Influence of History of Art Learning on Understanding of Beauty and Ugliness in Painting
Authors: Sakata Tomofumi , Watanuki Keiichi , Motohiro Kozawa 
Published: June 2023

Japanese elementary school teachers can teach art classes to elementary school students without receiving any art education. For this reason, there are no common evaluation criteria for art classes, and teachers create their own evaluation criteria and assign grades. The teachers' own evaluation criteria often include their own interests, suggesting that the students may not be receiving a fair evaluation. It is possible that elementary school students dislike art classes due to unfair evaluation. A dislike of art from an early age can lead to a lack of imagination and creativity. In addition, we are becoming a mature society with a rapidly declining birthrate and an aging population, and it is expected that each individual, as the bearer of a sustainable society, will be nurtured to create new values that will lead to the growth of individuals and society with qualitative enrichment driven by the diversity of the individual. One of the changes in a mature society is the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence. It is claimed that artificial intelligence is starting to think and comprehend knowledge conceptually on its own, and it is predicted that this would significantly alter the nature of employment and the significance of knowledge acquired in schools. At the same time, this leads to a reaffirmation of the fact that no matter how much artificial intelligence evolves and becomes capable of thinking, it is the greatest strength of human beings to provide the purpose of thinking and to judge the goodness, correctness, and beauty of the purpose. School education is required to enable children to actively face various changes, solve problems in collaboration with others, discern various types of information, realize a conceptual understanding of knowledge, reconstruct information and connect it to new values, and reconstruct purposes in complex changing situations. It is also required to be able to reconstruct objectives in the face of complex changes in circumstances. Thus, art education is considered crucial, and it is important to understand what aspects of art are perceived as beautiful or ugly in the process of learning art. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to understand the differences in the sense of beauty and ugliness in paintings between students majoring in art and those who are the same age as the students and have no prior art study experience.We conducted an experiment using paintings from each period of Western art history as the paintings for judging the beauty and ugliness of a painting. By evaluating the beauty and ugliness of art paintings from each period, we selected a variety of paintings from simple to complicated for the purpose of judging the beauty and ugliness of the paintings. We also aimed to quantify the beauty/ugliness points that do not change depending on the age or the complexity of the painting.Fractal analysis was used for the analysis. A fractal is a similarity between the whole and a part of a figure. Fractals are often found in nature and in living organisms, and fractal structures can also be found in works of art. In particular, fractals are seen in the paintings of Abstract Expressionist painters, whether by accident or necessity. It has been reported that fractal dimension and art are closely related. In this study, we consider fractals in color tones as well as in structure.As a result, art majors were able to clearly point out the beauty and ugliness of complicated paintings. Students who did not study fine arts saw the whole complicated painting as beautiful, and were unable to point out clear beauty or ugliness points. For simple paintings with only one person, the art majors were able to point out the beauty and ugliness of the painting in more detail. Students who did not study art pointed out the beauty and ugliness of a simple painting in a large and general way. Fractal analysis showed that the beauty/ugliness points pointed out by the experts maintained a medium fractal dimension. The fractal dimension of the beauty/ugliness points pointed out by students who had not studied art maintained a high fractal dimension, indicating that they perceived beauty/ugliness in more complex areas.The above results indicate that as students learn more about art, they are able to understand the beauty and ugliness of a picture more intricately and perceive beauty and ugliness in areas with a medium fractal dimension.