2009학년도 수시 2-I 알바트로스 국제화 특별전형
심층 면접 문제 <1차>
<인문ᆞ사회계열 공통> <수험생 및 면접위원 공통>
The earliest experience of art must have been magical; art was an instrument of ritual. The earliest theory of art, that of the Greek philosophers, proposed that art was imitation of reality. It is at this point that the peculiar question of the value of art arose. For the mimetic theory challenges art to justify itself. Plato, who proposed the theory, seems to have done so in order to rule that the value of art is dubious. Since he considered ordinary material things as mimetic objects, imitations of transcendent forms or structures, even the best painting of a bed would be only an "imitation of an imitation." For Plato, art is neither particularly useful (the painting of a bed is no good to sleep on) nor, in the strict sense, true.
Aristotle's arguments in defense of art do not really challenge Plato's view that all art is an elaborate trompe l'oeil* and thus a lie. But he does dispute Plato's idea that art is useless. Lie or no, art has a certain value according to Aristotle because it is a form of therapy. Art is useful, Aristotle encounters, in that it arouses and purges dangerous emotions. In Plato and Aristotle, the mimetic theory of art goes hand in hand with the assumption that art is always figurative. And it is through this theory that art as such becomes problematic and in need of defence. The defence of art gives birth to the odd vision by which "form" is separated off from
"content," and to the well-intentioned move which makes content essential and form accessory.
But advocates of the mimetic theory need not close their eyes to decorative and abstract art. The fallacy that art is necessarily a "realism" can be modified or scrapped without ever moving outside the problems delimited by the mimetic theory.
(* trompe l'oeil = to deceive the eye) 1. Explain Plato's concept of art.
2. What does Aristotle share with and differ from Plato on the notion of art?
3. Modern artists (in fine arts, literature, music, architecture, dance, etc.) have quite often discarded the theory of art as representation of an outer reality in favor of the theory of art as subjective expression. Give at least one example from modern arts which challenges the mimetic theory of art, and then describe it in brief.
4. Why do you think the writer argues that the mimetic theory makes art problematic?
5. Would you defend the value of "decorative and abstract art"? If you would, how? If not, why not?
