AAD 250 BLOG FOR Scott Huette

1. Ellen Dissanayake talks about her word called “paleoanthropsychobiological”. In my opinion, I choose to divide the word to be three parts, which are “paleo”, “anthrop” and “psychobiological”. Paleo means old things; anthrop means mankind, psychobiological means biological and mental stuff. Her writing “What is art for?” is using a explanation to describe the word, which is “that in order to include human history, human cultures, and human psychology, art must be viewed as an inherent universal (or biological) trait of the human species, as normal and natural as language, sex, sociability, aggression, or any of the other characteristics of human nature” (Dissanayake 1). In my opinion, I use something easy to understand to know it, which is that art is about human beings, especially from humans’ thoughts and physical things, and art originates from ancient.

2. Ellen Dissanayake uses the phrase “making special” to describe art because art is different by different people. Art has different styles, different forms, and different languages.  It combines different people’s minds, thoughts or mental ideas to a set. The name of the set is ART. According to Dissanayake’s words,” Among these tendencies, I claim, is also the behavior or propensity to “make special,” particularly things that one cares deeply about or activities whose outcome has strong personal significance.” (Dissanayake, 22), people all have their own understandings on the word “art”; therefore, art is “making special”.

3.  As the question menas, Dissanayake identifies many different theories/movement/periods of art throughout western european history. The first one is modernism. Art needs to improve every moment, and essencing absorption and drossing discarding is the necessary step to get progress. The second one is reality. Although art needs imagination and creativity, it does not mean that people can make it up, or fabricate anything. Art originates from life, and life is the direct form of reality. The second one is “aesthetics – “a concern with elucidating principles such as taste and beauty that govern all the arts and indeed make them not simply paintings or statues but examples of (fine) art.” (Dissanayake, 17) Art is a form of pretty things, and aesthetics is aim that all artists catches their steps for.

 

The most impressive novel in my life is a Chinese novel called “Never-flower in Never-dream”. It is written by a very famous Chinese writer called Guo Jingming.

The writer is the most famous, and the richest writer, especially liked by young people. Each novel he writes attracts large amounts of readers. In most of his novels, he writes about the lives among young people, and gives some suggestions of life value to young people.

In the novel “Never-flower in Never-dream”, he writes about a girl’s change after lots of things happen such as her family, her love, her friendship and so on.

In his novel, There is one sentence giving me the deepest impression, which is “One person has to go on a strange road, see a strange sight, and hear a strange song, and in an inadvertent moment, you will find that you will forget the things that you once wanted to forget.”

It is a kind of sadness, and even it is sorrowful, it is the truth. When people grow up, they have to give up lots of things even the things are their favourite, and at that time, they may think they will remember it for the whole life. However, during the step of growth, you will find that something really important in the past becomes passing clouds. people have to pay more attentions on the current things, and with the increasing of the age, people will have more responsibilities to undertake. Because in the past, you just need to care about yourself, your emotions, your feelings; however, in the future, you have to take care of your wife or husband, your parents, your sons or daughters, and these people will make you forget lots of things that you really cared about in the past. It is the value of life, and life is that know more, care more, and give up more.

 

 

I am in China right now, and now is 10:20 in the morning. Today my parents and brother will come back to home to prepare the Spring Festival which is as the same important as the Christmas in the United States. Even I have a lot of work to do, I still will pick them up around noon that I cannot wait to see them because in my mind, family is the most important. No matter how busy I am, if my family are there, I will stop everything to stay with them.

After they come back, I will cook for them. I cook because of two reasons. The first one is that home-made food is much healthier than outside food, and it represents that I pay lots of attention on the health. There is another reason that I cook because of my interest. When I cook, I really enjoy it. That is the enjoyment. Because I enjoy doing it, I will do it better and in a great quality.

In my group member Anna Bohr’s post called “Discussion Post 1- Hunter Lewis’ A qUESTION OF Values: Six Ways We Make the Personal Choices That Shape Our Lives”, she mentions one factor from the book she read which is “Lewis briefly outlines the process in which we end up with the values and beliefs that we possess as a combination and process of observations, personal experiences, and influences from other individuals’ values and beliefs.” Besides, she agrees with the point the author states.

In the beginning of her post, she states the point from the article she read, and shows that she strongly agrees with the idea from the book that when judging something, people always cannot be completely objective because they always use some of their personal preference and own experience. Besides, she explains why she agrees with his idea, and tells people how to do to avoid this kind of not objective.

For me, I also agree the idea from the book and Ann’s idea. Because when a person grows up, lots of principle used to judge others are changed everyday because of our growing background, environment, teachers, parents and so on. What people should do is to think more, listen more, see more before we make any decision so that we will not miss something or make any mistake.

I read the article called “Personal Values”, and thought a lot because lots of ideas

in the book moved me a lot, and made me think about myself and my life in the

past.

The same as lots of children borned after the year of 1990 in China, I was over

protected, and became the center of the whole family. My grandparents and

parents treat me as “treasure” to protect me to avoid any unhappiness or

dangers happening on me which leads me to be very self-centered. I always

only care about my own emotion, and always use my own

emotion to judge others. Like the sentence in the article, “The choice of emotion

as a primary mode of forming value judgments and thus a dominant personal

value judgment in itself- means that we are predisposed to certain specific

values, as other sections of this book will show”(P14), I use my own personal

preference to ask others to follow it.

For example, I do not like the collocation of red and green, especially wearing

red and green together. When I see someone wearing red adn green, I always

think he/she lacks of the sense of fashion, even more, I think he/she is tacky.

It is a kind of using own emotion to be the value judgments. After reading the

article, and thinking about my own behaviors and thoughts, I begin to rethink.

The reflection makes me know a lot that each person has its own style such as

clothes style, thinking style, living style, and others cannot use their own

habbits to judge others’ preference and behaviors are correct or wrong. It is

something like that if you are happy, and another person is sad, you cannot

force him to become happy because of your emotion.