ART 101 Understanding Art

Lecture Hours: 4
Credits: 4

Introduces approaches to viewing, understanding, and discussing the visual arts. Covers formal, stylistic, content, and meaning-based analysis. Explores the relationship between the social and artistic construction of reality.

Prerequisite: Placement into WR 115; or completion of WR 090 (or higher) with a grade of C or better; or consent of instructor.
Student Learning Outcomes:

Describe historical and contemporary works of art, using formal elements, principles of composition, style, technique, and medium using art-specific vocabulary.
Interpret content and meaning of historical and contemporary examples works of art, as revealed through subject, formal elements, and principles of composition, style and technique.
Analyze historical and contemporary works of art, using art-specific vocabulary.
Create, describe, and interpret a work of art.
Identify and discuss the construction of power, privilege, and difference in historical and contemporary works of art.

Statewide General Education Outcomes

Interpret and engage in the Arts and Letters, making use of the creative process to enrich the quality of life.
Critically analyze values and ethics within a range of human experience and expression to engage more fully in local and global issues.

Content Outline

Formal Elements
- Value
- Line
- Form
- Color
- Texture
- Scale
Principles of Design and Composition
- Format
- Figure and ground
- Balance
- Echoing shape and rhythm
- Construction of depth
  - One-point, rising and intuitive perspectives
Styles
- Idealism
- Naturalism
  - Ideal and realist
- Expressive distortion
- Abstraction
- Schematism
Techniques
- Painterliness
- Plasticity
- Linearity
Construction of Meaning in Art
- Subject
- Style
- Meaning and visual metaphor
- Art as constructor of power, privilege, and difference in art
Trends in Modern Art
- Cubism, mechanomorphism, abstraction, and non-representational art
- Expressionism and primitivism
- Dada and anti-art
- Appropriation