Two of the many Classical figures that influenced and shaped the meaning of Rhetoric was Plato and Aristotle. In the Classical period there was a lot differences between them that emerged from their ideas about Rhetoric. Plato believed only a select few were born with arete, which is a behavior showing high moral standards, virtue. The Sophists, who were paid teachers who traveled, believed they could teach arete to anyone. Plato argued Rhetoric was a skill (a knack). He feared conviction without knowledge. The Sophists argued that Rhetoric was a techne. A “true art”, the systematic study of art, science, or any discipline. Aristotle believed that Rhetoric is the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. Dialectic rhetoric was conviction with knowledge. It is rigorous questioning and arguing with a small audience. There were three Rhetorical Appeals that he thought was necessary in a speech in order to persuade an audience. Ethos focuses on the rhetor’s character and credibility. Pathos is the emotion, getting people in the right mind to make a decision or to view something a certain way. Logos is the main argument and the reasoning behind it. He contributes these 3 elements to the argument that Rhetoric is a techne. Aristotle divides oratory into three categories called Rhetorical Settings. Deliberative involves action and decisions, action persuasion for the future. Epideictic is ceremonial, to praise or to blame an individual based on past decisions. Forensic/Judicial deals with the past and the future (deciding issues of justice). Kairos it the opportune or situation that shapes the rhetor’s choices regarding line of reasoning, rhetorical appeal. I really never thought about rhetoric in other way other than writing or words on paper. I never thought of it as an art and how it has to power to persuade. I have learned that rhetoric is and can be in anything you do. Well it depends what your individual opinion of rhetoric is of course. Some connections I have seen are for example in the speech George Bush gave regarding 9/11. He used Kairos and gave the speech at the time he did. He knew his audience and used that to his advantage in that time of war. His tone of voice was calm and reassuring even through a time of panic. Bush used Pathos all throughout his speech letting his audience know they are not alone and we will get through this together, as one. He used rhetoric all throughout his speech. As we move further along in the class, I would like to know more about Rhetoric shaping education in Rome. I would like to know how the ideas of rhetoric were used throughout Rome.
Aristotle
Aristotle claims that truth does not always persuade. I think he means that truth is a small component of persuasion. In Aristotle’s Rhetoric underlies the three technical means of persuasion, Ethos, Pathos and Logos. Ethos focuses on the speaker, using trust to show the audience their character and integrity. Reputation, Character and Credibility will impact how your audience will judge you.If you want your audience to believe you, you first have to show them that you believe yourself. Pathos triggers senses and feelings, appeals to their listeners emotions. These are your values, goals, interests and beliefs. Logos focuses on the argument using both logic and explanation, evidence and reason. I think Aristotle means that the truth might not always be appealing to the audience. Which means the truth might not always have the power to influence them. In class today we looked at a paper written by a 43 year old man asking a College Committee to make an exception for him. He talked about his achievements and how he does not need this algebra course. He even provided statements of people he has spoken with to help make his case. The truth is he didn’t need that course in order to become a lawyer but it was a standard for everyone. The truth about him not needing the course didn’t persuade the committee. Being able to relate to values or beliefs of the speaker is so appealing to us as an audience. We all just want to feel understood and that someone else can relate. Words and speech has the power to do that. It does not necessarily have to be the truth. Take social media and advertising for example. They often use famous people to advertise products. Even though the star might not agree with the product, believe it works or even uses it, they influence the audience to buy the product. They make the viewers believe it works. The same goes for weight loss supplements. They show before and after pictures to make you believe it worked for them, it can work for you. Because the advertisement might be so appealing to us and relatable, we do not care about the truth behind it all. You can take something in your everyday life and compare it to Aristotles claim about truth and persuasion. Take alcohol for example. We know the truth about alcohol. We know all the negative effects, but does that persuade us to make the right decision and not drink? Maybe, but in the end we decide as our own person the choices we want to make.
Phaedrus
Why is Plato concerned about the difference between mere belief and true knowledge? Socrates gives a speech, known as a Great Speech, which then leads to a conversation about writing and rhetoric. Phaedrus was influenced by a different view of rhetoric which claims that persuasion outshines truth in the art of rhetoric. Socrates disputes this particular argument by revealing some damaging influences about speaking without knowing the truth. Rhetoric has the power to persuade. But on the other hand, the type of audience needs to be taken into consideration, and speak accordingly. Knowledge can be defined as, “A clear perception of a truth or fact, erudition; skill from practice. To perceive with certainty, to understand clearly, to have experience of”. However, belief is defined as, “Assent to anything proposed or declared, and its acceptance as fact by reason from where it proceeds, apart from personal knowledge”. I think the difference between these two definitions is that belief is like a memory or thought that exists in ones’ own mind. Unlike knowledge, it is learned and justified. In Gorgias, Socrates talks about knowledge with certainty and without certainty. Wouldn’t we consider knowledge without certainty a belief? Today in class we read and discussed the Debate between Clinton and Trump. We saw in Clinton’s speech how her beliefs (in family and as a grandmother) played a role in creating an emotional connection with her and the audience. As well, she used words such as, us, you, we to make the listeners feel like they actually matter and play a role in decisions that need to be made. But at the same time, her beliefs that may be steering her campaign and having an influence on her decisions, may not be the same beliefs the next person may have. If you look at the definitions, knowledge is “fact” and belief is “trust, a feeling.” For belief to be considered knowledge it must be justified and true. I think Plato was concerned because knowledge can be influenced by belief. What you know and what you believe can be two very different things. But what you believe can have an impact on what you want to know. That being said, there is some truth to knowledge, but how do we know that that knowledge hasn’t been influenced by someone’s belief? That would be problematic because that would mean without belief, we would not have knowledge.
Plato- Gorgias
Gorgias is a conversation between Socrates and four other citizens. In our previous class discussion it was based on the guiding question, what is the essential nature of rhetoric. Is it the study of words? Is personal freedom, mastery over others, order of social and political systems outcomes because of rhetoric? Socrates questions Gorgias about the extent and nature of rhetoric. Which then leads to questions about true vs false arts. In class, connections were made between art and rhetoric. Art is complex and filled with emotion. It’s a creation formed by thoughts, imagination and skill. It is a form of expression. On the other hand, would a piece of art work have the same meaning to you as it did to the artist. Are you able to see the vision, the story the artist had when creating an art piece. Perception was a subject we discussed in class that can be connected to Gorgias and Rhetoric. Just like the saying, If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Did it really happen, does it really exist? If you never knew what defines rhetoric, can rhetoric really be art, or music, or emotions and thoughts? Would there be justice if you didn’t have knowledge of the laws. In Gorgias, they bring up points like right vs wrong, true essence of power, good existing vs pleasant. Of course you can go back and forth and make a case for each side. But is it really going to matter, or exist in your world if you don’t perceive the other side of the argument the way someone else does. Perception is reality.
Globalization and Commercialization of the Art Market
Globalization is often defined as, “the process of interaction and integration among the people, companies, and governments of different nations, a process driven by international trade and investment and aided by information technology”. New York has been and still is the heart of the art market where the “largest and most influential art dealers headquartered and the main contemporary art auctions are organized”. Throughout history, art has changed significantly because of the impact both the economy and society has made. The art industry suffers because of global economic crisis. There has been an increased rivalry with the contemporary side of the art market and auction houses. In the reading it mentions the increased demand for contemporary art and how this affects the prices. “This increased demand is reflected in price levels for the top segment of contemporary art, which between 1990 and the peak of the market in 2008, rose more than sixfold. In other market segments, price increases were more modest. Between 2
003 and 2007 the size of the contemporary art market grew spectacularly by 851 percent worldwide, again much higher than the 311 percent growth of the overall art market”. Because of todays society, art works that were created centuries ago remain precious. For example, Pablo Picasso’s “Le Rêve” sales for $155 Million. Europe and the United States were once the hot spots for the art industry. The emerging art markets has caused the art industry to grow tremendously in countries all around the world such as, India, China, Russia and the UAE. “As a culmination of this ecommerce development, in January 2011, the first online art fair took place, in which many established dealers from the United States and Europe participated. As in the case of auctions, globalization may further spur this development; especially in India, internet sales and online auctions are considered much more legitimate and more common as sales venues than in Europe and the United States”.
The Digital Age
Appropriation is a technique used in art and is often defined as, “the use of pre-existing objects or images with little or no transformation applied to them”. The image to the right is an example of the use of appropriation. The Composition with Fruit, Guitar and Glass. Made in 1912 by Pablo Picasso. This technique has been used throughout art history and has made a significant impact in literary, visual, musical and performing arts. Throughout this reading, appropriation is used in the digital age. Many people would argue that this changes the true definition of art and they would question if this is really art anymore. I think the reading really brought to life how today’s society is and how it is affecting everything around us. Especially something that has been around for centuries, like art. For example, Social media. It is a huge issue today. It takes away from what use to be cherished back then. Whether it was art works, or nature around
us. In the past it was about living in the moment. But now, people’s lives are “fake”. This reading ties into the previous reading, Zombie Manifesto. We basically live in a society where we are Zombies. We are not really living life. For example, Facebook. Your life on Facebook shows only the good things that happen and you don’t see the hardships. We rely way too much on our phones. Our lives revolve around it. Everything we do is a representation of something. Sort of like a spectacle. This can be defined as, “Images produced by and for capitalist project.t image put out there that alienates people’s actions and respons
e”. A spectacle doesn’t capture reality. You are able to put up representations at will. Again, Facebook. It is not real life because no one sees the struggles that you may be going through. It is just a digital representation. All you are able to see is the “perfect” life. There is a diversion between the idea of concrete visibility. How it diverts from the spectacle, brought up as a style of art. Cindy Sherman used images and film and reproduced the piece also including herself. This was appropriation but also determinant. She makes a point about how society is undermining women. This image is related to the
idea of “high art”, Post Modern. Bill Viola-Silent Mountain (2001). It ,”exemplifies a ‘truly creative’ engagement with digital technology that reworks perception and ushers in a new age of image-making, thereby reconfiguring the ‘correlation of the human with the technical’ and exploiting ‘the potential of information to enlarge the scope of the human grasp over the material world”.
https://vmi.instructure.com/courses/1391/files/53902/download?wrap
http://arthistory.about.com/od/glossary_a/a/a_appropriation.htm
http://nypost.com/2014/10/10/walking-dead-makes-confident-return-with-season-5-premiere/
http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/photography/Cindy-Sherman.html
Zombies- The Face of Capitalism
Capitalism is often defined as, “an economic system in which investment in and ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange of wealth is made and maintained chiefly by private individuals or corporations, especially as contrasted to cooperatively or state-owned means of wealth”. So what does Capitalism have anything to do with Zombies? Zombies are both heartless and mindless creatures that devour resources in the same way capitalism needs profit. They are never satisfied. “Zombies are fictional undead creatures, typically depicted as mindless, reanimated human corpses with a hunger for human flesh. Zombies are most commonly found in horror and fantasy genre works. The term comes from
Haitian folklore where a zombie is a dead body animated by magic. Modern depictions of zombies do not necessarily involve magic but invoke other methods such as a virus”. Zombies are the face of Capitalism. They mock our mortality. “The zombies embody the classic Marxist critiques of capitalism. The heartless creatures mindlessly devour resources (i.e. human brains) in the same way that capitalism pursues profit for its own sake”. Capitalisms main goal is to dominate. Always unsatisfied needing to expand, needing more in order to sustain itself. This relates to art in a sense that a lot of the works today are meaningless and empty. They are created just for fame with no real purpose or underlying meaning to it. It all leads to society and how much it has changed. When todays art works are viewed there is a sense of mindless to it. In todays society, it is all about fame and wealth. Greed is consuming the world. Most individuals are never really satisfied with what they have. They always want more and more until there’s nothing left. Exactly like both Capitalism and Zombies. “Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed…” Karl Marx
The Zombie Manifesto: Marx & The Walking Dead | SociologyInFocus
file:///Users/Downloads/Lauro_%20Embry_zombie%20manifesto%20(1).pdf
http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/monopoly-monopolies-ranked-1676960465
Olafur Eliasson- Jones
Olafur Eliasson, a Danish-Icelandic artist, was well known for his art works enhancing the viewer’s experience. His large-scale art works incorporated materials such as light, water, and air temperature. “Eliasson’s art is driven by his interests in perception, movement, embodied experience, and feelings of self. Eliasson strives to make the concerns of art relevant to society at large. Art, for him, is a crucial means for turning thinking into doing in the world”. Nothing prevented him to create the visions he had for his works. “Not limited to the confines of the museum and gallery, his practice engages the broader public sphere through architectural projects and interventions in civic space”. All of his works had a specific purpose and deeper meaning. For example, the “Green River”. Eliasson pour a non- polluting solution that turned the water green in five different cities around the world. “The aim was to challenge the inhabitants’ perception regarding a natural element in their city to which they are so accustomed they no longer notice”. People in the world today are so caught up with technology and materialistic objects that they are blind to what exists around th
em. Because of Elisson, people just noticed something that has been there all along. It really makes you take a step back and look at things differently. The Weather Project was another one of his creations. Eliasson used the open space of the gallery’s Turbine Hall. He used humidifiers to create mist while having a huge “circular disk made up of hundreds of monochromatic lamps which radiated yellow light”. The walls were covered with mirrors, “which allowed the visitors to see themselves as tiny black shadows against a mass of orange light. Many visitors responded to this exhibition by lying on their backs and waving their hands and legs”. This is exactly the reaction Eliasson wanted to get from his viewers. “The Weather project is a work about an audience living in a counterfeit environment, mesmerized by dematerialization, tricked by the duplicated space, and subject to its own perception. Once the clouds dissipate the mirrors reflect the image of the viewers beneath caught in the act of seeing”. Eliasson’s art focused on “perception, movement, embodied experience, and feelings of self”. These are the main ideas that drove his works and made them what they are today.
http://olafureliasson.net/archive/artwork/WEK101541/green-river
https://art1ficial.wordpress.com/2012/06/
file:///Users/Downloads/Jones_Server%20User%20Mode%20(1).pdf
http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/exhibition/unilever-series-olafur-eliasson-weather-project/olafur-eliasson-weather-project
Postcolonial Textiles
Some people would admit that textiles have the ability to “capture and convey cultural, national and individual identities”. Artists such as, Elaine Reichek, created a way to link textiles to the art world. She often called the textile the painting’s canvas. This idea that she had was interesting considering the boundary between what is considered art and what is considered craft. “Throughout her work, Reichek uses the textile to help scrutinize alternative cultural perspectives”. Yinka Shonibare, a Nigerian artist, made a special cloth named Batik cloth. “Since the mid- 1990s, his work has depicted clothed copulating couples, aliens, ballerinas, and the sails of sla
ve ships all reworked in wax resist cloth”. This cloth was imported but Indonesia did not accept it and soon found its way to West Africa. “Today wax resist cloth is a symbol of national pride associated with independence of the West African nations gained in the late 1950s through the 1970s, but this, too, is a ‘new’ tradition”. Susan Stockwell was a British artist who has a unique way of depicting art. She often used coffee filters, rubber, paper currency. “Materials that allude to the physical excess of our contemporary lives appe
ar in re-creations of maps and dresses that refer to colonial-era expansion and trade.Trayne uses coffee filters to create a life-sized woman’s dress with a pronounced bustle. The filters remind us that the wealth behind the ownership of luxury clothing came directly from the trade of materials such as tea and coffee.” There was a famous piece of work called the Pattern of the World that used paper dressmaking with a pattern of sta
ined tea. “It provided us with yet another version of the scramble for Africa. To adapt the pattern to the wearer’s size, coincide with the tip of the African continent to provide yet another interpretation of the arbitrary madness that went into the creation of he contemporary African map. Stockwell seems to be telling us that skirts can be lengthened and shortened. Continents cannot, and should not”. Textiles can be used in many different ways to depict different meanings. Artists often use textiles to communicate a complicated idea. It can also be used to represent a culture. “The beauty of the textile is often deployed as a visual seduction used to package challenging narratives”.
http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O80231/pattern-of-the-world-drawing-stockwell-susan/
file:///Users/Downloads/Hemmings_Shonibare%20(1).pdf
http://disabledfeminists.com/2010/11/23/creative-work-yinka-shonibare-mbe/
http://www.fiberarts.com/article_archive/history/Postcolonial.asp
Globalisation- Gursky & Sekula
Globalisation is, “the process of international integration arising from the interchange of world views, products, ideas and other aspects of culture”. In this reading there were two very different authors that had divergent ideas to go about expressing art. Andreas Gursky was a photographer who had a unique sense of style. He would digitally manipulate and enhance his images to “create an art of spaces larger than the subjects being photographed”. Gursky’s art, “largely focused on the industrial and technological possibilities of globalisation, he uses digital manipulation to bend our sense of perception to the outer edge of credibility, creating a world we recognise but also one which is partially imagined and not yet realised”. The way both Gursky and Sekula approached their art work, highlighting the different ways Globalisaion can be understood is what set them apart
from one another. Some people would agree that the Global justice movement has tested capitalism. Allan Sekula, on the other hand, “focused on the limits of globalisation. Following the deterritorialised flow of capital, he focuses on the wave of industrialisation in the developing world which has relocated old technologies into this new context. Within the two worlds of Globalisation, Sekulachooses to focus on the one inhabited by the poor, the marginalised and the dispossessed”. Gursky’s art depicts a world in a sense that is still to come while Sekula’s work depicts a world that has already passed. “The multitude is in a process of becoming by invoking a world that is not (yet). ‘Another World is Possible'”. With art work, there is always a deeper meaning. The struggles that are conveyed in these pieces of artwork solicits the possibility of a world becoming. It conveys hope among all things.
file:///Users/Downloads/beggs_on_gursky_sekula%20(1).pdf
http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/contemporary-art-and-globalisation-study-day-video-recordings
http://asuartmuseum.asu.edu/2001/gursky/
http://www.portlandart.net/archives/2015/01/allan_sekula_at.html