Emotionalism Theory Essay

Emotionalism theory is an aesthetic and critical theory of deviceistic production which is mainly concerned with the expressive qualities of art work. According to the theory, the more or less important thing about a work of art is the vivid communication of moods, feelings, and ideas.The theory posits that an artwork can each be shocking or entertaining but will mainly try to provoke you into action or call for your attention to any issue of concern. The artwork can either be realistic or acquire an abstract outlook but the simple objective of the artwork is to get the viewers attention in a dramatic way and to impact the viewers emotions. A good emotionalist artwork will succeed in getting the artists message across. Pieces of artwork will mainly depict characters showing emotions. Artwork is however classified as emotionalist only if the emotion being expressed was the primary purpose of the artwork. An example is artwork by David Siqueiros which has been tailored to draw you r attention to the horrors of war. A screaming babys head emerges from the destruction. The artist is making the tailor that no child could survive in that environment for very long. pic The painting below is a social-protest work of art. It depicts an actual event in history when the french army, led by Napoleon, invaded Spain. The painting shows the merciless French soldiers executing defenseless people at point-blank range.Critique of the theoryThe theory has been criticized for dwelling excessively much on the emotional aspects on the pieces of art work and ignoring the identifiable features such as interest, recognition of motifs, forms, or ideas, acute perceptual awareness, intuitive insight, light of relationships, and the like to give true meaning.The theory assumes that an aesthetic get wind must be characterized by an aesthetic emotion. The theory ignores the identifiable features in art and basically analyses the quality attached to the emotional aspects in the set about without highlighting any positive features of human experience, and maintaining that it is broad(a)ly unlike the emotions of life. Therefore, the narrow representation of art by means of one or many emotions only offers a partial account because the emotional- element is just one factor that is discernible when the experience of art is reflected upon.The theory has also been faulted for describing pieces of art based on ordinary terms like joyful, sorrowful, exhilarating, depressing, and exciting to reflect the meaning in the art piece. These general terms have widely been touted as misleading especially when similar explanations are applied to an indefinite number of dissimilar art works to filter out meaning.Further, the words used to describe emotions in art work are restrictive in comparison to the richness of emotional experience. Therefore any cartridge holder we assign a single term or even a combination of them to a work of art, one succeeds more in misrepresentin g and distorting than in characterizing it eg the description of a musical composition as sad, tragic, amusing or cheerful.Moreover, to apportion a single type of emotional reaction such as frolic to cover all cases of aesthetic response can not only lead to misinformation but also limit the variety and scope of aesthetic experience by confining it to a single feature of its emotional aspect. Further, falsification of meaning can occur if feeling is used to summarize everything that can be felt, from physical sensation, pain and comfort, excitement and response, to the most complex emotions, intellectual tensions, or the steady feeling-tones of a conscious human life,. Such generality, however, makes feeling equivalent to the entire range of human experience of which we may become aware, and goes well beyond emotionalismAny objective analysis of artwork must therefore overtake all the other aspects of the experience. This helps bring out the totality of an experience that is usual ly tied to the emotional component during the experience and before reflecting on it.