Giving Students Options to Explore an Artwork’s Cultural RelevanceOverview

Assessment: Explore the Cultural Relevance of a Work of Art

Purpose

Every culture can be represented by its artistic creations. In a sense, the work of art encapsulates the meanings of a culture at a particular time and place. The purpose of this assignment is to understand the symmetrical relationship between art and culture.

Instructions

Culture involves surveying the traditional forms of the past and choosing what best can be utilized in the present. In this sense, as Mathew Arnold argues culture moderates the best of the past into the present and then pushes it forward into the future. Art comprises the aesthetic relationships of symbolic form. In other words, art involves the placing together of stimuli to convey some type of dramatic or creative meaning. In this sense, works of art are historical and speak to a unique time and place but also influence who we are now. For example, one of my favorite poets is Claude McKay. He was a writer during the ‘Black renaissance’ of the early twentieth century. He wrote poems related to Black culture such as ‘The Lynching’ and ‘Harlem Dancer.’ His poems both capture and represent the Black culture of 100 years ago and inform our understanding of Black culture today.

Choose one of the following options.

Option A: Explore the cultural relevance of a work of art.

Utilizing the concepts of art as discussed in your readings such as aesthetics, the muse as cultural memory, materialism, philistinism, the meme, taste, art and cultural evolution, creativity, dramatist, and style, please choose a work of art and articulate its cultural meaning. You may choose a song, poem, statue, painting, dance, movie, etc. Make sure to define and appropriately apply terms from your readings. Please include a link to the work of art that you choose.

Option B: Create a work of art and discuss its intercultural communication implications.

You may create a work of art with intercultural meaning. You may write a poem, make a film, compose a song, write a short story, paint a picture, arrange a photo montage, mold a sculpture or develop any original artwork that you find significant and important with respect to intercultural communication. If you choose this option, please include a 150-300 word paragraph to unpack the aesthetic work’s intercultural meaning. In your paragraph, briefly articulate the relation of the work of art that you create to class concepts you found interesting. This assignment is deliberately open and vague to give you as much freedom as possible to create something unique and meaningful. Please make sure you have clearly justified how the artwork connects to course concepts, through the artwork and written statement.

Explore the Cultural Relevance of a Work of Art Rubric

Total Points: 30