In our unit one for Art History, we learned what is art, what it means, Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy and Power, banking model, and formal analysis. In the beginning, as our first assignment, we were to write what art means to us, an and most of us wrote how it is a form of expression to oneself, it can be music, it can be choreography, and how it can be literally anything.
As I read The fundamentals of interpretation: formal and contextual analysis, I learned how art is also used as a form of advertisements and how it can have a powerful impact. For example in the reading, they mentioned the Dior ad, it was a simple photo of a lady sitting with the Dior bag, with the Central Park as a backdrop, and within this photo, there is no headline promoting sales and discounts. This photo is powerful in a way because it captures the thrive of New York City, with a gorgeous and stylish lady who is Gwyneth Paltrow, this ad is literally screaming “Dior’s not outdated, its retro cool”.
When we learned about formal analysis, I realize it’s more than that criticizing an artist work, it’s about understanding what the artist is trying to convey visually. There are many kinds of formal analysis such as analyzing the colors, the lines, the space and mass, scale of the work, and the dimensions. It had made me realize there is a deeper meaning to the art, and appreciate the techniques that the artist puts into their work.
Paulo Freire’s banking concept of education is basically that the teachers “teach” and the students are “taught”. The problem with this model is that the teachers have the authority over what is being taught to the students, and the students have freedom in their own thoughts and opinions. We are to aimlessly learn and memorize on what the teachers are teaching and retain this information without an objective. Freire objects this kind of concept and instead believes that students should work together with their teachers to come up with solutions, to have dialogues to interact with each other, thus allowing the students to be able to think more freely and come up with their own ideas and opinions.
To sum up, what I learned so far in unit one, it is how to have a better mindset, to have a deeper judgment/critic on things and to appreciate on how much effort people put into their art. It’s almost like the popular saying, “don’t judge a book by its cover”, get a better perspective on things. I thoroughly enjoy what we have learned so far in unit one, and cannot wait to see what unit two can teach me.
