Emotion in the Fine Arts

Abstract

The fine arts are spotlighted in this chapter. The role of emotion is discussed in two different types of drama, two different types of architecture, two different approaches to music, two different analyses of color, Paul McCartney’s lyrics, and dancing.

Appendices

Learning Exercises for This Chapter

13.1.1 Questions and Important Concepts

This section will help you review your learning for this chapter. It is composed of numbered questions (which are also the headings of this chapter). Concepts (important terms and phrases, labeled with letters) appear below most questions. These questions and concepts serve as an outline and summary of this chapter. If you have mastered the material in this chapter, you will be able to answer all the questions and define all the concepts. You should be able to answer each question in about 50–100 words and define each concept in about 20–50 words. Questions and concepts are best understood in the context of the entire chapter, and the information for answering them is always available within this chapter.

• 1. What role does emotion play in the fine arts?

  • (a) ___ encompass(es) emotion and ___ perform(s) them with the intent of communicating emotion.

• 2. How is emotion involved in Method Acting?

  • (a) Method acting

  • (b) Facial-feedback theory

• 3. What emotions are involved in comedy and tragedy?

  • (a) Comedy

  • (b) Tragedy

  • (c) Masks

• 4. What was the emotional tone of Shakespeare’s comedies, tragedies, histories, and romances?

  • (a) Shakespeare’s dramas.

  • (b) Comedies.

  • (c) Histories.

  • (d) Tragedies.

  • (e) Romances.

  • (f) Comedies were more pleasant than tragedies.

  • (g) Tragedies were more active than comedies.

• 5. What emotions does brutalist architecture convey?

  • (a) Brutalist architecture

  • (b) Strength or power

  • (c) Opposite of fear (Boldness)

  • (d) Trust

• 6. Is Art Nouveau architecture the emotional opposite of Brutalist architecture?

  • (a) Art Nouveau

  • (b) Gentleness and softness

  • (c) Elegance

  • (d) Beauty versus strength

• 7. The emotion in opera is pretty obvious, right?

  • (a) Operas

  • (b) Tragedy

  • (c) Sadness

• 8. What characteristics of music signal different locations on emotional dimensions?

  • (a) Characteristics of music

  • (b) Tempo

  • (c) Loudness

  • (d) Pitch

  • (e) Mode

  • (f) Dimensionality

  • (g) Activation and pleasantness

• 9. Is it possible for music to reliably produce discrete emotions?

  • (a) Discrete emotions

  • (b) Dimensional or discrete?

• 10. Can computer programs read the emotions in paintings by their colors?

  • (a) Computers can read emotions in paintings by their colors.

  • (b) Luscher Color Test.

• 11. Is red really an angry color?

  • (a) Red—anger

  • (b) Blue, gray—sadness

  • (c) Black, red—fear

  • (d) Yellow, turquoise-green—happiness

• 12. What kind of emotion is expressed by the lyrics of Paul McCartney’s songs?

  • (a) Songs where McCartney was the main author

  • (b) DAL program

  • (c) Pleasant lyrics

  • (d) Cheerful lyrics

  • (e) Active lyrics

  • (f) Tough lyrics

  • (g) Unpleasant lyrics

  • (h) Sad lyrics

  • (i) Passive lyrics

  • (j) Gentle lyrics

• 13. How is emotion revealed in dancing?

  • (a) Are there particular dance moves related to each emotion?

  • (b) Anger

  • (c) Fear

  • (d) Grief

  • (e) Joy

13.1.2 Experiential Learning Exercise 13.1: Color in Van Gogh’s Sunflower Paintings

In this chapter, we have suggested that you can read the emotion in a painting from its colors. This is an example of such a “reading.”

• 1. Go online and find an example of Van Gogh’s sunflower paintings. The search terms “Van Gogh and sunflowers” should find these for you. There is more than one sunflower painting, but they are similar in terms of their color scheme.

• 2. What is the chief color of the sunflower paintings? (one sentence)

• 3. According to the Luscher Color Test described in Table 13.3, what emotions does this color suggest? (one sentence)

• 4. According to the color research described in Table 13.4, what emotions does this color suggest? (one sentence)

• 5. This step involves a synthesis. What is your reaction to the paintings and their color? What emotion do they suggest to you? Take about 350 words to outline what the two theories of emotion and color predict, and discuss whether you agree with one or both of them.

13.1.3 Experiential Learning Exercise 13.2: What Does the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count Say About a Song?

In Sect. 13.12, I suggested that the lyrics of Paul McCartney’s two songs Good Day Sunshine and Maxwell’s Silver Hammer represented opposites of positive and negative emotions. In this experiential exercise, we are going to find the lyrics for the two songs on the Internet and score them with the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC). We will use the LIWC results to talk about the agreement/disagreement between the two scoring methods and the additional insights that LIWC provides.

• 1. Use your search engine for “Good Day Sunshine lyrics.” Copy the lyrics.

• 2. Use your search engine for “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer lyrics.” Copy the lyrics.

• 3. Go to: https://www.liwc.app, where you can use LIWC for small samples such as the two songs. Click on the link TRY IT NOW that appears at the top of the page.

• 4. Score each song by dropping it into the box provided. Choose “Other” as the comparative group.

• 5. Complete the following Table 13.6.

Table 13.6 Scoring McCartney’s lyrics

• 6. Using the data table you have prepared, take about 300 words to discuss the following:

  • (a) Does LIWC agree that Good Day Sunshine has positive (pleasant) lyrics?

  • (b) Does LIWC agree that Maxwell’s Silver Hammer has negative (unpleasant) lyrics?

  • (c) What can you say about social words and cognitive processes?

13.1.4 Experiential Learning Element 13.3: Evaluating the Emotion in Opera Lyrics

Most operas have been written in Italian rather than in English. In this experiential learning element, we will take a look at an English translation of the lyrics at the end of Aida, an opera with music by Giuseppe Verdi and lyrics by Antonio Ghislanzoni.²⁰ This is an extremely famous opera and all opera-lovers will know about it. The story of the opera involves a captive Ethiopian princess who is a slave in Egypt (Aida in the lyrics below), and the man she falls in love with (Radames, or Rad. Below), who is a military leader. The lyrics I have copied come from Aida’s death scene at the very end of the opera: although we do not see Radames die, we know he will be dying as well because he has been enclosed in a vault (Aida hid in the vault in order to die with him).

AIDA	My heart forboded this thy dreadful sentence, And to this tomb that shuts on thee its portal I crept unseen by mortal. Here from all where none can behold us, Clasped in thy arms I resolved to perish.
RAD	To perish! so pure and lovely! To die, thine own self dooming, In all thy beauty blooming, Fade thus forever! Thou whom the heav’n only for love created But to destroy thee was my love then fated! Ah no! those eyes So dear I prize For death are too lovely!
AIDA [transported]	See’st thou where death in angel guise With heavenly radiance beaming, Would waft us to eternal joys On golden wings above! See heaven’s gates are open wide Where tears are never streaming, Where only bliss and joy reside And never fading love!
AIDA	That sad chanting!
RAD	’Tis the sacred dance Of the Priesthood!
AIDA	It is our death chant resounding!
RAD. [trying to displace the stone closing the vault]	Cannot my lusty sinews Move from its place this fatal stone?
AIDA	’Tis vain! all is over Hope on earth have we none!
RAD. [with sad resignation]	I fear it! I fear it! [approaches Aida and supports her]
AIDA—RAD	Farewell, O earth! farewell thou vale of sorrow! Brief dream of joy condemned to end in woe! See, brightly opens the sky, an endless morrow There all unshadowed eternal shall glow! [Aida drops in the arms of Radames]

• 1. Read the lyrics copied above and circle all the emotional words in them. Not all of these words will represent the same emotion. For example, we see both hope and fear appearing in the lyrics.

• 2. Classify the emotional words according to which emotion you think they are communicating. Place them in one of the boxes below that list Plutchik’s eight emotions from Chap 3. Try and see if words are being negated: if the words are “not happy,” then their emotion should be classified as sadness, and you should write “not happy” under sadness (Table 13.7).

Table 13.7 Scoring opera lyrics

• 3. In 250–350 words, describe and discuss the emotions conveyed by the words in the opera lyrics.

Experiential Learning Element 13.4: Color and Emotion

This Learning Element will look at the effect of color on emotional responding. Here are four copies of a diagram that I copied from: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/bicycle-clip-art-free-black-white (publicdomainvectors.org, 2022).

• 1. Get some crayons or color pencils and color in each of the four figures in combinations of colors. For the first one, use gray and brown. For the second one, use two shades of blue (lighter and darker) for the third one, use red and orange, and for the last one, use pink and yellow. Cut out the four pictures after you have colored them.

• 2. Now find a few volunteers (ask them if they wish to participate, ensure them of confidentiality).

• 3. Now shuffle the pictures and present them one at a time to each volunteer. (If you are doing this on a screen, make sure to reveal only one picture at a time.) Give the following instructions: “I am trying to see what emotional effect color has on people. I am going to show you four versions of the same picture colored in different ways. As you see each picture, please give me the first few (between 3 and 7) emotional words that best describe what you think about the picture.” Write down the color and the words given by each volunteer in response to that color. When you have collected the opinions of two to three people, put them in the following Table 13.8:

Table 13.8 Color and emotion

• 4. Take between 300 and 600 words to describe your results and to see if you can come to any conclusions about what emotions the different colors represent. Refer to the color research discussed in this chapter. You might want to refer to the actual design that is on the figures we have used: is the zigzag design emotional in itself? If so, what emotions might it trigger?

13.2.1 Mind-Benders for This Chapter

Each Mind-Bender asks you a question that you cannot answer simply by reading this chapter. You have to think beyond this chapter. Mind-Benders are prompts for long essay answers of 500 or more words. Even if you are not asked to write the full essay, think of each of these in terms of how you might answer them.

• 1. We discussed the emotional implications of brutalist and Art Nouveau architecture. What do you think the emotional implications are for Gothic architecture? You should probably begin by defining what Gothic architecture is.

• 2. Opera and tragedy (in drama) are similar in that they lead to unhappy endings. Yet people find them worthwhile, educational, uplifting, etc. Why? You might want to consult this entry from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry for Art and Emotion (n.d.), which talks about this issue: https://iep.utm.edu/art-and-emotion/#H4

• 3. The fine arts represent things but their methods tend to rely on fiction rather than reality (e.g., opera, song lyrics, paintings). How can we experience real emotions in response to fictional works? The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry for Art and Emotion is a good place to begin searching for answers to this question: https://iep.utm.edu/art-and-emotion/#H4

• 4. What emotion is generally being conveyed in paintings or statues of the Buddha? Why?

• 5. Imagine that you are an artist—say a sculptor—and you have created a work that you think clearly signals the emotion of Disgust. Yet none of your audience agree with you. They see Anger and Fear, but not Disgust. Are you wrong? Are they wrong? Should you call your statue “Disgust” just to make sure no one misses the point?