Module 2

I watched the videos that were posted. The videos included Aesthetics: Philosophy of the Arts and CARTA: Neurobiology Neurology and Art and Aesthetics. I have to read an article What the brain draws from: Art and neuroscience. It was hard trying to understand these professors but I tried the best as I can. The main topic of all these clips and news is What Aesthetics are.

From the first video I learned how philosophers thought of Aesthetics during his time. His main idea was the idea of beauty. It was hard understanding this video so I did a research of my own trying to back up my facts and have a better understanding what Plato's point of view was. A source that I used was Plato's Aesthetics. There were more philosophers that wrote on the theory of Aesthetics but Plato interested me the most. Other examples are, Aristotle and Francis Hutcheson. Aristotle focused on unity of action, time and peace. Plato brought about a meaning of beauty to me and stuck with me throughout the whole video. It distracted me because I wanted to know what the concept of beauty was. Beauty is defined as the quality present in a thing or person that gives intense pleasure or deep satisfaction to the mind,whether arising from sensory manifestations (as shape, color, sound, etc.), a meaningful design orpattern, or something else (as a personality in which high spiritual qualities are manifest), according to the dictionary. Now there are three parts in Plato's theory. There is beauty, imitation and divine inspiration. 

The word beauty derived from the Greek word Kalon. They are the two terms that are similar but are applied to different items. Plato uses the word Kalon for a face or body than for works of art and natural scenery. Plato uses the work Kalon as admirable and closer to splendid and upright. Now after all the definition, I was up thinking Kalon is what I always thought of what beauty was but according to Plato, the term beauty has a greater meaning and such a powerful significance than I thought. There are so many different version of beauty. Beauty possesses the reality that Forms have and is discovered through the same dialectic that brings other Forms to light. This means the cause of all occurrences of beauty, and the cause not of the appearance of the beauty but the real being. Another point is that beauty doesn’t come in any Form. It bears some close relationship to the good. Therefore this type of Form has a higher status than the regular forms. Beauty offers a close relationship to art. These are the three aspects of beauty that Plato describes.

I can go on and on describing about how Plato inspired to think different on how beauty works and its form. These three essential foundations is the most important piece that made me grasp onto, then moving forward to other theories and definitions.

According to the article I guess in a vague way it describes how beauty is described by making some sense of lines, colors and patterns. Artists tried to create beauty throughout human history to create illusions such as depth and brightness that aren’t actually there but make works of art seem somehow more real. The article shows the basis to such beauty is Lines, Faces, color vs. luminance and shadows and mirrors.

Through human history, people used the concept of lines in almost all pieces of art. Things that are not real, like lines have an effect on how lively and real an art piece can become. For example, a line drawing of a face can be recognized as a face to any culture. It turns out that these outlines tap into the same neural processes as the edges of objects that we observe in the real world. The individual cells in the visual system that pick out light-dark edges also happen to respond to lines.

Faces bring us to modern-day emotions. Everybody can agree a happy face is a happy face and a sad face is a sad face. Our brains have a special affinity for faces and for finding representations of them. Our brains readily find faces in art, including in Impressionist paintings where faces are constructed from colored lines or discrete patches of color. These type of information can trigger emotional responses, even without bearing the awareness of it. Cavanagh explains that this may mean we are more emotionally engaged when the detail-oriented part of our visual system is distracted, such as in impressionist works where faces are unrealistically colorful of patchy.

Most people have three kinds of cones in the eye’s retina: red, blue and green. You know what color you’re looking at because your brain compares the activities in two or three cones. A different phenomenon, called luminance, adds the activities from the cones together as a measure of how much light appears to be passing through a given area. Livingstone explained that there are two major processing streams for our visual system, which is the “what” and “where” streams. The “what” allows us to see in color and recognize faces and objects. The “where” is a faster and less detail-oriented but helps us navigate our environment but is insensitive to color. Artists often play with luminance in order to give the illusion of three dimensions, since the range of luminance in real life is far greater than what can be portrayed in a painting. By placing shadows and lights that wouldn’t be present in real life, paintings are able to trick the eye into perceiving depth. To trick the brain into thinking something looks three-dimensional and lifelike, artists ad elements – lightness and shadows – that wouldn’t be present in real life but that tap into our hard-wired visual sensibilities.

Shadows are colored more darkly than what’s around them. It’s not readily apparent if the lighting direction is inconsistent. They can even be the wrong shape as long as they don’t look opaque. They help convince us of a three-dimensional figure. Studies have shown that people don’ t generally have a good working knowledge of how reflections should appear, or where, in relation to the original object.

Videos and articles relate to the readings in the text because they both have their own understandings and viewpoints of what Beauty is and the concept of it. Now there is no true meaning of what the magnificence or beauty is of a painting except how you, as an individual interpret it. According to Plato I have been interpreting beauty in a different way. He has open my eyes to see how powerful and important the meaning of beauty is.

The films were hard to understand but I am not so great and hearing and listening to things online. I tried to catch the key concepts and performed a research of my own to get a better understanding. I don’t know if this was a great idea or I was allowed to do this but I did whatever I can to try and understand what these professors were saying and to understand the article. They added depth by acknowledging their own theories and ideas of how we all define and understand what paintings are.