Week Eight Video Reviews

The first video I chose to watch was The Birth of the Middle Ages.  I was interested in this video because I did not know much about the Middle Ages and I wanted to learn about the artwork from that time.  In all these videos I choose to view I choose the ones in which there topics were not related.  In the first video about the Middle Ages I found it interesting how Taxes were collected and divided up in that time.  In this time everything done on a daily basis was based on religious practices.  I enjoyed that part showing how the people of this time celebrated with their festivals.  There were a lot of celebrations with horses and sword fighting that looked like they would still be fun today.  This time I thought was mostly farming and rural villages but during this time there was populated townships with markets and churches.  This video really does not relate to the textbook.  While the textbook may have some history about the middle ages I learned a lot more about the middle ages from watching the video than reading my textbook.   Our text is mostly about art and things about art movements and periods this video showed everyday life in the Middle Ages.  While this video really didn’t enforce art concepts from class it did give me the understanding of the cause and basis of some of the art works of this time period.  I thought this video was very well informative and a great general overview of the Middle Ages.

I choose to watch the Cairo Museum because I was always interested in Ancient Egypt and the artifacts of the time period.  The stories and history that are behind the works and the artifacts are the most interesting.  If these works of art could talk and tell you about the history that they witnessed it would be incredible.  I learned that much of the history of the time is not yet discovered and the museum is home to so many things that is hard to decide which pieces to display.  The museum is always getting new artifacts from excavations that always occurring.  The videos relate pretty well to the text but the video has more history of the artifacts and the time period.  There is really so much material from the period that makes it hard to organize let alone display.  I enjoyed this video it was interesting to see that the work of this time is overwhelming and very time consuming.  These objects need to be restored and could have been lying in storage for many years.

I watched Greek Art and the Human figure because I am interested in how people make sculptures of Humans.  This process sounds very time consuming and tedious.  The video shows how these works involved a lot of emotions and feelings that I didn’t notice on the sculptures before watching this video.  I learned that the sculptures had to be careful to not crack the mediums that they were using to create the piece.   Out of the videos that I viewed I found that this one was the most related to the textbook.  The explanations that were in the video were almost identical to the ones found in the book.  I thought this video was good but it was a little over my head.  I couldn’t really grasp some of the concepts that were being explained.  I did however enjoy viewing and learned what to notice when looking at a sculpture.