Video Review

After viewing the Aesthetics video I have learned several key concepts. Artists have tasks that they consider before producing art work. Plato's low opinion on aesthetics and how he wrote what he saw at the time. Creativity is mainly the ability to produce something that is new and groundbreaking. Avant-garde is the refusal to follow standard definitions of art. I have also learned that you cannot define art, it is more useful to interpret the role you feel it represents. Not all art is going to be beautiful in the eyes of the beholder. The article was very interesting to me because I really enjoyed the Mona Lisa paragraph. It was very amazing to view the painting with the peripheral view. When your eyes move around her face, her expression changes! I don't think that I have ever looked at the Mona Lisa this way and I find it breathtaking. While reading the article I also realized how much there is to learn about art. People often think that they "know" what art is and all you have to do is look at it. My eyes are more open now than ever. I feel that Leo Tolstoy's (20th Century) Expression theory of art is most important. This theory states that art is an expression of emotion. I believe that all artists show some form of emotion in their work. This theory has shaped the minds of artists today. I found it interesting that Changeux's view of aesthetic art bottom-up processing. I remember learning about this in psychology 101 class. This explains the steps that the brain takes to process what you are looking at. Neuroscientist Ramachandran had an interesting scientific view of art. He discovered that symmetry plays a huge role in aesthetics. The peak shift principle was created and explains why animals are attracted to a particular shape especially when exaggerated. Personally I really enjoyed the article and the aesthetics film because I felt I learned a lot from them both. However, I did not enjoy viewing the second video because of the neurobiologist's heavy accent and poor video quality. I found his high use of "um" very distracting and hard to focus on the topic. I wish I could have seen his slide show better. All these resources have added great depth to my understanding of aesthetics of art and the processes that are done to create such pieces.