origins.

"If you look at the street art of Jean-Michel Basquiat or younger artists like Dash Snow or Barry McGee, their work is about the grit and grime of reality," says Susan Davidson, senior curator at the Guggenheim Museum. "There is beauty in it but it's harsher, rough, and in your face."

contentment or self-satisfaction, especially when coupled with an unawareness of danger, trouble, or controversy

Dada : early 20th century art movement that used absurdity and tragedy of life as their subject

Charred : To burn the surface

Behooves : To be necessary or proper.

Criterion : a rule of priniciple for judging something

Vapid : lacking or having lost life, sharpness, or flavor

12. Which artists and art movement decided it could not tell a lie?

13. How does this attitude of “I cannot tell a lie” contradict or reinforce Plato’s ideas of beauty?

14. How is street art different than traditional forms of beauty?

Otto Dix’s War Field

Lucien Freud’s Self Portrait

Basquiat

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Morley Safer, who covers art for CBS's "Sunday Morning," says, "its clear beauty has no place in contemporary art." He suggests substituting "emotional and intellectual impact" as the criterion to judge quality.

To assess quality in today's art, don't rely on superficial beauty. Unlike a vapid Breck-girl image, good art has got to have punch to shake us up, wake us up, and – above all – make us sit up and take notice.

Good art grabs our attention, then deepens our engagement with multiple layers that expand our knowledge of the world and ourselves, and make us see and feel and think in different ways. And all this should come in the form of an object made with consummate skill. "Things that quicken the heart" is how John Baldessari, a master of postmodern art, puts it.

Renaissance idealism – a pinnacle of beauty in visual art – embodied the smiling face of life as we might wish it to be. Caravaggio gave art a Baroque twist when he took his models from the gutter and painted the Virgin Mary with dirty feet. Caravaggio's patron’s howled, just as today, museum-goers often recoil from art reflecting the sordid side of life.

It's lovely to depict humanity's highest aspirations, but it's necessary to acknowledge our feet of clay, too.

Looking at art today has the morbid fascination of rubbernecking at a wreck on the highway. Yet the artist's intent goes beyond voyeurism to sound an early warning. The canary's song is beautiful and lulling. But when its melody stops in the mine, you'd better cease heaving that pickaxe and run for your life.

• Carol Strickland is an art correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor and the author of "The Annotated Mona Lisa: A Crash Course in Art History from Prehistoric to Post-Modern." This is the second of a

Renaissance : a 15th and 16th century period in Europe as a transition from the Medieval to modern world.

Idealism : The act or practice of envisioning things in an ideal form

Pinnacle : the highest or culminating point

Patron : a person who supports with money

Aspirations : strong desire, longing, or aim

morbid : suggesting an unhealthy mental state or attitude

rubbernecking : to look about or stare with great curiosity

voyeurism : gets pleasure from looking at something

15. How does a new definition of beauty connect to what good art is?

Baldessari

Caravaggio

three-part series.

3. A Taste of Beauty Culture

(CNN) -- Can beauty be defined by age, gender, color, body shape or size? Who gets to decide?

Multibillion-dollar beauty and fashion industries both shape and depend on the cult-like worship of what physical attributes the public sees as beautiful. And most women feel the effects of those decisions.

The photo exhibition "Beauty Culture" at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles, with 175 pictures by iconic photographers, is aimed at starting people thinking and talking about female beauty. It also peeks into the underbelly of the beauty industry, including its relation to celebrity, plastic surgery, the faux-perfection of airbrushing of advertising and even child beauty pageants.

There are a lot of hot-button issues as to how the media and the beauty and fashion worlds depict whole groups of people, why they show them in a particular way or barely notice them at all.

However, there's been a major shift when it comes to diversity in beauty advertising and magazine beauty editorial spreads.

Supermodel Veronica Webb, L'Oreal's corporate diversity director Jean-Claude Le Grand, fashion insider Bethann Hardison, Marie Claire's beauty editor Erin Flaherty and others share their thoughts on the evolving and increasingly inclusive take on gorgeousness.

America's changing definition of beautifulSeveral studies suggest that many equate beauty with symmetry, but even within that equation, "Each time has its

Iconic : Having a conventional formulaic style

Underbelly : a corrupt or sordid par

Faux : false, fake

Inclusive: including a great deal, or including everything concerned

equate : to make equal

16. According to the article, who decides on what beauty is?

17. What is one of the “hot-button issues” in today’s fashion world?

18. What prevents us from equating symmetry with beauty?

own standard (of beauty)," said photographer Melvin Sokolsky during his lecture at the Annenberg.

A photographer, an editor or a casting director may be subject to his or her personal predilections of what beauty is and foist them upon the public, leading entire societal likes and dislikes to shift, too.

And that standard in America is changing rapidly. Today, the number of marriages between people of different ethnicities is surging. Back in 1993, Time magazine's cover story "The New Face of America," featuring a computer generated face consisting of a mix of several ethnicities, is indeed more in line with what most of us now consider beautiful, according to Allure's 20th Anniversary Beauty Survey. "Sixty-four percent of all our respondents think women of mixed race represent the epitome of beauty," the survey says.

And of those respondents who said they wished to change their skin color, "70% reported that they wanted it to be darker." Full lips and curvy bodies are also coveted.

That's a far cry from 1991 when most Allure respondents chose blonde haired, blue-eyed Christie Brinkley as the ideal beauty. The all-American look today is much more of a hybrid.

One model's storyModel, writer and television personality Veronica Webb (former co-host of "Tim Gunn's Guide to Style" on Bravo) experienced this transition from the front lines of the beauty industry.

Although Beverly Johnson was the first African-American on the cover of Vogue in 1974, Webb was the first African-American to win a major cosmetics campaign when she signed on with Revlon in 1992.

Predilections : Condition of favoring or liking

Foist: to force another to accept especially secretly

Respondents : a person who is called upon to issue a response

Epitome : A representative or perfect example of a class or type

Coveted : to desire wrongfully

Hybrid : something new created from two or more known elements

19. How is the standard of beauty in America changing?

Christie Brinkley

"For me personally it was like almost the impossible dream of the fashion industry," says Webb of her Revlon campaign. "The biggest reward, the most money you could make, the highest level of commercial validation. And you know a barrier -- a real barrier, a glass ceiling that existed forever -- got broken.

"And the ideal of beauty, and who represents beauty, and what beautiful is changed so quickly and so radically right after that, that by the time I had my children they can't even recognize the world of fashion and beauty that I came up in."

Webb says that in any business when you qualify and can perform on every level, "but you're rejected out of hand because of your skin color ... not even your skin color, but the perception of your 'race,' there's nothing more frustrating than that," says Webb.

But today there's a whole spectrum of women who've helmed beauty campaigns from blonde to brunette, from fair skinned to deep, including celebrities such as Jennifer Lopez, Beyoncé, Freida Pinto, Eva Mendes, Taylor Swift, Kerry Washington, Aishwarya Rai, Drew Barrymore, Gwen Stefani and models such as Liu Wen, Liya Kebede, Christy Turlington and Adriana Lima.

A global perspective = good businessTime has shown the beauty industry that embracing a world of beauty isn't just good karma, it's also good for the bottom line.

"For us, the more you are diverse, the more you are successful," says Le Grand. L'Oreal Group is the world's largest beauty company and includes 23 international brands, including L'Oreal Paris, Lancôme, Maybelline and Garnier.

Validation : to give legal force to; legalize

Helmed : A position of leadership or control

Karma : result of ones actions

20. How did the “glass ceiling” get broken?

21. What does Webb say is sometimes frustrating for models?

22. How might diversity in modeling prevent Webb’s frustration?

If you are to be a leader, Le Grand says that you have to understand "there is a link between beauty and diversity." And that includes understanding the vision of beauty in places such as China, India, Africa and Europe as well the United States.

"If it's only one vision of beauty and not a diverse one, you are out. ... We have to reflect everyone from the model to the employee."

Flaherty, Marie Claire's beauty editor who also once worked at Jane, says that she's been lucky to work at magazines that are all about a global perspective, diversity and unusual beauty.

Diversity, of course, can be expresses a myriad of ways, be it featuring women with freckles, who are curvier or who are 45 and older.

An element in the beauty world that changed things, "was the Dove campaign," says Flaherty. "Using many different types of models and reflecting what women really look like."

The campaign's stated goal is to "free ourselves and the next generation from beauty stereotypes" and contribute to building self-esteem for young women and others through marketing campaigns featuring women of different shapes, sizes, ages and hues as well as partnering with groups such as the National Eating Disorders Information Center and the Girl Scouts.

Bethann Hardison has been a model, modeling agent and recently Vogue Italia editor-at-large.

"I'm an advocate of the fashion model," says Hardison, who laments models losing jobs to actors and singers.But she does see big changes in advertising in that it better reflects

Myriad : a very great or indefinitely great number of persons or thing

Stereotypes :. A conventional, formulaic, and oversimplified conception, opinion, or image.

Demographics : the statistical data of a population

Inequities : unfairness

23. What reason does the article give for the need for diversity?

24. Why is this type of beauty important for the next generation of women?

American demographics.

Hardison points out that the beauty industry has a large consumer base, speaks to a broader group of people, and so is more democratic and shifts faster than the fashion world.

But as the global economy shifts, so too will fashion with the help of newspaper editors who call out inequities and magazine editors, casting directors, advertising agencies and designers committed to inclusiveness, as well as the public.

"The word beauty is such a controversial word," says Hardison. "I think that the more that there's exposure (of different kinds of looks), and as long as you expose them consistently, you give people a chance to see what could also be beautiful besides what came before.".4. Art Talk Chapter 10: ProportionLesson 1: The Golden MeanThrough the ages, artists have looked for a ratio (a mathematical comparison of sizes) that produces an ideal form for figures and structures. The Greek mathematician Euclid found what he considered a perfect ratio. Known as the Golden Mean, this ratio consists of a line divided into two parts so that the smaller line has the same proportion to the larger line as the larger line has to the whole line. In math, this ratio is written 1:1.6. The Golden Mean was extended to the Golden Rectangle, which had sides that matched this ratio. Many artists have used the Golden Rectangle to organize their paintings. Also, if you divide the average adult male body at the navel, the two body measurements match the Golden Mean. Many artists, therefore, have used the Golden Mean to represent humans. This was common in the Renaissance, when the Golden Mean was called the Divine Proportion. Although

Inclusiveness : letting people in and making them feel welcome.

25. How will diversity help redefine beauty in the fashion industry?

there may be no “correct” proportion for works of art, many people have looked to the human body as a source for perfect proportions.

Lesson 2: ScaleScale refers to the size of something as measured against a standard reference. In art you can judge whether an object is represented in large or small scale, based on the average size of that object. Artists often use hierarchical proportion, which is when figures are arranged in a work of art so that scale indicates importance. You can also consider the scale of an artwork itself, based on what you know of the average size of works of the same type. Some works that seem monumental are actually very small in size. This is why the dimensions are always listed in the credit line of the work. Variations in scale within a work can change the work’s total impact. When drawing human proportions, Western artists usually try to represent them realistically. But sometimes they use the technique foreshortening. Foreshortening is when artists shorten an object to make it look as if it extends backward into space. Other artists use symbolic proportions, showing areas of the body they consider more important, such as the head, as larger. By studying the general proportions of the human body and the human face, you will learn to create natural-looking figures. Then you can vary these proportions for expressive effect.

Lesson 3: How Artists Use Proportion and DistortionMany artists use correct proportion in their works so that viewers will recognize the person, place, or thing being shown. Other artists choose exaggeration and distortion—deviations from expected, normal proportions—to create works with unusual expressive qualities. Michelangelo’s statue of David (Figure 10.19, page 267) has very accurate proportions, but its large scale adds to its dramatic effect. Portrait painters often use accurate proportions because

they want to record information about real people. Other artists deviate from expected, normal proportions to convey their ideas and feelings. In Single Family Blues (Figure 10.23, page 269), Leo Twiggs exaggerated the size of a hand to show the dominance of “the blues” in one family. An artist may place a small head on a large body to give an artwork a monumental quality. Masks often have highly exaggerated features that enhance their purposes. And cartoonists often exaggerate their characters’ bodies and expressions to make them funnier.