2. What is the purpose of art? How does it
contribute to knowledge?
3 theories for exploration:
• Art as communication
• Art as education
• Art as imitation
3. Art as communication
By words one transmits thoughts to another;
by means of art, one transmits feelings.
Leo Tolstoy
A conductor has to know how to translate
music into a communicative force that makes
the listener want to hear what he has to say.
Isaac Stern
If an attunement or sensory response can be evoked from the
viewer, a most exquisite form of communication has been
established, and the artist's role has been truly fulfilled.
Irving Shapiro
• The ‘language of art’
• Artist communicates a message in their own language
• Spectator needs to ‘learn the language’ in order to interpret
the message as it was intended
4. Art as communication
Picasso’s Guernica (1937): a perpetual reminder of the tragedies of war,
an anti-war symbol, and an embodiment of peace
6. Art as education
By opening our eyes we do not necessarily see what confronts us. We
are anxiety-ridden animals. Our minds are continually active,
fabricating an anxious, usually self-preoccupied, often falsifying veil,
which partially conceals the world. Our states of consciousness differ
in quality, our fantasies and reveries are not trivial and unimportant,
they are profoundly connected with our energies and our abilities to
choose and act. And if quality of consciousness matters, then anything
which alters consciousness in the direction of unselfishness, objectivity
and realism is to be connected with virtue.
Iris Murdoch (1919-1999), writer
We have never lived enough. Our experience is, without fiction, too
confined and too parochial. Literature extends it, making us reflect and
feel about what might otherwise be too distant for feeling. The
importance of this for both morals and politics cannot be
underestimated.
Martha Nussbaum (1947-), philosopher
7. Art as education: task
Worker and Collective Farm Girl,
Vera Mukhina, 1936
The Wide Expanse, Aleksandr Deineka, 1944
Private Lessons, Svetlana Bondarenko,
Socialist Realist books and films
1972
9. Art as education
• Art as moral guide/educator
• Emotional response influence on behaviour
• Art used as a force for good / bad?
– to raise awareness, increases knowledge
– to forge consciousness (e.g. ideological art)
10. Art as imitation: the mimetic theory of art
• Renaissance: imitation of art of Classical antiquity
• Art was driven by desire to achieve the perfect likeness
(portraits, sculptures, novels), since doing so required
considerable skill. Michelangelo
(1475-1564)
• 18th century Romanticism: reversal of this idea with focus on originality
• 19th century invention of the camera revolution in the visual arts; why
devote art to imitation?
Visitor to Matisse’s studio:
‘Surely the arm of that woman is
too long?’
Matisse: ‘Madame, you are
mistaken. That is not a woman; that
is a picture.’
• 20th century: ‘art as imitation’ seen as limiting, unless it seeks to pursue
other goals…
11. Art as imitation: the mimetic theory of art
• 20th century: mimesis is reconfigured to serve other
purposes / reveal different truths
• Homage, where
• an author shows respect to an event/topic by alluding to
it in their own work (e.g. Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia)
• an artist shows respect to a veteran of the field or to an
admired practitioner by alluding to or imitating their
work
Purpose: to acknowledge the quality or superiority of the work of
another artist; to act as a reminder to society of eternal values/
truths presented in the original work and which are still relevant in
the present.
12. Art as imitation: the mimetic theory of art
Execution by Yue Minjun, 1995
Execution of Maximilian by
Manet, 1867
The Third of May, 1808, by Goya,
1814
13. Art as imitation: the mimetic theory of art
• 20th century: mimesis is reconfigured to serve other
purposes / reveal different truths
• Parody, where an imitative work is created to mock, comment on
or trivialise an original work, its subject, author, style, or some
other target, by means of satiric or ironic imitation)
• James Joyce's Ulysses, which incorporates elements of
Homer's Odyssey in a 20th-century Irish context
• T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland, which incorporates and
recontextualizes elements of a vast range of prior texts,
including Dante's Inferno.
• Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildernstern Are Dead –
minor characters from Shakespeare’s Hamlet transformed for
comedic effect
Purpose: to provide a new perspective on / defamiliarise the
present by drawing, mimetically, on the past.
14. A 1943 poster promoting A parody of the original that
patriotism and suggesting that works both as a playful critique of
careless communication may be Western consumerism, and
harmful to the war effort, perhaps as a more serious
showing the American flag. comment on the
meaning(lessness?) of patriotism
in modern America
15. A 1960 Soviet state propaganda
poster produced at the height of
the Cold War space race. It
adheres to the official aesthetic
doctrine of ‘Socialist Realism’ and
reads: ‘Man’s path is open before
him!’ (Yuri Gagarin was the first
man in space the following year).
A 1989 reworking of the original
by Russian artist Alexander
Kosolapov, member of the Sotsart
(or ‘Soviet pop art’ movement,
founded in the early 1970s as a
reaction against Socialist Realism
and the unceasing heroism it
depicted).
16. Anish Kapoor’s re-appropriation of ‘Gangnam Style’ to draw
attention to Ai Weiwei and other prisoners of conscience all
over the world.
17. The arts and truth
‘Art is a lie that gives us the truth, at least the truth we are given to understand.’
Picasso
• Can truth be based on a ‘lie’, as Picasso suggests? If science gives us
truth that is verifiable, what kind of truth do the arts give us?
• Do we risk diminishing the value of art if we reduce it to a series of
truth statements?
‘Hamlet and Socrates spoke of art as a mirror held up to
nature. Socrates saw mirrors as but reflecting what we can
already see…and [therefore] of no cognitive benefit whatever.
Hamlet, more accurately, recognised a remarkable feature of
reflecting surfaces, namely that they show us what we could
not otherwise perceive – our own face and form…and so art, in
so far as it is mirrorlike, reveals us to ourselves.’
Arthur Danto
