INTERNET ONLINE COURSES

07:080:106 ART APPRECIATION (3)

NOT OPEN TO STUDENTS IN A VISUAL ARTS MAJOR 080 OR 081

Art Appreciation: Learn how to Look at, Understand and Discuss Art

Course description: Do you want to know how to understand art when you walk into art galleries and art museums? This course is an introduction to the terms and ideas that will give you a way to appreciate what you see. You will learn how and why historical and contemporary artists made their decisions. We will examine the formal elements of design in two-dimensional and three-dimensional art and discuss the basic making of the work, with descriptions of the tools and the processes. There are fourteen lessons. Each lesson requires four hours as class time and students are expected to spend four hours outside of class to work on the required assignments for a total of eight hours per lesson. Each lesson needs to be completed before the student may access the next lesson.

Course objectives: This course requires that you look, that you spend time looking. Your eyes need to travel over the images that you are presented to find the visual events that the vocabulary describes. There is reading but in every week’s Vocabulary list and with every Lecture there are images, images of paintings, sculptures, photographs and buildings. Each one of the images needs your attention. The instructor will speak of one or two visual events in the images during the lecture but there is much visual information in each image that will not be noted. The student is required to look. You use your eyes and your brain, informed by the course vocabulary, to deepen your ability to see the complexities that the artist put into the work. This course, that teaches you what art is made of and how to approach and understand art, requires that you spend time looking. You will have the opportunity and requirement to talk and share what you see in the discussion forums. You will learn how to see rather than assume, “Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees.”* At the end of this course you will know how to use the basic vocabulary of visual art. You will be able to walk into an art gallery or art museum knowing how to discuss your observations and communicate them to others.

*Robert Irwin, Being and Circumstance: Notes Toward a Conditional Art, 1985

Light and Space, 2007 by Robert Irwin Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego

How the class will be conducted:

Visual images of art that pertains to the topics for each lesson will be online, embedded within the written lectures and the in the terminology the student will learn for discussion of art works. For each lesson, there will be group discussions online about the meaning and formal aspects of the art shown. Dates will be given in advance so that students can complete the necessary work for each online discussion. In addition, all students will participate with each other in the online discussion forum, and with the instructor through email. The final assignment will be a collaborative assignment where the student will work online with other members of the class.

Grading: Students are required to participate in online discussions forums each week with assigned deadlines for each unit. All essays will be submitted to Turnitin.com to check for plagiarism, if a student disagrees with this policy he or she must withdraw from the class during the scheduled add/drop period. Each online discussion forum will be devoted to one of the fourteen lessons. Students will be expected to have gone through the lessons and readings to be discussed in each online session. These discussion forums give the student the chance to ask and answer questions as they would in a face-to-face classroom setting.

There will be very short essay assignments that will be posted on certain dates for discussion as will the hands-on project. The student will earn 20% of their grade through participation in the discussion forum, blogs and online reading. The software in the online course will monitor the length of student’s reading times. All posted lectures, vocabulary explanations, and assigned reading pdf.s are required readings. All students must read online before they are allowed to copy and print the lectures, etc. Again, the level of participation of the student in the online discussions and readings will determine 20% of the grade. The remainder of the grade will be based on the quality of the assignments. See descriptions below of the essays and projects required for the course.

Students load EXAM GUARD software before they take an exam. Once student activates Exam Guard before taking each exam, their computer will not be able to “surf” the internet or open any other files. They will not be able to read or cut and paste from existing documents. All exams are timed with no return make up without permission of the instructor. The student will not be allowed to sign back on to the exam site to re-start the exam without the permission of the Instructor. There would need to be an unusually dire reason for that permission to be granted. Therefore the students will not be able to sign off from the exam, look up answers and re-enter the exam site to cheat on the exam.

There is no requirement to purchase books for this course. Rather you will need to have access to or purchase an inexpensive scanner for the hands-on component of the course. Once you have created your hands-on project as described below, you will scan and send it to the instructor in jpg format on the page indicated on the online course for comments and grading. After all grades are assigned, the class will be able to see each other’s work and there will be a discussion with the rest of the class.

1. Hands-on Project: 15% of grade

The project will be posted twice as a jpg. The first posting will be half way through the course (after Lesson Seven), and the second posting at the end before Lesson Fourteen, both for class discussion. Questions will be posted for the discussions about the themes of your collected imagery. The point of the project is to open your eyes to visual images and to develop your understanding of art from the position of an artist about the decision-making artists use.

Choose one

a. Using the front page of the New York Times from the date of your birth, collect images that relate to a main news event of that day. Then collect images that relate to who you are. The images should not be limited to the year of your birth but should travel with you through the time that you have lived. Make a collage with these images that relates to your life and the world you live in as you see it.

b. Most artists keep journals. You can make your own journal by collecting images of objects, colors, people, your environment, using a camera or magazine images, web images, etc. Collect at least 5 images a day, every day. Images should be uploaded to a document, site, power point, etc. that will open all the images by itself, NOT a file folder. You will then have a visual diary/ scrapbook similar to the artist’s books that many artists make today.

2. First essay due after five sessions. Go on the internet, and select a painting, sculpture, photograph, drawing or print of a figure of your own choosing from the internet. Describe the proportions and distortions. Do they convey an image of a real person or a spiritual or symbolic entity? How does the artist achieve that effect? 250 words. You must post a jpg of the image and your essay to the instructor. The essay will be graded and then posted for discussion by the class. 15% of grade

3. Midterm Essay due after nine sessions: Again go on the internet and select two art works from different eras and different cultures. Compare and contrast their form, materials and meaning. Use your new understanding of the meanings of the vocabulary of art. 500 words You must post the images along with your essay for he Instructor. Your images and essay will be graded by the instructor and posted for discussion by the class. 15% of grade

4. Write a review of a fine art exhibition at a museum or gallery, which will be due after twelve sessions. If you are unsure of the definition of “Fine Art” in this assignment, the Instructor will help you with more specific guidelines. You must actually visit the museum or gallery in real time. If you can, take photos (cell phone photos are fine) so that the class can see the objects you are reviewing when your review is posted after grading. 15% of grade

5. Final Project: Group Research Project Topic TBA 20% of grade. Students will break into groups. Through research and discussion forums each group will build a presentation from a proposed aspect of the assigned topic that has been accepted by the Instructor.

Weekly Topics:

1. Introduction, Requirements, Terminology, Tools and Processes used in drawing, painting, printmaking and graphic design. Online discussion of questions posted after class has completed the assigned lectures and reading.

2. Human Figure: Representation of the real; proportion, scale and distortion. Online discussion of questions posed after class has completed the assigned lectures and reading.

3. Palaces and Temples from prehistoric times and Ancient Cultures in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe: Similarities and differences in three dimensional structures Online discussion of questions posed after class has completed the assigned lectures and reading.

4. Human head in painting and sculpture: Optics and edge qualities. Online discussion of questions posted after class has completed the assigned lectures and reading.

5. Groups: Volume, mass, gravity, line, shape, contour. Online discussion of questions posed after class has completed the assigned lectures and reading.

6. Light and shade in Medieval and Renaissance painting. Online discussion of first essay, which will be graded by the instructor, before being posted two days before the online discussion (date to be determined).

7. Narration: time and motion in artwork, visual dynamics. Online discussion of questions posed after class has completed the assigned lectures and reading.

8. Sculpture and earthworks, methods and materials of the artist working with the third dimension, texture and surface pattern. There will be an online discussion of hands-on projects. Projects will be graded by the instructor and posted two days before the online discussion (date to be determined).

9. Landscape in paint, print, and sculpture; principles of perspective. Online discussion of questions posed after class has completed the assigned lectures and reading.

10. Architecture and environmental design: scale/space, calligraphy. There will be an online discussion of the essay comparing and contrasting two works of art from different eras and different cultures. Essays and images will be graded by the instructor and posted two days before the online discussion (date to be determined).

11. Direct observation vs. principles of optics; Allegory, Myth, Fantasy. Online discussion of questions posed after class has completed the assigned lectures and reading.

12. Photographic Images: film and digital arts; communicating through real and unreal images. There will be an online discussion of your review of a Museum or Gallery exhibition that you visited in real time. Essays and images will be graded by the instructor and then will be posted two days before (date to be determined).

13. Modern to Contemporary: Abstraction, Pop, Minimal, Material/Process, Postmodernism, Appropriation, Pluralism, etc. how to approach never-ending change. Online discussion of questions posed after whole class has completed the assigned lectures and reading.

14. Final Project Discussion and Review Online discussion of the discussion forum final projects, sent to the instructor one week before will be graded and posted two days before a final class discussion.

Reading selections from the following; all readings will be provided online in pdf format:

Baxendall, Michael. “The Period Eye” Painting and Experience in the 15th Century Italy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.

Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting Company and Penguin Books, 1977.

Fineberg, Jonathan. Art since 1940: Strategies of Being. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1995.

Heller, Nancy G. Women Artists: An Illustrated History. New York: Abbeville Press, Inc, 1987.

Hyde, W. Lewis. The Gift, the Erotic Life of Property. New York: Random House, Inc., 1983.

Lewis, Samella. African American Art and Artists. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990.

Lippard, Lucy. Mixed Blessings; New Art in a Multicultural America. New York: Pantheon Books, 1990.

Lippard, Lucy. Overlay; Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory. New York: Pantheon Books, 1983.

Shattuck, Roger. “Afterword” The Innocent Eye and the Armed Vision. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984.

Steinberg, Leo. “The Eye is a Part of the Mind”, Other Criteria. London: Oxford

University Press, 1972.

Steiner, George. Real Presences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Stokstad, Marilyn. Art History. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1999.

Woman’s Art Journal, published by Old City Publishing, Inc. out of the Department of Art History at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.