Art museum education: Chapter 8, How does this Artwork Make You Feel?

Art museum education: Chapter 8, How does this Artwork Make You Feel?

​Learning is particularly relevant to arts education. Unlike the content of the text, the work exists as a physical (or virtual) entity that exists in the same space as us. A work of visual art is embodied in images perceived by the eye and objects that can potentially be touched. Thus, there is an immediacy in how the viewer begins to understand the work of art. It precedes conception. This is not to say that art speaks exclusively to people's bodies and emotions. Exciting works can also stimulate viewers to form interpretations through rational thought processes. As such, the experience of a work of art is often simultaneously conceptual and embodied. They can instantly activate the motor channels of a person's reason, senses, emotions and reactions. The integration of different modes of perception is, according to many people, what defines aesthetic experience. The whole defines aesthetics as John Dewey's words contributes to making it "an experience in a refined and enhanced form," to borrow.

How does this piece of art make you feel? “Never ask students how their work makes them feel. If it makes children happy or sad, that's fine, but as educators, that's not our concern.” This is advice.

For example, someone may feel excited when immersed in a picture depicting a sad scene, while someone may feel annoyed in front of images of joyful people. In short, people's emotional responses to art are complex, multi-layered, and varied. So it's no surprise that museum education asks specific questions like, "How does this piece make you feel?" or "What emotions does this work suggest?" It does not inherently create or disrupt. Rather, the validity (or ineffectiveness) of these questions depends on the circumstances of the encounter. For example, "What emotions does this piece suggest?" Artwork tends to succeed when it expresses emotions that the audience can identify and name. This question tends to be unhelpful when the work lacks an inherently explicit emotional content, or when the emotions it presents are complex and ambiguous. The same goes for the question “How does this piece make you feel?” In general, it works well when viewers actually feel emotions that help express their language, whether these emotions are suggested by the work or related to the experience of engaging with the work in some other way. But when viewers don't feel any distinct emotions, find it difficult to tease or name the emotions they're feeling, or feel the educators want to discuss feelings other than what they're feeling, these same questions are easily broken down. can. (To be fair, no matter how the question is phrased, there are also cases where viewers have the flexibility to understand that they don't necessarily mean strictly literal meanings, which is hard to come by).