General Objectives

• To understand the meaning and importance of

the art
• To identify and appreciate the different forms
and aspects of art through a study of various
elements, mediums, and techniques used in
the creation of art
• To enhance enjoyment of the arts particularly
local artists and those from the students’ own
cultural heritage
 HUMANITIES: What is it?
• The term Humanities comes from the Latin
word, “humanitas”
• It generally refers to art, literature, music,
architecture, dance and the theatre—in which
human subjectivity is emphasized and
individual expressiveness is dramatized.
•How important
The fields is Humanities?
of knowledge and study falling under
humanities are dedicated to the pursuit of
discovering and understanding the nature of
man.
• The humanities deal with man as a being of
purpose, of values, loves, hates, ideas and
sometimes as a seer, or prophet with divine
inspiration.
• The humanities aim at educating.
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Can you identify the following?

Vincent van Gogh, Starry Night, 1889. Oil on

canvas. Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselle de Avignon, 1907. Oil painting.
Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa. C.1503-1506. Oil painting. Louvre Museum,
Paris
An Example of Performing Arts
 Etymology
• The word “art” is rooted from the French
word “art” which means skills.
Related terms:
1. Artificial – made by human beings
2. Inert – having no skills
3. Artisan – instructor or master of a
human skill
The great Russian novelist
Leo N. Tolstoy (1828-
1910), author of War and
Peace and Anna Karenina,
developed his own
original philosophy of art.
He argues that art is
important even amidst
extensive poverty and
deprivation.
 Salient Points in Tolstoy’s
Definition of Art
• In order correctly to define art, it is necessary,
first of all, to cease to consider it as a means to
pleasure and to consider it as one of the
conditions of human life.
• Every work of art causes the receiver to enter into
a certain kind of relationship both with him who
produced, or is producing the art, and with all
those who, simultaneously, previously, or
subsequently, receive the same artistic
impression.
• Speech, transmitting the thoughts and
experiences of men, serves as a means of
union among them, and art acts in a similar
manner.
• The activity of art is based on the fact that a
man, receiving through his sense of hearing or
sight another man's expression of feeling, is
capable of experiencing the emotion which
moved the man who expressed it.
• Art begins when one person, with the object of
joining another or others to himself in one and
the same a feeling, expresses that feeling by
certain external indications.
• To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once
experienced, and having evoked it in oneself,
then, by means of movements, lines, colors,
sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to
transmit that feeling that others may experience
the same feeling - this is the activity of art.
• Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man
consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to
others feelings he has lived through, and that other people
are infected by these feelings and also experience them.
• All human life is filled with works of art of every kind - from
cradle song, jest, mimicry, the ornamentation of houses,
dress, and utensils, up to church services, buildings,
monuments, and triumphal processions. It is all artistic
activity.
 Why Do We Make ART?
• Art is a vital and persistent aspect of human
experience.
• To impose order on disorder and to create
form from formlessness.
• The wish to leave behind after death
something of value by which to be
remembered.
• The wish to preserve one’s likeness after
death.