Introduction

ARTH 110

Introduction

Slide List 1


Jan Van Eyck, Arnolfini Wedding Portrait, 1434. See webpage for more details of the painting.	Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907.

Rogier Van der Weyden, St. Luke Drawing the Virgin, c. 1435.	Albrecht Dürer, Self-Portrait, 1497.

Albrecht Dürer, Self Portrait, 1500.

	Daphne, Pantocrator, Byzantine, c. 1080-1100.

	Velazquez, Las Meninas, 1656

DEFINITIONS

Like language and religion, art is a cultural phenomenon, a phenomenon of the group, and like language and religion, art is a system of signs in a certain relationship to one another enabling communication both between members of the group in interpreting and responding to experience of the external world and in the individual's inner discourse with himself/ herself as to his/her own behavior, emotional and private. Art is among other things a way of re-presenting and interpreting the external world and humankind's experience of itself.

Images show us a world and not the world itself. Images are not the things shown but are representations thereof: re-presentations. When we look at images, whether photographs, films, videos, or paintings, what we see is the product of human consciousness, itself part and parcel of culture and history. Images are constructed for the purpose of performing some function within a given sociocultural matrix. "Every image embodies a way of seeing." Each image embodies historically, socially, and culturally specific competing, and contradictory, ways of seeing.