The+Arts

=Syllabus Notes - The Arts=


 * Does art have to have meaning? Conversely, if something is meaningless, can it be art?
 * Is a work of art enlarged or diminished by interpretation? What makes something a good or bad interpretation?
 * Can anything be art? Are there limits to what is acceptable in art? Who decides?

[|Art too bad to be ignored]

What is art?
Read the following articles and write a response in your TOK notebook to the following questions. Can anything be art? What do you think are the requirements for something to be art? Consider what Mr Huxtable said last lesson about intention, skill, audience and communication.

What is beauty?
As a fascinating new season is launched on BBC2, the broadcaster defines the 10 qualities that make art beautiful.

By Matthew Collings Published: 3:29PM GMT 13 Nov 2009

I recently finished work on a television programme about beauty in art, which is being shown tonight. For me there are certain laws by which beauty, this almost meaningless word, can be defined. These laws come from my own observation and experience over the years. I think they might be helpful to others – people are curious about beauty in art. Why is a painting by Gauguin, with its rough surfaces, beautiful? Is it because the faces of the South Sea Islanders he painted were beautiful? Or is it the way the painting is done? Is beauty in art always in the eye of the beholder? Does beauty change over time? These are perfectly good questions, and to try to answer them I picked 10 art works that I personally thought were beautiful and devoted a few minutes to each one. In each case I examined the principles that I thought lay behind this particular experience of beauty. I allocated a single main principle to each thing.