Dr. Eric W. Trumbull, Professor, Theatre/Speech

Objectives for this lesson:

 

Students will examine:

the nature of art and the arts

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Theatre - What is it?

A performing art

A graphic art

A literary art (although sometimes not written down)

A popular art (entertainment) - diversion for a mass audience.

The arts can be divided traditionally into the:

Useful arts: medicine, politics, persuasion can be taught.

Fine arts: literature, politics, painting, sculpture, architecture, music, dance -- the traditional wisdom says that we cannot really be taught to DO art, but we can be taught to appreciate art.

1) Art helps people understand the world:

It involves a search for meaning.

It can help shape our perceptions (which comes through our emotions, imaginations, and intellect -- in art, experience is presented, not necessarily explained -- the audience can be involved directly; therefore, art is different from history, philosophy, science, etc.).

We know we are not watching (experiencing) reality, but art.

Art is a distillation of life.

Look at the four verbs of creativity-- select, rearrange, condense, intensify--to examine art's relationship to life.

We have "aesthetic distance" --"the factor which allows us to enter into an imaginative world--even though we are aware that it is separate from everyday reality..."

The separation of audience and artist through art (Cameron and Gillespie)--
We can watch others kill and die and will not stop or help. It is a state in which we view art objectively, at least partially.

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Simultaneously, we must also feel EMPATHY   for the characters on-stage - we are involved, yet also detached.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge said that literature involves "the willing suspension of disbelief" (34).  We agree to accept non-reality as reality for the duration of the art experience (performance).  The production and all its elements attempt to create an illusion of reality, verisimilitude, and "the audience completes the illusion by accepting as real what it sees and hears." [Cassady, 28.]

3) Art is "safe" -- The artistic self-awareness of the artists and audiences mean that art NEED NOT have any influence on the outside world; MAY have an influence (some say it should, some that it should not, and certainly in many cases it DOES), but it doesn't need to.

4) Art is synthetic -- It is "made" -- it is not natural.

--Elements of life and art are similar, but not the same.

--We can examine it as synthetic object.

--Can break it down and analyze it.

1) the nature of their audiences.

2) their means of communication.

3) permanence / recoverability.

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This page last modified: October 25, 2004