Viewing Art - Essay Example

The majority of the art produced by Soviet artists was created to support the ideals of the government and make their communism present in every part of the culture, especially the visual arts. Soviet art of the period consisted of pictures of workers farming, working in factories, or similar actions. In one way, it was good because they pictured women working alongside men which reinforced the idea of equality, but there is very little difference between the characters. They all look the same, which reinforces the Soviet idea that a person was only as valuable as their work to the state (“Into the 20th Century”).

Examples of art used to oppress people are not limited to despotic foreign countries. Sometimes art can be used to reinforce social customs that are discriminatory or racist. The American film Birth of a Nation has been credited with justifying racism and discrimination against African Americans in the America south. The movie tells a fictional account of the founding of the Ku Klux Klan and how it was started to protect good white southerners against the black Union soldiers after the American Civil War.

Birth of a Nation expressed a mythology about the southern United States and its identity that was not true and justified the use of violence and mistreatment of African Americans. In fact, the movie has been credited with reviving the Ku Klux Klan, which by then had already become inactive (Armstrong). Visual art was also used before the American Civil War to promote an idea of how the south was and to cover up the cruelty of slavery. Many landscape paintings of southern plantations did not picture slaves, instead focusing on the beautiful buildings and crops of the owners.

Other landscape artists did paint African slaves into their pictures, but sometimes pictured them working happily alongside white workers. These representations perpetuated an idea of the American south as a peaceful, prosperous part of a country, whose slave owners were kind and whose slaves were happy (Mack). With all the time that people spend looking at art and interacting with it, we do not step back enough to wonder about what a piece of art or a piece of graphic design is saying to us.

Most of the time, we simply respond. A good deal of art created in modern society is designed to get people to do things: to click on a banner, to buy something, to inspire feelings of patriotism or anger. Advertisers depend on the fact that the viewing public will not really step back and evaluate how an advertisement is trying to manipulate them and that they will just respond and click, or buy something, or vote a certain way. Claude Monet’s painting “Regate a Argenteuil” is a masterpiece that communicates more than the simple coercive ideas behind Soviet art and art in advertising.

Monet’s impressionism was about replicating the experience of seeing something commonplace, rather than the realistic reproduction of grand and heroic or mythological events as was popular in the 19th century. This painting, in particular, is not a realistic rendering of sailboats on the river Seine. The We Museum website calls it a “bold simplification” in which Monet was trying to capture the mood of boots sailing on a beautiful day (Pioch). Monet attempted, in this painting, to communicate that mood and his understanding that