Artist

Vincent van Gogh

Edvart Munch

Goya

Study Task 4

Introduction

This essay is to explore the dark side of creativity; the mental health problem in the creative industry. According to the National Institute of Mental health, more than half of the world’s population will have a depressive disorder at some point in their lifetimes.  People in creative professions were more likely to have relatives with depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, anorexia and autism. In the creative industry, depression is a widespread phenomenon. Depression has afflicted van Gogh, Picasso, Schultz and other artists. Art specialties have also been listed as one of the most easily depressed professionals.

Study Task 3

Stress: Stress is the word that many people use when they are describing how the demands of their life seem to be becoming too great for them to cope with. This ability to cope Varies from person to person and what one person finds stressful may not be a problem for another. Whilst many of us suffer with stress at times in our day to day lives, long-term stress is known to be bad for our health and many of us would like to find ways to gain some control over it.

Depression: Depression  is a common and serious medical illness that negatively affects how you feel, the way you think and how you act. Fortunately, it is also treatable. Depression causes feelings of sadness and/or a loss of interest in activities once enjoyed. It can lead to a variety of emotional and physical problems and can decrease a person’s ability to function at work and at home.

-Losing interest in things
-Crying a lot
-Feeling very sad
-Feeling bad or guilty
-Getting angry about little things
-Feeling like you are no good
-Feeling lonely
-Not enjoying things
-Feeling like nothing matters

Thoughs on practical:
Produce some illustrtions to show how depression feels.
Gemma Correll- Illustrate her depression in hilarious way.

Study Task 2

 DEPRESSIVE ART

‘The motivational compatibility account for the influence of mood on creative generation. Building upon the feelings-as-information framework, it was proposed that positive moods signal to individuals that they are safe, motivating them to take advantage of this presumed safety by seeking stimulation and incentives (i.e., having fun), whereas negative moods signal to individuals that there are problems at hand, motivating them to solve these problems. Based on these assumptions, it was predicted that positive and negative moods should enhance effort on creative generation tasks construed as compatible with the motivational orientations they respectively elicit. Specifically, positive, relative to negative, moods were predicted to enhance effort on tasks construed as fun and silly, whereas negative, relative to positive, moods were predicted to bolster effort on tasks construed as serious and important. Evidence for this model and several of its underlying assumptions were adduced in 3 experiments in which mood was manipulated, and participants completed creative generation tasks that were framed as either fun or serious. Results are discussed with an eye toward addressing alternative theoretical explanations.’

'Its specific contribution lies in the aesthic elaboration of a salient rule of depressive disorders: disenagagement.'

'Contemporary art cannot be isolated from the depressive paradigm.'

'They consistently rethink aesthetics through a  depreciation of its inherent feature, the relational, that is, not only the viewer's connection to the image but also intersubjectivity, communication, community, interpellation, and still more important, the attachment to the other.'

'Depressiveness unfolds as not so much a theme as an aesthetic depreciation of connectedeness.'

Artists;

‘My fear of life is necessary to me, as is my illness. They are indistinguishable from me, and their destruction would destroy my art.’ -Edvart Munch

"I am unable to describe exactly what the matter with me is. Now and then there are horrible fits of anxiety, apparently without cause, or otherwise a feeling of emptiness and fatigue in the head... at times I have attacks of melancholy and of atrocious remorse." -Vincent van Gogh

‘the artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web.’ -Picasso

Study Task 1

Im interested in mental health problem.This moudle I want to disuss mental health in creative industry.

END OF MODULE EVALUATION

Leeds College of Art BA (Hons) ILLUSTRATION	Level	04
OUIL401 Context of Practice	Credits	20
End of Module Self Evaluation

NAME	Chuyi Tang

1.    What skills have you developed through this module and how effectively do you think you have applied them?
In this module, I believe that it surely developed my researching skills. Pick up the key words from my chosen quote and Using LCA library, google books and scholar, search on websites. From that, I learned how to take elements from research and to explore it visually in my sketchbook.
2. What approaches to/methods of research have you developed and how have they informed your practical outcomes?
During the researching stage, I develop my research by reading articles, theories, and some survey. Finding elements from a book is also important although I haven’t used it that much in my research. I develop my visual journal by taking some elements from illustrations and articles; they influenced me to explore my idea visually.
3. What strengths can you identify in your work and how have/will you capitalise on these?
I think the works in my visual journal shows the ideas that I want to argue. I think collage work quite effective.
4. What weaknesses can you identify in your work and how will you address these in the future?
I think the logic of text in my essay is quite messy and confusing sometimes. I think I need to focus just only one aspect. I find it difficult to finding research from the library; I still need to practice my skills of researching in the future.  The quality of my work also have to be enhanced; I need to refine my work more in the future.
5. Identify five things that you feel will benefit you during next years Context of Practice module?
-       Motivation is the key. Have to find out what I find it interesting, this with help me to achieve some good quality works. -       Focus on the topic. Expand and develop this topic, not looking for another topic. -       Develop the skills of finding resources from a different place. -       Analysis the texts from the research and take some key words and ethos from it to use in my essay. -       The most important time management.
6.How would you grade yourself on the following areas: (please indicate using an ‘x’)  5= excellent, 4 = very good, 3 = good, 2 = average, 1 = poor
	1	2	3	4	5
Attendance			x
Punctuality			x
Motivation			x
Commitment			x
Quantity of work produced			x
Quality of work produced			x
Contribution to the group		x
The evaluation of your work is an important part of the assessment criteria and represents a percentage of the overall grade. It is essential that you give yourself enough time to complete your written evaluation fully and with appropriate depth and level of self-reflection. If you have any questions relating to the self-evaluation process speak to a member of staff as soon as possible.

A copy of your end of module self evaluation should be posted to your studio practice blog. This should be the last post before the submission of work and will provide the starting point for the assessment process. Post a copy of your evaluation to your COP blog as evidence of your own on going evaluation.

Notes

COP 2

COP 1

Final Eassey

Rationale

My quote is 'Modern-day pop culture is a mass culture, spread widely through the mass media and mass communications technologies. Pop culture would not have become so widespread without the partnership that it has always had with the mass media.' I mostly use collage and add some drawing and mark making on it to explore my theme visually. I want to focus on negative effect of mass media in society to people. For example, we dealing with too many information on media, we become anxious and impatience, become angry very easily.

Because The Internet provides us with infinite amounts of information, including negative information, and this could be very harmful for young people.

The media always judge people by their appearance especially with women. I looked at  Guerrilla Girls in my research which influence me to discover the gender problem in media and society.

Also people too rely on technology, they do not want to find the solution by themselves, therefore the ability of humans to think for themselves is deteriorating, people become more like a robot.

Initial Ideas and Definations

Image Analysis

Laura Callaglion

The illustration shows a girl making track for celebrities, by searching on the Internet, reading a magazine and putting some poster on the wall. The image looks busy with so many information about celebrities around her. The celebrity-obsessed world and popular culture have long been associated with youth. ‘Culture, especially popular culture, into the primary educational site in which youth learn about themselves and the larger world’ (Giroux, H. A. 2000) Pop culture enable youth to understand and participate in the representations that help to construct their identities. It affects the way teenagers think of themselves, how they connect with others. Teenage are the main group to follow and make pop culture and also they have a strong ability to accept new things. Which makes the pop culture with a strong inducement influence young people's traditional values and moral consciousness. As the backbone of future social development, the selection and judgment of pop culture by adolescents will also affect the development and trend of the whole social culture.

In addition, self-definition plays an important role in every teenager’s maturation. Self-definition can be defined as the way you see yourself. Celebrities can provide benchmarks with which teenagers pin their self-definition. Popular culture is not only about media; it is about identity, commodities and their connection with education. In fact, the study of popular culture assists youth, and all of us, in being less constructed, more constructing and allows us to see the obstacles in our path towards a more democratic and egalitarian society (Reynolds, W. M. (2012),

Female role in media

Tate Modern

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/guerrilla-girls-do-women-have-to-be-naked-to-get-into-the-met-museum-p78793

This is one of thirty posters published in a  portfolio entitled Guerrilla Girls Talk Back by the group of anonymous American female artists who call themselves the Guerrilla Girls. Tate’s copy is number twelve in the  edition of fifty.

Since their inception in 1984 the Guerrilla Girls have been working to expose sexual and racial discrimination in the art world, particularly in New York, and in the wider cultural arena. The group’s members protect their identities by wearing gorilla masks in public and by assuming pseudonyms taken from such deceased famous female figures as the writer Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) and the artist Frida Kahlo (1907-54). They formed in response to the International Survey of Painting and Sculpture held in 1984 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The exhibition included the work of 169 artists, less than 10% of whom were women. Although female artists had played a central role in experimental American art of the 1970s, with the economic boom of the early 1980s in which artwork prices rose steeply, their presence in museum and gallery exhibitions diminished dramatically. Dubbing themselves the ‘conscience of the art world’, in 1985 the Guerrilla Girls began a poster campaign that targeted museums, dealers, curators, critics and artists who they felt were actively responsible for, or complicit in, the exclusion of women and non-white artists from mainstream exhibitions and publications. 

Word vomit

Liza Donnelly

Triangulation &Harrard Referencing

My quote is 'Modern-day pop culture is a mass culture, spread widely through the mass media and mass communications technologies. Pop culture would not have become so widespread without the partnership that it has always had with the mass media.'- Danesi, M. Popular Culture: Introductory Perspectives. Lanham, USA: Rowman and Littlefield.

This essay is discussing the negative effect of mass media in society to people. Firstly, what is culture? The word culture suggests ‘a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period or a group.’ It can also refer to ‘the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activities.’ Culture plays an important part in how human societies communicate with each other. ‘An obvious starting point in any attempt to define popular culture is to say that popular culture is simply culture which is widely favored or well-liked by many people.’

The Internet provides us with infinite amounts of information, drastically impact our mind. Our screen always filled with overlapping windows, we follow them, chase them and discuss them. An hour passed in a flash, but in the end, we cannot remember any of the information. This world has a dizzy feeling, it is colourful but be amazed at the same time. The Internet makes the world smaller; we can know the instant news quickly. The mass media has been deeply combined with the whole society, which has become an important public opinion carrier, the carrier of information, the carrier of culture and a major cultural existence. The mass media quickly spread, wide coverage, strong penetrability, and for the decision of the government publicity, social ethics construction and for the people's values and way of life of remodeling have not underestimated the influence.

In all the impact of various media, the most controversial topic is the Internet Network to the teenager. Mass media is a ‘double-edged sword.' Teens outside the world are full of curiosity, eager to get new knowledge, understanding of new information, becoming a member of the social identity, associate with others and express their thoughts and feelings. So they became the most enthusiastic readers of modern mass media because it is the way they think of themselves. For example, people try to seek their identity by changing the look of themselves to be like supermodels in the television or magazine. Mass media can also provide negative feelings and information. For example, violence which can lead to some illegal activities. Research by psychologists L. Rowell Huesmann, Leonard Eron, and others starting in the 1980s found that children who watched many hours of violence on television when they were in elementary school tended to show higher levels of aggressive behavior when they became teenagers. The report and a follow-up report in 1982 by the National Institute of Mental Health identified these major effects of seeing violence on television:

-Children may become less sensitive to the pain and suffering of others.

-Children may be more fearful of the world around them.

-Children may be more likely to behave in aggressive or harmful ways toward other.

Therefore it is important to have a self-maintaining mind, keep a cool head,

Not only when we were dealing with violence on media but also some other negative information like fake news and the spread of misinformation, never blindly follow the media.

Patricia Greenfield says‘’ Most visual media are real-time media that do not allow time for reflection, analysis, or imagination,’’. People receive tons of information, the media is more and more cater to readers, so that people can only read what they want to know, but they forget to stop and think. "Critical thinking can be accelerated multifold by the right technology." On the other hand, "The technology distraction level is accelerating to the point where thinking deeply is difficult. We are overwhelmed by a constant barrage of devices and tasks." Worse: "We increasingly suffer from the Google syndrome. People accept what they read and believe what they see online is fact when it is not." By Michael Bugeja, director of the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication at Iowa State University of Science and Technology. In today’s Information Age, all kinds of high-tech products in our life. As people more and more rely on their electronic devices to solve problems, it makes them have difficulty concentrating, memory loss and the ability of humans to think for themselves will surely deteriorate. "Reading enhances thinking and engages the imagination in a way that visual media such as video games and television do not," Greenfield explains. "It develops imagination, induction, reflection, and critical thinking, as well as vocabulary." So now, reading is a prerequisite for success in life. It is not the best opinion for people to solve a problem, but it can make us think, constructs rich self’s inner worlds and the culture life. The articles from media are fragmentation reading; it is hard to learn and think deeply. There are many articles on media but most of them people just give a hurried and cursory glance, because the reader is more and more impatient. There are many authors, but just a few can be remembered. Look back in times when we read a book; some fantastic article remains fresh in the memory.

Bibliography:

Danesi, M. Popular Culture: Introductory Perspectives. Lanham, USA: Rowman and Littlefield.

Giroux, H. A. (2000), impure acts: The practical politics of cultural studies, New York

Anderson, C.A., Ihori, Nobuko, Bushman, B.J., Rothstein, H.R., Shibuya, A., Swing, E.L., Sakamoto, A., & Saleem, M. (2010). Violent Video Game Effects on Aggression, Empathy, and Prosocial Behavior in Eastern and Western Countries: A Meta-Analytic Review

Samuel Greengard, https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2009/7/32082-are-we-losing-our-ability-to-think-critically/fulltext

Triangulation & Harrard Referencing (development)

-‘Modern-day pop culture is a mass culture, spread widely through the mass media and mass communications technologies. Pop culture would not have become so widespread without the partnership that it has always and with the mass media.’

-As the development the Internet, today we live in the high-tech world. We can have access to all kinds of high-tech products such as television, newspapers, and the network to send us a lot of information, they all belong to the media.

-The Internet makes the world smaller, we can know the instant news quickly. 

The mass media has been deeply combined with the whole society, which has become an important public opinion carrier, the carrier of information, the carrier of culture and a major cultural existence. In all the influence of various media, the most controversial topic is the Internet Network to the teenager.

-The mass media quickly spread, wide coverage, strong penetrability, and for the decision of the government publicity, social ethics construction and for the people's values and way of life of remodeling have not underestimated the influence, especially for the teenager. Mass media is a ‘double-edged sword’. Teenagers outside the world are full of curiosity, eager to get new knowledge, understanding of new information, becoming a member of the social identity, so they became the most enthusiastic readers of modern mass media.

-This essay is the effect of pop culture in mass media in society to youth people. Firstly we need to ask; what is culture? The word culture suggests ‘a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period or a group.’ It can also refer to ‘the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activities.’ Culture plays an important part in how human societies communicate with each other. ‘An obvious starting point in any attempt to define popular culture is to say that popular culture is simply culture which is widely favored or well-liked by many people.’

-Nowadays, whatever happened people always post it on media, let people notice. The direction of public opinion will influence the court judgment to some extent. In fact, people always make a judgement by moral standards but not everyone understands the law.

-Providing convenience to society is one of the positive effects of popular culture.

-Promoting the advancement of society is another positive influence of popular culture.

-‘’ Most visual media are real-time media that do not allow time for reflection, analysis, or imagination,’’--Patricia Greenfield

( Danesi, M. Popular culture: Introductory perspectives. Lanham, USA: Rowman and Littlefield.

Giroux, H. A. (2000), impure acts: The practical politics of cultural studies, New York

Storey, 2006.4

Strinati, 2004.6

Macedo, D. and Steinberg, S. R. (2007), Media literacy: A reader, New York: Peter Lang.

Reynolds, W. M. (2012),

‘Iron Man democracy: Militainment and democratic possibilities,’ in A. Abdi and P. R. Carr (eds), Educating for democratic consciousness: Counter-hegemonic possibilities, New York: Peter Lang.)

https://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/internet/fake-news-conspiracy-theories-journalism-research