We respond to the arts in a variety of ways. We experience and recall them. We behave differently, perhaps by dancing to music or making a video in response to someone else's video. We also think and write about the arts in a sustained, organized way, called art criticism.

In HUM 300, we are going to discuss and you will practice three broad kinds of criticism, each with long and glorious traditions. As you can see on the assignments page, your analysis of an artwork will use the first, art as object. Your analysis of a music instrument will use the second, art in context. Your reflective pieces will use the third, art as occasion for meditation. Your essay may combine all three in any proportion, as long as you are doing one or the other of them.

Art as object

Look at the work of art (story, painting, song, performance, etc.) as a made object in and of itself, autonomously, independent from any historical, cultural, or psychological context, which are extraneous. The work of art is broken into its component parts (formal analysis) and each part is analyzed separately and not judged by context, that is, ideas or forces outside itself. The kind of criticism is sometimes called a "close reading", though it can be of a terra-cotta sculpture (Egyptian glazed faience of Horus as a child on left) as well as of a poem. Painting should be about paint, not ideas; writing should be about words, not ideas.

For example, according to what in literature is called New Criticism (it actually started almost a hundred years ago), a poem is not a series of verifiable statements referring to a "'real" world beyond it. It is not an expression of the poet. It is an arrangement of words and, to some exent, the presentation and sophisticated organization of a set of complex experiences in a verbal form. Similarly, a painting is not a representation of something in the "real" world. It is not an expression of the painter. It is the presentation and sophisticated arrangement of colored pigment, shapes, and lines in a visual format.MGM tycoon Louis B. Mayer: ""

This critical approach carves away the maker and audience and leaves only the work by articulating two fallacies, one from the maker's side and the other from the audience's.

Intentional Fallacy - confusing the meaning of a work of art with the artist's intentions

What does it matter to the work what the artist intended? The moment it is finished (or does the artist just stop working on it and go on to other work?), a work of art is on its own, beyond the artist's power to intend about it or control it. The art work belongs to the audience, not the artist.

Affective Fallacy - confusing the meaning of a work of art with how it makes the viewer/reader/listener feel

Concern with the audience moves the emphasis away from the art and toward the person experiencing it, which is different for every person and changes over time. While decisions to purchase tickets and artwork are certainly made on that basis, it is so subjective that it has little value for understanding the work itself. This affective thinking confuses what the art work is with what it does.

Art in context

PHATES - political/historical/artistic/technological/economic/social context

A "framework for analysis" is an academic phrase for a bunch of boxes to sort stuff into. You are doing research that takes you into new, strange areas. A very common way to deal with such situations is also called an "environmental scan" in business organizations. It usually has four boxes or categories: STEP or PEST - Social, Technological, Economic, Political. (Sometimes the E is for Environmental.) For the purposes of HUM 300, I added two, artistic and historical, and made a new acronym: PHATES.

In a traditional STEP or PEST analysis, the arts are usually included in the S or social category and history is implied in every category. But for HUM 300 it makes sense to emphasize them.

political relationship to power

historical/biographical record

artistic expression

technological process/product

economic supply/demand

social cost/benefit

Most of the published writing about the arts uses this kind of criticism. Depending on your audience and purpose, any given critical document could address one or more of these areas to varying extents. The introduction to the document will stake out that scope and then the body of the document will gives examples and explanation.

This kind of arts criticism is often practiced by people who aren't artists and have more interest in another discipline -- history, sociology, commerce, the artist's life, etc. Art historian Howard Risatti wrote in 1988 that this kind of art criticism wants "to understand how art functions socially, economically, and politically in relation to status and power and the construction of worldviews."

Art as occasion for meditation or revolution

This critical view sees art as servant of the personal and psychological for meditation or of the social and political for revolution.

From stained glass windows in Polish churches to Indian mandalas, art has been used for religious/spiritual/meditative purposes. The opposite of the art as object approach (see above), it emphasizes rather than rejects the affective fallacy, saying that the meaning of a work of art depends totally on how it makes the viewer/reader/listener feel (meditation) or act (revolution).

Similarly, from army marching songs (videos of Chinese military songs) to propaganda posters, from political hip-hop to South Africa's resistance art during apartheid, art has been used by people to help bring about change in their conditions, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse.

Art and Revolution

Founded in 1995, A & R is an attempt to revitalize political protest through the introduction of dance, street theatre, and puppetry into political protests. Though very little exists in terms of critical practice, A & R does however support a myriad of anti-corporate, anti-globalization, housing, poverty, and criminal justice actions. A & R exists as a tactic rather than a direct, ideologically driven entity.

Kenya's Sanaa Art Promotions (SAP)

an organisation of artists, researchers, social scientists and communication specialists active in the use of arts to promote socio-economic development within East African communities.

Founded in 1985 under Kenya’s Non Governmental Organisation Act, SAP visual and theatre arts for communication through Participatory Interactive Media Model (PIMM) to advocate for behaviour change primarily among the youth and, secondarily, through the ripple effect, the community.

Music That Changed History and Still Resonates
by Jon Pareles
NY Times, February 10, 2010

It was not lost on anyone that Mr. Obama is America’s first African-American president. “The civil rights movement was a movement sustained by music,” Mr. Obama said in opening remarks. The music, he said, “was inspired by the movement and gave strength in return.” ...

If any music can claim to have changed history, it was the songs of the civil rights movement. Rooted in the hymns, gospel and rural ballads of the southland they set out to change, civil rights songs seized a moral high ground with their melodies as well as their words.

The lyrics followed through with the eloquence of sermons and slave songs, transforming them into both topical agitprop and long-term bulwarks of resolve.

Interrelationships between various forms of art

Girl with Pearl Earring case study

Girl with a Pearl Earring
the painting by Johannes Vermeer 1665	the movie starring Scarlett Johansson 2003	the book by Tracy Chevalier 1999
movie trailer

Pygmalion case study

It all started with the Greek myth of Pygmalion a sculptor who fell in love with his statue.

In Ovid's narrative, Pygmalion was a Cypriot sculptor who carved a woman out of ivory. According to Ovid, after seeing the Propoetides prostituting themselves, he was 'not interested in women', but his statue was so realistic that he fell in love with it. He offered the statue gifts and eventually prayed to Venus (Aphrodite). She took pity on him and brought the statue to life. They married and had a son, Paphos.

Still in the ancient world, one of the kings of Tyre (now Lebanon) was called Pygmalion of Tyre and the sculptor Pygmalion is a character in Virgil's masterpiece the Aeneid.

In the arts, the mythical character is depicted or is alluded to frequently, as you can see from this very partial list.

1748 - Pigmalion, an opera by Jean-Philippe Rameau

1762 - Pygmalion, a melodrama (just about the first) by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

1779, 1806, and 1816 - Pygmalion operas by Georg Anton Benda, Luigi Cherubini, and Gaetano Donizetti

1871 - Pygmalion and Galatea, a play by W. S. Gilbert (of Gilbert and Sullivan fame)

1878 - Pygmalion and the Image Series: The Soul Attains (see detail on left or full image), oil on canvas by Edward Burne-Jones

1883 - Galatea, or Pygmalion Reversed, a musical comedy by Meyer Lutz

1883 - Pygmalion, ou La Statue de Chypre (Pygmalion, or The Cyprus Statue), a ballet with choreography by Marius Petipa

1913 - Pygmalion, a play by George Bernard Shaw

1938 - Pygmalion, a movie based on Shaw's play

1956 - My Fair Lady, a Broadway musical (poster on upper right) by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe based on Shaw's play

1964 - My Fair Lady, a movie (poster on lower right) with Rex Harrison as a language teacher and Audrey Hepburn as Galatea, in this case known as Eliza Doolittle, based on Shaw's play

1980 - Educating Rita, a stage comedy by Willy Russell

1983 - Educating Rita film (poster on left) with Michael Caine as a literature teacher and Julie Walters as Galatea. Note the cut line on the poster: Sometimes students end up being the best teachers.

1990 - Pretty Woman, a romantic comedy film with Richard Gere as a financial trader and Julia Roberts as Galatea

1997 - Hole in My Soul, a music video by Aerosmith with Pygmalion as a mad scientist and Eva Mendes as Galatea

2007 - Lars and the Real Girl

This list in the arts -- TV episodes, poems, novels, paintings, sculptures, etc. -- could go on and on and on. You could make a case that all the Frankenstein stories, starting with Mary Shelly's original in 1818 (published when she was 20 years old, by the way), are a variation on the Pygmalion story.

It's not just the arts, of course. For psychologists, the pygmalion effect describes the behavior of individuals as people expect them to behave. In extreme cases, a person with pygmalionism or agalmatophilia has an erotic attraction to statues or immobility.

In astronomy, 96189 Pygmalion is a minor planet. OK, I'll stop.

myth of the hero

What's going on here? First, there are only so many stories that humans tell each other. Second, we keep telling them over and over.

Monomyth - many enduring stories over the ages from around the world share fundamental structures and stages.

The Stages of the Hero's Journey

Departure
The Call to Adventure
Refusal of the Call
Supernatural Aid
The Crossing of the First Threshold
Belly of The Whale

Initiation
The Road of Trials
The Meeting With the Goddess
Woman as Temptress
Atonement with the Father
Apothesis
The Ultimate Boon

Return
Refusal of the Return
The Magic Flight
Rescue from Without
The Crossing of the Return Threshold
Master of Two Worlds
Freedom to Live

The Hero with a Thousand Faces, by Joseph Campbell

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.

examples of common heroes who share most of the stages in classical literature: Osiris, Prometheus, the Buddha, Moses, Christ

examples from the movies: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, Harry Potter

Campbell's 'Hero's Journey' Monomyth

The Archetypal Hero

The Monomyth

universal plots

If life is a sequence of events, plots give them causality. For example: "The king died. The queen died." That is not a plot. However: "The king died because the queen died." Oh yeah? How did the one cause the other? Now, we have a plot.

How many plots are there?

The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations is a descriptive list by Georges Polti to categorize every dramatic situation that might occur in a story or performance.