Speaker A
Evaluating art. How do we know whether a work of art is good? What is the criteria we use when judging art?
Explore how we evaluate art, the role of personal values, market influence, and changing reputations of artists like Bouguereau and van Gogh.
Key Takeaways
- Art evaluation is deeply personal and culturally relative.
- Market prices are not reliable indicators of artistic value or longevity.
- Innovative and unique contributions to art tend to endure beyond initial reception.
- Engagement with art requires effort and openness to new perspectives.
- Understanding art involves considering historical, social, and economic contexts.
Summary
- Art evaluation is subjective and tied to personal values, cultural context, and historical perspectives.
- Modern media saturation affects our attention span and ability to engage deeply with art.
- High auction prices, such as Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, do not necessarily reflect true artistic value.
- William Adolphe Bouguereau was highly successful in his time but is now considered less significant due to lack of innovation.
- Vincent van Gogh was ignored in his lifetime but is now celebrated for his influence and uniqueness.
- Our taste in art reveals much about our personality and values, often more than objective criteria.
- Art appreciation requires openness beyond snap judgments and understanding why we respond to certain works.
- Abstract art demands more personal engagement and interpretation from the viewer.
- Historical and social contexts influence how art is created, perceived, and valued.
- There is no single correct way to evaluate art; it is a complex, evolving process.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction to Evaluating Art
- 01:26Impact of Modern Media on Art Appreciation
- 02:49Art Market and High Auction Prices
- 03:44Changing Reputations in Art History: Bouguereau
- 05:21Criticism and Legacy of Bouguereau
- 06:37Vincent van Gogh’s Posthumous Fame
- 08:37Personal Values and Art Preferences
- 09:28Engaging with Abstract Art and Interpretation
- 11:38Conclusion: No Single Way to Evaluate Art
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
Our judgments are usually connected to other values and deeply held beliefs. Sometimes when people are confronted with an artwork that they don’t enjoy or understand, they will say, “I don’t like that,” and then qualify it with, “I know what I like.”
Speaker A
But just by moving a few words around, we might have a more insightful view of this sentiment.
Speaker A
Instead of saying, I know what I like, I think most people like what they know.
Speaker A
Most of us really enjoy what we know, what we understand. The English art historian Roy Strong once suggested that we see more images in one day than someone of the Middle Ages would’ve seen their entire lifetime.
Speaker A
Ponder this: in our interconnected, digital world, with 24-hour cable channels, social media, and the world of information at our fingertips, we are now saturated with seemingly endless amounts of imagery and information.
Speaker A
Has this had any noticeable effects on us? Has this diminished our attention span and our ability to pause with a work of art?
Speaker A
In an age where every summer blockbuster has quicker frame changes, faster and more action, bigger explosions, crazier twists, and effects than the year before, are we losing the ability to slow down?
Speaker A
Can we still enjoy reading books or poetry, or is this something that is fading into history?
Speaker A
Perhaps. Simply put, it appears we live in the age of the non-stop spectacle. People are doing crazier and crazier things to attempt to get our attention.
Speaker A
From extreme reality shows to social media stunts, it’s not too surprising that in the process we have become more suspicious and cynical.
Speaker A
It can be difficult sometimes to separate the stunts from the new challenging ideas. I notice this in how my students often think about art, especially in regard to the art market where art prices routinely reach ridiculous and stratospheric heights.
Speaker A
“At three hundred and seventy million dollars, today, gentlemen. Four hundred million (crowd clapping)!
Speaker A
For the Salvator Mundi at four hundred million. Thank you all for your bidding here and on the telephone to my left, and of course here the week Laurique and Francois, it is with Alex Rotter at 400 million, Leonardo’s Salvator
Speaker A
Mundi selling here at Christie's 400 million dollars is the bid and the piece is sold.”
Speaker A
As of this writing, the highest price paid for a painting is Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait of Christ called Salvator Mundi (Savior of the World).
Speaker A
It sold in 2017 for a mind-boggling $450.3 million to a Saudi prince. This amount of money has now reached infrastructure budget levels.
Speaker A
I bet you feel that cynicism sinking in right now! Money is not the best indicator of value.
Speaker A
However, I would argue that money is not the most accurate indicator of a work of art’s value or longevity.
Speaker A
A better gauge is that which is timeless or works that appear to last through the ages.
Speaker A
It is important to remember that quality is relative and how we evaluate art varies from different individuals, cultures, and time periods.
Speaker A
In European art history, many artists have had changing reputations over time. For example, William Adolphe Bouguereau was a very successful and wealthy French academic painter working in the second half of the 19th century.
Speaker A
Many of his works would be sold just days after completion. His work epitomized taste, refinement, and a respect for tradition and was characterized by a slick, highly finished, technically flawless realism with a sentimental interpretation of his subjects.
Speaker A
He painted many portraits of young girls, with lilting heads, gazing yearningly, holding flowers. He was, at a time, the most famous French painter of his day and got top dollar for his work and received many official honors of recognition such as being granted lifetime
Speaker A
membership to the French Academy in 1876 and made a Commander of the Legion of Honor in 1885, which was the highest possible distinction for a living artist.
Speaker A
He was a great defender of the traditional, academic way of painting and was very dismissive of the more experimental artists of his day such as the Impressionists, for their lack of technical precision.
Speaker A
His influence led to the Impressionists being rejected from showing their work in the all-important annual salon show.
Speaker A
He became, in a sense, the symbol of opposition to modernism and was even reviled by the Impressionists and other progressive artists of his day.
Speaker A
The famous post-Impressionist Paul Gauguin loathed him and later described the single occasion when Bouguereau made him smile.
Speaker A
Gauguin ran across a couple of his paintings in a brothel, where he said, that is where they belonged.
Speaker A
Bouguereau created paintings for the market. The middle and upper class wanted stylized beauty, mythology, rustic country life, and childhood innocence.
Speaker A
Concerning his art, he once confessed, “What do you expect? You have to follow public taste, and the public only buys what it likes.
Speaker A
That’s why, with time, I changed my way of painting.” That quote has not aged well for Bouguereau.
Speaker A
Bouguereau was famous, wealthy, and internationally recognized in his lifetime. Today he is largely unknown to the general public.
Speaker A
He is at best a footnote. I dislike being so uncharitable to Bouguereau because he was clearly very skilled in painting.
Speaker A
But he didn’t bring anything to the conversation of art. No innovation or uniqueness. You might say that Bouguereau is to French society what digital filters are to our selfies.
Speaker A
An artificial attempt to aggrandize or idealize ourselves in a predictable fashion. Now let’s look at another artist of the same time.
Speaker A
Vincent van Gogh, you’ve probably heard of him. Van Gogh was a Dutch painter who lived in the last half of the 19th century.
Speaker A
He was completely ignored during his lifetime. He sold only one work when he was alive that we know of: The Red Vineyard.
Speaker A
It was sold to the sister of one of his friends for 400 francs. Yet today van Gogh’s work is highly sought after by museums and collectors worldwide.
Speaker A
At auctions, his work routinely goes for millions of dollars. In fact, in 1990, the most expensive painting ever sold at that time was van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet, which sold for a whopping $82.5 million to Saito Ryoei, a CEO of a paper company
Speaker A
in Japan. There is even a lovely museum in the Netherlands, in Amsterdam, that’s devoted to the work of this artist.
Speaker A
In every new generation, van Gogh’s remarkable life and artworks are discussed in books, documentaries, and films.
Speaker A
In every succeeding generation, his artwork has found legions of followers. Yet he was completely ignored during his own lifetime.
Speaker A
As we can see, Bouguereau was highly valued in his day but is considered largely insignificant concerning his contribution to art history now.
Speaker A
While van Gogh was completely ignored and dismissed in his day, he is now acknowledged as a forceful expression of his generation, an innovator and influence that has changed the conversation of art and art history.
Speaker A
We bring our values with us every time we look at a work of art.
Speaker A
When you go to a museum, gallery, or look at a work of art, you bring with you every single work of art you’ve ever seen and experienced.
Speaker A
If we look for art to distract us from our daily lives, then obviously we will favor certain kinds of art.
Speaker A
The type of art we prefer reveals far more about us than you would think.
Speaker A
Our taste in artwork involves our personality and our values more than any other kind of judgment.
Speaker A
It’s most rewarding and useful to try to be open and go beyond knee-jerk, snap judgments.
Speaker A
When we look at a work of art, we should ask ourselves why we respond the way we do.
Speaker A
What we find can depend on what we’re looking for. Often when looking at abstract works, we are required to bring more of ourselves to the work.
Speaker A
To try and see something in the work. According to Leonardo da Vinci, ideas for compositions could be discovered simply by considering the clouds.
Speaker A
This can require more effort from us but also bring greater reward.
Speaker A
Imagine walking into a gallery or museum and seeing a painting on the wall that is simply a red rectangle.
Speaker A
You look at the museum label and it reads Untitled, red paint on canvas. You may not think much of it.
Speaker A
In fact, all we have to go on, is our experience with the color red.
Speaker A
Looking at red for long periods can actually raise your heart rate. Well let’s add something.
Speaker A
Let’s say the museum label now says “After the Massacre” red paint on canvas, 7’ x 10.’ Now we have a bit of a potential narrative, and we can see that the painting is a decent size and of a human scale.
Speaker A
Now let’s say the museum label actually reads, After the Massacre, painted with the artists blood on canvas, 7’ x 10’.
Speaker A
Whoa! Now it’s getting serious. Finally let’s say the museum label says “After the Massacre, 1995, painted with the artist’s HIV positive blood on canvas, 7’ x 10’.
Speaker A
Around 1995 is when HIV had peaked and was beginning to decline because of new treatments and medicines.
Speaker A
Now the painting has not changed but hopefully your thinking about the work has. By adding these strata or layers of facts, we are constructing a foundation for potential meaning for this work.
Speaker A
Now I must confess this example was made up just to demonstrate the ways of thinking about art.
Speaker A
Now let’s discuss art criticism. Art criticism is the process of using formal analysis, description, and interpretation to evaluate or explain the quality and meanings of art.
Speaker A
We all engage in art criticism but professional critics that write for newspapers, journals, magazines, etc. tend to follow one or more of three basic theories.
Speaker A
First are formal theories, which focus attention on the composition of the work and how it shows originality, how it may have been influenced by other works, or how it influences other artists.
Speaker A
Second are contextual theories, which consider art as a product of a culture and value system.
Speaker A
This theory asks what are the economic, racial, political or social factors that led to the creation or influence on the work.
Speaker A
And finally expressive theories, which pays attention to the artist’s expression of a personality or worldview.
Speaker A
This theory tries to discern personal elements in works of art. Now let’s look at this photograph that we saw earlier called Tomoko in a Bath by W.
Speaker A
Eugene Smith. From a formal perspective we can actually make a few connections to other artworks that appear to have influenced the formality of the work.
Speaker A
The mother cradling her child is very reminiscent of the famous Christian subject the Pieta or pity or compassion.
Speaker A
The Pieta depicts the sorrowful Virgin Mary cradling the dead body of Jesus after his body was removed from the cross.
Speaker A
In Christianity story of the Passion refers to the suffering and death of Jesus. The origin of the word Passion comes from the Latin word, pasio, which means to suffer.
Speaker A
The term copasio gives us our word for compassion – to suffer with someone. The dramatic lighting of the photograph also suggests a similarity with the work and technique of the Italian Baroque painter Caravaggio who used tenebrism which was a style of painting
Speaker A
in which the figures were engulfed in shadows but dramatically illuminated by a beam of light.
Speaker A
From a contextual perspective, the photograph Tomoko in a Bath came from an urgent need to bring attention to the plight of those suffering from Minamata disease (mercury poisoning).
Speaker A
This work was used as a form of political and social activism to stop a corporation from polluting the environment and making people seriously ill.
Speaker A
From an expressive perspective, the photograph suggests the profound human concern of the photographer. Despite the tragic story, it captures a powerful message of human love and compassion.
Speaker A
Let’s apply these theories onto one more work, Horn Players 1983 by Jean Michel Basquiat.
Speaker A
From a formal perspective, we can see the introduction of his graffiti techniques into his painting, which was very new at the time.
Speaker A
He repeats the head motifs which makes each vertical panel feel connected. Born from his graffiti art, it feels improvised but actually it’s carefully balanced between unity and variety.
Speaker A
From a contextual perspective, the work is a celebration of the famous bebop jazz musicians Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, who were great musical innovators from the 1940s.
Speaker A
The saxophonist Charlie Parker is in the upper left, with Dizzy Gilllespie at the center and at the right with his trumpet.
Speaker A
Together they recorded one of Parker’s tunes called Ornithology. In bottom right we see they must have created alchemy – a magically transformative mixture.
Speaker A
Basquiat is proclaiming an important African American musical movement. From an expressive perspective - Basquiat’s work is full of personal meaning.
Speaker A
Look at his personal style of line, it is as purposeful and intense as Basquiat displayed in life.
Speaker A
The work suggests the relationship between his improvisational style of painting and the alchemy of jazz composition.
Speaker A
In this work the artist is exploring his personal history as an African American by honoring and sharing these great musical artists who are important to him.
Speaker A
As we can see we’ve now got a standard for critically evaluating and judging art.
Speaker A
Great works need to have some degree of innovation, important contextual meanings, or a recognizable personal statement as a key ingredient.
Speaker A
Not all are required but at least one must be strongly represented. Most works in museums have been selected by specialists using one or more of these theories.
Speaker A
We clearly like art that we can relate too, so asking yourself why you relate to something or what are you really looking for in art will help one to discover the values that motivate our choices.
Speaker A
Writing is a way to give form and clarity to our ideas and beliefs. Here is a 3-step method for writing about art.
Speaker A
First get the facts. This includes information such as the artist, title, medium, date, size, and location of the work.
Speaker A
Any facts that you can find out. Second analyze. Observe the formal elements and parts of the work and how they fit together.
Speaker A
Does the choice of the medium affect the work? Does it fit or belong to any art movement or time period?
Speaker A
Is it an early work or late work by the artist? How has the work been received?
Speaker A
Third evaluate. Use one of the 3 types of art criticism we discussed to determine the quality or the works importance.
Speaker A
Is it innovative? Does it move you? Does it communicate a political or social cause?
Speaker A
Is it beautiful or difficult for the eyes? What is the message and is it conveyed effectively?
Speaker A
How have governments, religious institutions and business corporations changed art? They have all supported it on a grand scale, but they have also modified the content to suit their own agendas.
Speaker A
This is of course a nice way of suggesting, what we call, censorship. Censorship is the alteration of works of art, or their removal from public view.
Speaker A
Censorship is not a recent phenomena. In the 16th century the Italian genius and artist, Michelangelo had one of his greatest works censored. 20 years after he painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo was invited back to paint an adjacent wall behind the altar.
Speaker A
He chose to paint the The Last Judgement, which is the depiction of the second coming of Christ and the final and eternal judgment by God on all of humanity.
Speaker A
This work was a strong contrast with the paintings on the ceiling telling the stories from the Old Testament.
Speaker A
Here we see Christ with a raised right hand condemning most of humanity. In this dramatic image we see on the right those who are damned being pulled to hell.
Speaker A
To the lower right of Christ, we see St. Bartholomew who was skinned alive, holding a knife and the skin of Michelangelo – it’s a kind of self-portrait of the artist.
Speaker A
Michelangelo doesn’t even save himself. At the bottom we see Charon the ferryman who brings damned souls across the river Styx into Hade’s realm.
Speaker A
This work was deemed controversial for a few reasons. Foremost was the voluptuous nudity. Jesus was also portrayed as clean-shaven, muscular Apollo-like pagan figure, which was problematic in a Christian church.
Speaker A
The angels trumpeting the end of the world are not in the 4 corners of the earth as the bible describes but rather clustered together near the center bottom of the work.
Speaker A
Additionally, the Angels don’t have wings as described by scripture. When Michelangelo was working on this fresco, Biagio da Cesena, the Papal Master of Ceremonies kept criticizing the work for its shameful nudity.
Speaker A
In response, Michelangelo immortalized Cesena’s likeness as King Minos, in Hades with donkey ears and serpent’s tail.
Speaker A
When Cesena complained to the Pope, the pontiff joked that his jurisdiction did not extend to hell and the portrait would have to remain.
Speaker A
After Michelangelo’s death, Daniele da Volterra, an Italian mannerist painter and sculptor was hired to cover the genitals in the work with loincloths.
Speaker A
He gained the nickname il Braghettone “the breeches maker.” Volterra actually chiseled away and repainted this part of the wall showing St. Blaise and St. Catherine of Alexandria holding the devices of their martyrdom, iron combs and the breaking wheel.
Speaker A
They were repainted because St. Blaise had appeared to look at St. Catherine’s naked behind and some observers thought their body positions were too sexually suggestive.
Speaker A
So Volterra repainted them turning away the head of St. Blaise and adding clothes to both of the figures.
Speaker A
Now I’d like to show you another more recent artwork. It’s a photograph created by the American artist Andres Serrano in 1987.
Speaker A
Now formally speaking, the image is quite lovely. The glowing crucifix emerges and appears all while surrounded by a hazy, mysterious, lava-like reddish-yellow atmosphere.
Speaker A
The work is quite colorful and harmless. That is until you read the title, which is like lighting a fuse to a bomb.
Speaker A
This controversial work is titled Piss Christ. Serrano, took a plastic commercial crucifix and submerged it in a vat of his urine, then he illuminated and photographed it.
Speaker A
He did an entire series with urine including Piss Satan and other figures. Now this is almost like eating a hotdog and thinking it absolutely delicious, then being told what is in the hotdog.
Speaker A
It kind of stops us in our tracks for a moment. Piss Christ provoked conservative lawmakers to attempt to get rid of a governmental agency, the National Endowment for the Arts because it had awarded money to Serrano for his work.
Speaker A
The photo then became one of the visual centerpieces of the culture war. It raised the question of whether limits should be drawn as to what is acceptable in publicly displayed art or publicly funded art.
Speaker A
This work raises many interesting theological and philosophical questions such as: What happens when we mix the sacred and the profane?
Speaker A
Does the crucifix sanctify the urine or does the urine defile the crucifix? Can an industrial piece of plastic be sacred?
Speaker A
What is the difference between a symbol and the thing it represents? Remember, good or bad, this photograph is just an idea.
Speaker A
The work has been physically attacked many times. The artist, who is a lifelong Christian, has said he owned over 200 crucifixes and expressed fascination with their variety and numerous differences.
Speaker A
He also stated “The thing about the crucifix itself is that we treat it almost like a fashion accessory.
Speaker A
When you see it, you’re not horrified by it at all, but what it represents is the crucifixion of a man.” Serrano has also expressed interest in the over-commercialization and cheapening of Christian iconography in contemporary culture and denounces the idea that he intended to create a blasphemous
Speaker A
work. I’d like to discuss one last famous historical event from the 20th century concerning the Nazis and censorship.
Speaker A
In German it’s called ent artete kunst which means Degenerate art. In the early 20th century, the visual arts went through a period of drastic changes.
Speaker A
At the time, avant-garde artists and their artistic expressions clashed with the ideas of German nationalism under the Nazi regime.
Speaker A
What we consider innovative now was not yet appreciated by the general public. In Germany, the defeat from WW1 and a very unstable economy left many Germans quite upset.
Speaker A
And under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, the Nazi’s official platform towards modern art is that it was considered degenerate and should be banned.
Speaker A
The Nazis thought modern art an insult to German feelings, or that the work was Jewish or Communist in nature.
Speaker A
Many renowned German and international artists were persecuted by the Nazis by being sanctioned from creating, exhibiting, selling their art and even being dismissed from teaching positions.
Speaker A
Ent artete kunst or degenerate art was the title of an exhibition held by the Nazi’s in 1937 in Munich, Germany that consisted of 650 modernist works that were displayed terribly with mocking graffiti and handwritten labels that were mocking the artists.
Speaker A
When visitors first entered the exhibition the first work they encountered was a sculpture of an oversized, theatrical Jesus, which was meant to intimidate viewers as they bumped into it in order to enter.
Speaker A
The first three rooms of the exhibition were grouped thematically. The first room contained works the Nazi’s thought demeaned religion, the second featured works by Jewish artists and the third contained works considered insulting to the women, soldiers, and farmers of Germany.
Speaker A
The rest of the exhibit had no particular theme. The walls of the exhibit had mocking wall graffiti with slogans that said things like: Revelation of the Jewish racial soul.
Speaker A
An insult to German womanhood. The ideal – cretin and whore. Even museum bigwigs called this the “art of the German people.” A Nazi critic said that the work was “an insult to the German heroes of the Great War,”
Speaker A
referring to World War 1. The Degenerate art show was meant to manipulate public opinion against modernism.
Speaker A
Next to many paintings were labels indicating how much money a museum spent to acquire the artwork.
Speaker A
At the same time as the Degenerate art show, the Nazi’s held another concurrent show called The Great German Art Exhibition that promoted officially sanctioned art of the Nazis.
Speaker A
It promoted what was called Heroic Art, which was a type of romantic realism in art, considered racially pure, free from distortion and corruption.
Speaker A
After the degenerate art show many German artists were branded as enemies of the state and a threat to German culture.
Speaker A
The Nazi’s later auctioned off some of the works in Switzerland, while approximately 4000 artworks that had little value at the time on the international art market were burned.
Speaker A
Many “degenerate works” such as this self-portrait by Vincent van Gogh were auctioned off to support the Nazi regime.
Speaker A
There are even stories of the Nazi representatives mocking the international bidders, that were bidding on the work.
Speaker A
As we’ve seen throughout this lecture despite our ability to describe, analyze, interpret, and evaluate art, there is clearly no single correct way to evaluate it.
Speaker A
The three approaches we’ve discussed in this lecture have been popular at one time or another.
Speaker A
The bottom line is that the process of evaluation is meaningful from any viewpoint because it pulls the viewer into the creative process.
Speaker A
This concludes our lecture on Evaluating Art. Thank you!
Topics:art evaluationart historyVincent van GoghWilliam Adolphe Bouguereauart marketart criticismart appreciationmodern artartistic valuecultural context
