Response to ‘Was of Seeing, Episode 1: Psychological Aspects’

Response to ‘Was of Seeing, Episode 1: Psychological Aspects’

I thought that this program was for people who didn’t really know much about art, and were trying to become educated for one reason or another.  

The narrator used lots and lots of examples of famous pieces, talking about context and place and time.  He tried to prove that as the viewer, our observation of the piece is not the only thing that create our opinions about it.  He used music over Gouya’s “The Fifth of May” to prove this.  He used happy music, and then sad music, and then he put it in the middle of scenes.  All of the efforts didn’t really work because I knew a lot about the piece, as well as most of the other pieces he talked about.

I am pretty sure that I am not the only one that felt this way.  As design students we are all required to take Intro to Western Art History, which all of us did last semester.  So, we all knew a lot about the pieces that were shown.  So I think that even though the points that he was trying to prove were valid, the examples didn’t work on us (the student) because we have already been educated about the pieces.  

I did agree with the narrator that context is everything, even with art.  We have to know a little about the author, subject matter, and time period the piece was made in the create reasonable assumptions and observations about pieces.  I think that is why it is important to take art history classes, even as design students.  Because we are still going to (hopefully) be interacting with painters and sculptors and the rest of the art crowd, and we need to be able to properly discuss works with them.  And we also need the knowledge to help influence our own work and to help educate the rest of the world who is not so artistically inclined.