Thank you L. Strub for sharing this curriculum
Critical Lens comes from ways to interpret and look at "text" In our case, "text" refers to to any art form including art work, photos, paintings, poems, songs, films,...
here are many different ways to approach a work of art
When you do that with a specific intent in mind, it is the same as approaching art with different perspectives or theories and helps you understand the piece more deeply.
Lenses, ways, or theories to approach, view, criticize and appreciate art.:
Political
Marxist: criticism based on socialist and dialectic theories. Marxist criticism views literary works as reflections of the social institutions from which they originate. It involves a dialectical and materialist, or dialectical materialist, approach to the application of Marxism to the cultural sphere, specifically areas related to taste such as art, beauty, etc.
*(is a type of economic system proposed by Karl Marx in which there are no classes. The government would control all resources and means of production to, in theory, ensure equality. upon the laborers in society an awareness of their exploitation by the bourgeoisie, the managerial class)
Psychoanalytic:Psychoanalytic interpretation, both clinical and as applied to other fields, deals with the observation and analysis of imagery: in dreams, symptom formation, symbolism, and fantasy.
*Psychoanalysis was founded by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). Freud believed that people could be cured by making conscious their unconscious thoughts and motivations, thus gaining insight. The aim of psychoanalysis therapy is to release repressed emotions and experiences, i.e., make the unconscious conscious.
Feminist:.Feminist art criticism emerged in the 1970s from the wider feminist movement as the critical examination of both visual representations of women in art and art produced by women. It continues to be a major field of art criticism.
Semiotics:Semiotics is the study of works of art signs and symbols, either individually or grouped in sign systems that can give us more insight from the work source and meaning. All painters work in a pictorial language by following a set of standards, basics and rules of picture-making.
* Based on “semiosis,” the relationship between a sign, an object, and a meaning. The sign represents the object, or referent, in the mind of an interpreter. “Interpretant” refers to a sign that serves as the representation of an object.
Ethical Criticism of Art
Moral:where moralism is the view that the aesthetic value of art should be determined by, or reduced to, its moral value.
[Moderate moralism] contends that some works of art may be evaluated morally (contra radical autonomism) and that sometimes the moral defects and/or merits of a work may figure in the aesthetic evaluation of the work."
Autonomism:autonomism holds that it is inappropriate to apply moral categories to art; they should be evaluated by ‘aesthetic’ standards alone. "An artwork will never be aesthetically better in virtue of its moral strengths, and will never be worse because of its moral defects. / On a strict reading of moderate autonomism, one of its decisive claims is that defective moral understanding never counts against the aesthetic merit of a work. An artwork may invite an audience to entertain a defective moral perspective and this will not detract from its aesthetic value."(Carroll, 1996, p. 232)
Formalism:the study of art by analyzing and comparing form and style. ... In painting, formalism emphasizes compositional elements such as color, line, shape, texture, and other perceptual aspects rather than content, meaning, or the historical and social context.
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/f/formalism
Critical race theory:Critical Race Theory is an emerging transdisciplinary, race-equity methodology that originated in legal studies and is grounded in social justice. Critical Race Theory's tools for conducting research and practice are intended to elucidate contemporary racial phenomena, expand the vocabulary with which to discuss complex racial concepts, and challenge racial hierarchies.
https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.2009.171058
Aethetic Interpretation of Art
pragmatic:exists to serve a function and is conceptualized in terms of its effects on its audience, and in terms of the purposes it is design to accomplish such as the creation of specific shared experiences.
expressive . the view that “art is imitation (representation)” has not only been challenged, it has been moribundin at least some of the arts since the 19th century. It was subsequently replaced by the theory that art is expression. Instead of reflecting states of the external world, art is held to reflect the inner state of the artist. This, at least, seems to be implicit in the core meaning of expression: the outer manifestation of an inner state. Art as a representation of outer existence (admittedly “seen through a temperament”) has been replaced by art as an expression of humans’ inner life.
But the terms express and expression are ambiguous and do not always denote the same thing. Like so many other terms, express is subject to the process-product ambiguity: the same word is used for a process and for the product that results from that process. “The music expresses feeling” may mean that the composer expressed human feeling in writing the music or that the music when heard is expressive (in some way yet to be defined) of human feeling. Based on the first sense are theories about the creation of art. Founded on the second are theories about the content of art and the completion of its creation.
relativist: Aesthetic relativism might be regarded as a sub-set of an overall philosophical relativism, which denies any absolute standards of truth or morality as well as of aesthetic judgement. (A frequently-cited source for philosophical relativism in postmodern theory is a fragment by Nietzsche, entitled "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense".)
"Standard relativism claims that interpretation of artworks are true or false but not all true interpretations an be conjoined into a more comprehensive true interpretation. "
processional:
imitationalism:
ritual
cognition
mimetic
postmodern