1 柏拉图和亚里士多德关于艺术的观点
Plato viewed human life as a pilgrimage from the appearance to reality. He also believed that a piece of art had to be strictly censored when they depicted any form of evil and cruelty. When an artist imitated what was bad, they added to the sum of badness in the world. Both Plato and Aristotle pointed out, we as humans do find delight in representations of objects and emotions that we consider different from real life; most of us agree with Aristotle in refusing to believe that they are corrupt.

2 如何欣赏艺术
Students must be taught to value not only the beauty of art, but also the meaning, elements and the history of art. Students do not naturally look at a painting and know the principles contained in it, who created it and for what purpose. Students must learn how to view and critique art in order to understand it. This understanding can come from being immersed in an environment in which art is an essential component to learning. If art is integrated throughout the curriculum, and is not relegated to half an hour per week of drawing, cutting or pasting, then students can develop a love and understanding for a variety of creative experiences involving artistic expression. An environment supportive of art development can be obtained in any classroom in which the teacher instills in the students a respect for the history, purpose and meaning of art. This doesn’t mean that all students have to be great artists capable of completing outstanding works of art themselves; rather the implication is quite the opposite. Even students who are not great artists themselves are capable of appreciating, understanding, and perceiving art on a highly cognitive level. In order for this to happen, students must experience for themselves the production of art using specific elements, principles and techniques. Once they have tried to create a particular effect, it is important to show them the work of someone who mastered the task, and allow them to critique not only their own work, but also the work of the professional artist. It is only by attempting to create a piece of their own that students will truly understand how talented some artists are. Despite the benefits of art production and criticism, an environment truly conducive to artistic development must include both art history and art aesthetics. As mentioned before, it is to provide a culturally diverse perspective in these areas.

3 艺术的欣赏和审美
We must be aware of the global culture and heritage from which art emerges. For example when teaching our students art aesthetics, we must never let them think that there is only one way to view art. Students, and especially teachers, should be ready to accept all ways in which art evaluation can occur. Western aesthetics is based primarily on individuality, originality, permanence, and form. These factors cannot be applied to art from every culture. For example, African art is understood in terms of rites of passage, healing, power, control, and commerce. Students must be taught to understand the principles of art as they are understood by the cultural group in which they belong in order to truly achieve global awareness and appreciation for art. Obviously, teachers must gain this awareness themselves before they can impart it to their students.
Travel, physically or intellectually, is necessary for teachers who truly aspire to instill a devotion to open-mindedness and tolerance in their students. Furthermore, teachers themselves must be open to teaching about culturally diverse art, and learning the history and meaning behind such pieces. As teachers, we must constantly be open to expanding our base knowledge and learning new information to share with our students. It is important to note that teaching art requires more than just looking at pictures, listening to music or watching a dance. To teach art in a truly meaningful way, principles of art history, production, criticism and aesthetics must be explored.

4 康德观点: 两性的不同美德
Women’s mental ability and understanding, then, refer to the beautiful. Men’s deep, noble understanding is not suitable for women. Women have beautiful virtues such as kindness and benevolence. Men’s virtue is noble and has to do with principles and duty. Because a woman is concerned with the beautiful, the worst that can be said against her is that she is disgusting. A man’s greatest defect, however, would be that he is ridiculous, as this is the opposite of the sublime.
In sexual selection, a woman demands that the man have noble and sublime characteristics. A man wants a woman to possess beautiful qualities. In a marriage, the husband and wife unite their disparate attributes to form, as it were, a single moral person. The man’s understanding combines with the wife’s taste to constitute a union.

5 康德观点: 美好感情和人性的关系
Kant described the relationship between these finer feelings and humanity. The feelings are not totally separated from each other. Beauty and the sublime can be joined or alternated. Kant claimed that tragedy, for the most part, stirs the feeling of the sublime. Comedy arouses feelings for beauty. The personal appearance of humans prompts these feelings in various cases. A person’s social position also affects these feelings.
Human nature has many variations of the feelings of the beautiful and the sublime. Some variations of the terrifying sublime are the adventurous and grotesque. Visionaries and cranks are persons who have fantasies and whims. The beautiful, when it degenerates, produces triflers, fops, dandies, chatterers, silliness, bores, and fools.

6 康德观点: 美和高尚的不同对象
Kant states that feelings of enjoyment are subjective. In his book, he describes his observations. His interest is not in coarse, thoughtless feelings or in the other extreme, the finest feelings of intellectual discovery. Instead, he will write about the finer feelings, which are intermediate. These require some sensitivity, intellectual excellence, talent, or virtue.
There are two kinds of finer feeling: the feeling of the sublime and the feeling of the beautiful. Kant gives examples of these pleasant feelings. Some of his examples of feelings of the beautiful are the sight of flower beds, grazing flocks, and daylight. Feelings of the sublime are the result of seeing mountain peaks, raging storms, and night.
Kant gives many particular examples of feelings of the beautiful and the sublime. Feelings of thebeautiful “occasion a pleasant sensation but one that is joyous and smiling.” On the other hand,feelings of the sublime “arouse enjoyment but with horror.”
Kant subdivided the sublime into three kinds. The feeling of the terrifying sublime is sometimes accompanied with a certain dread or melancholy. The feeling of the noble sublime is quiet wonder. Feelings of the splendid sublime are pervaded with beauty.

7 康德观点: 脾性与美好情感
Kant asserted that the human temperaments or dispositions are fixed and separate characters. An individual who has one frame of mind has no feeling or sense for the finer feelings that occur in a person of another temperament.
1. A person who has a constitution that is melancholic will have a predominating feeling for the sublime. That person may possess genuine virtue based on the principle that humanity has beauty and worth.
2. One who has a sanguine nature will mostly have a feeling for the beautiful. This results in an“adoptive” virtue that rests on good-heartedness. This person’s compassion and sympathy depend on the impression of the moment.
3. A choleric human will have a feeling for the splendid or showy sublime. As a result, thisperson will possess an apparent virtue. Kant calls it “a gloss of virtue.” This includes a sense ofhonor and concern for outward appearance.
4. Phlegmatic people have apathy or lack of any finer feeling. They therefore may have an absence of virtue.
As a whole, human nature in general is a combination of these virtues. As such, it is a splendid expression of beauty and dignity.

8 康德观点: 同情与真正的美德
Sympathy or compassion and also good-natured agreeableness are not true virtues, according to Kant. True virtue is the quality of raising the feeling of humanity’s beauty and dignity to a principle. When a person acts in accordance with this principle, regardless of inclination, that person is truly and sublimely virtuous.
“A profound feeling for the beauty and dignity of human nature and a firmness and determination of the mind to refer all one’s actions to this as to a universal ground is earnest, and does not at all join with a changeable gaiety nor with the inconstancy of a frivolous person.” With this observation, Kant will attempt to fit the various feelings of the beautiful and sublime, and the resulting moral characters, into Galen’s rigid arrangement of the four humors or human temperaments: melancholic, sanguine, choleric, and phlegmatic.

9 艺术改善了我们的生活
Art is a deliberate recreation of a new and special reality that grows from one’s response to life. It improves our existence by enhancing, changing and perpetuating our cultural composition. “The great artist knows how to impose their particular illusion on the rest of mankind,” proclaimed Guyde Mauspassant. Art improves our lives by directly and indirectly lifting the morale of individuals, creating unity and social solidarity. Art creates awareness of social issues. Art may express and reflect the religious, political, and economical aspects of cultures. Art is and can be whatever a culture says it is or whatever they want it to be. It involves all people, those who conceive the idea of the work, execute it, provide necessary equipment and materials, and people who make up the audience for the work. Art forms as diverse as architecture, body decoration, clothing manufacture, and memorial sculptures reflect social status. Art echoes the natural world. It gives order to the world and intensity to human life. Art is a means of communion as well as communication. It provides pleasurable experiences along with cerebral wealth. Art also helps us to express our sentimental relations. It can beautify, surprise, inspire, stimulate imagination, inform, tell stories,and record history. As someone once said, “Art is life.” Therefore, as teachers, it is our jobs toteach students about life through art. We must have a penetrating comprehension ourselves of how art affects our society in order to teach our students to comprehend the complex purposes of art.

10 艺术史的概念
Art history is the academic study of objects of art in their historical development and stylistic contexts, i.e. genre, design, format, and look. Moreover, art history generally is the research of artists and their cultural and social contributions.
As a term, art history (also history of art) encompasses several methods of studying the visual arts; in common usage referring to the study of works of art and architecture. The definition is, however, wide-ranging, with aspects of the discipline overlapping upon art criticism and art theory. Ernst Gombrich observed that“the field of art history is much like Caesar’s Gaul, divided in three parts inhabited by three different, though not necessarily hostile tribes: (1) the connoisseurs,(2) the critics, and (3) the academic art historians”. Works of art criticism and of art theory frequently have been the pivots upon which the understanding of art history has turned.

11 艺术史的发展

Art history is a relatively new academic enterprise, beginning in the nineteenth century. Whereas the analysis of historical trends in, for example, politics, literature, and the sciences, benefits from the clarity and portability of the written word, art historians rely on formal analysis, iconology, semiotics ( structuralism, post-structuralism, and deconstruction ) , psychoanalysis and iconography, as well as primary sources and reproductions of artworks as a springboard of discussion and study. Advances in photographic reproduction and printing techniques after World War II increased the ability of reproductions of artworks accurately. Nevertheless the appreciation and study of the visual arts has been an area of research for many over the millennia. The definition of art history reflects the dichotomy within art, i.e., art as history and in anthropological context; and art as a study in forms.

12 艺术反映古代文明
Ancient Egyptian and Greek societies both made significant contributions to western civilization, specifically in the areas of politics and social structure. The political system of ancient Egypt was primarily based on the religion belief that the Pharaoh was a divine entity, while Greek politics were based on a democratic system that valued individuals in a unique way. The political and social advancements of both Greek and Egyptian civilizations are best reflected in the advancement of each culture’s artwork. In the early kingdom of the Egyptian civilization, the Pharaoh ruled as a God-King and dictated the religion and laws of the land. He promoted a polytheistic religion that was used to explain natural phenomena and life after death. According to this religion, all Egyptians, not only the ruling class, were offered the hope of survival in the next world, as a reward for a good life in the present world.
The idea of a good life is defined by the devotees’ accomplishments in the eyes of Osiris, the judge of the dead. Funeral services were devised to exemplify these beliefs and help to guide the spirit of the dead into the afterlife. The ridged structure of this Theocracy greatly limited individualism in all aspect of life, but most importantly art. The art of the early kingdom was predominantly based on the divinity of the Pharaoh, and his status in society.

13 古埃及和希腊的社会结构与艺术形式
Although early Greek sculpture highly resembled Egyptian cult statues, distinct differences in design made Greek sculpture remarkably unique, and in consequence showed a major difference in the Greek social structure, and their view of man. The first and probably most important difference of the Greek sculptural design was that the figures were mainly shown as nude. This variation on the basic Egyptian sculpture shows a definite separation from the rigid class system of Egypt. By removing clothes from the human figure, the pure and true identity of the subject is revealed. The subject is no longer seen as a product of society, but as a creation of nature. This view of man was further explored as Greek thought continued to progress. This progress is best shown by examining the change in style from the Kouros, form Attica to the Kritios Boy, from Acropolis. The Kouros showed a definite attempt to reveal the true human form. Although the sculpture put great effort into portraying the real muscle and bone structure of the subject, he still uses the transcendental stare that was so popular in Egyptian relief.
As Greek philosophy progressed, the idea of the human perfection was further explored in the arts. By 490 B.C. the Kritios Boy, from Acropolis was created and the perfect human form was found. The extremely accurate portrait of human anatomy and the realism of the facial expression are exemplified by the relaxed stance of the figure. For the first time in ancient art, the figure is no longer looking or walking straight ahead. His head and shoulders are shifted to one side while his hips are shifted to the opposite side, and his weight is placed on one leg. This was the most advanced and realistic portrait of a human figure in the history of ancient art, and is a direct reflection of the Greek interest in the true nature of man. The changes in art from the beginning of Egyptian civilization to the early stages of Greek civilization reflect the evolution of human thought and social structure. The Egyptian art of the Old Kingdom portrayed a ridged and powerful Theocracy that gave little room for personal interpretation of art. In the Middle Kingdom Akhenaton lead the first artistic revolution by introducing a new religious system. But after his death, religion and art both returned to the traditional style of the Old Kingdom. The Greeks, however, took on a new view of the heavens in which they put less emphasis on the Gods and more emphasis on the human spirit. This new belief system allowed the Greeks to break away from a rigid social structure and explore the human form in its most pure state.