Методическая разработка урока «Modern Art» по английскому языку для учащихся старшего школьного возраста

Modern Art

How modern art became trapped by its urge to shock?

Pre-reading activities.
Look at the picture. 
This is Tracy Emin’s artwork called “My bed”. 

This is Marcel Duchamp’s artwork “Fountain”

What are your feelings? Are you enraptured or disgusted? 
Do you agree that modernism is an aesthetics of shock? 

It’s used visual materials and questions to involve students into the topic, facilitate the comprehension and raise motivation.

While reading activities
Read the article “How modern art became trapped by its urge to shock?”
Complete the table “Originality and fake”

Students monitor the information, analyze the information. It’s noticed cultivation of the ability to perform the information analysis, development of analytical and critical thinking.

Lexis 
Task 1. Find these expressions in the text and match them with their meaning. 
1)to deceive c
2)to pretend a
3)to expose f
4)to take smb in b
5)to snatch d
6)to brazen out e
7)to sweep away h
8)to cushion i 
9)to endow g

a) to behave as if something is true when you know that it is not
b) to trick someone into believing something that is not true
c) to keep the truth hidden from someone for your own advantage
d) to seize (something) or act quickly in a rude way.
e) to act confidently and not admit that a problem exists
f) reveal the true, objectionable nature of someone or something.
g) to give a large amount of money to pay for something 
h) to destroy or to completely remove something
I) to make the effect or force of something softer

Students recognize the meaning using indirect semantization, develop contextual guess. This is the word-level exercise.

Task 2. Fill in the verbs presented above.
1. She _______ them ____ , herself included.
2. Tsunami that could ______ ______ all the positive achievements that have been made in recent years.

3. I decided to __________ it ________ and hoped they wouldn't notice the scratch on the car.

4. He _________ the photos out of my hand before I had a chance to look at them.

5. Various attempts were made to _________ the impact of unemployment.

6. The company ________ customers by selling old computers as new ones.

7. This hospital _____________ by the citizens of Strasbourg in the 16th century.

Students do the training exercise to drill, they recognize the use of words and develop receptive skills. This is the sentence-level exercise.

Task 3. Some situations enable us to pretend and deceive. In some cases it is not as bad as it may seem. Do you agree?

Students develop productive skills, opinion-gap technique is used.

Grammar

The Gerund

The gerund is a non-finite form of the verb with some noun features. It is formed by adding

the suffix-"ing" to the stem of the verb.

The gerund has the following verbal characteristics.

1) It has voice and tense distinctions

The indefinite gerund is generally used after the verbs of recollection, gratitude,

blame, reproach, punishment: to remember, to forget, to thank, to recollect, to excuse,

to forgive, to reproach, to blame, to punish.

The gerund may be used in the functions of the subject, a direct or prepositional object,

a predicative. The gerund may be modified by a possessive pronoun or by a noun in the possessive case. The ing-form when preceded by a noun in the objective case has a pronoun in the objective case has a function intermediate between that of the present participle and the gerund. Such an ing-form may be called a half-gerund.

Task 1. There are sentences below the table. Read them and find out functions of the gerund from the text.

1) as a subject: Faking, however, is an achievement. Tartuffe's faking was a matter of sanctimonious religion.

2) in sentences with the introductory "there" or "it": It is worth asking ourselves why the cult of fake originality has such a powerful appeal to our cultural institutions, so that every museum and art gallery, and every publicly funded concert hall, has taken it seriously.

3) as a predicative: There are two kinds of untruth - lying and faking.

4) as an attribute: The interesting fact, however, is that the habit of faking it has arisen from the fear of fakes. With the decline of religion during the 19th century there came about a new kind of faking. But modernism gave way to routines of fakery: the arduous task of maintaining the tradition proved less attractive than the cheap ways of rejecting it. The fake is a person who has rebuilt himself, with a view to occupying another social position than the one that would be natural to him.

5) as a direct object: Originality requires learning, hard work, the mastery of a medium and - most of all - the refined sensibility and openness to experience that have suffering and solitude as their normal cost. Like Shakespeare Molière perceived that faking goes to the very heart of the person engaged in it.

6) as an adverbial modifier of manner: So powerful is the impetus towards the collective fake that it is now rare to be a finalist for the Turner Prize without producing some object or event that shows itself to be art only because nobody would conceivably think it to be so until the critics have said that it is.

7) half-gerund: The person who is faking says what he or she believes, though only for the time being and for the purpose in hand, writes Roger Scruton.

Deductive approach of teaching Grammar is used, students get to know the rules, then do drilling exercises. Students recognize the verb form and its function.

Task 2. Open the brackets using the Gerund

1)The film was really worth … (see).

2)Brent is looking forward to … (take) a short break next month.

3)She is fond of … (have) picnics.

4) I can’t remember … (see) him before.

5)Everybody enjoys … (work) with him.

6)The boy hates … (scold).

Students do training exercises.

Task 3. Which type of art forms do you good at? Which type do you prefer? Which ones do you dislike? Use the expressions below.

I enjoy...

I fond of...

I’m good at...

I can’t stand ...

It’s worth ...

I dislike ....

Students involve the constructions in speech, communicative exercise to develop productive skills

Post-reading activities:

Continue the dialogue

A: I was at the art gallery. Guess what happened?

B: I guess it’s worth asking you. What happened?

A: The boy wanted to deceive people.

B: Taking people in requires faking, I suppose.

A: Exactly! Well! Look!..

Students cultivate creativity and imagination, using lexical and grammar patterns.

Project.

Acquisition of new knowledge and development of cognitive skills are used. Students evaluate the information, develop analytical and critical thinking.

Article (статья)

BBC Magazine, 07 December 2018

Anyone can lie. It suffices to say something with the intention to deceive. Faking, however, is an achievement. To fake things you have to take people in, yourself included. The liar can pretend to be shocked when his lies are exposed: but his pretence is part of the lie. The fake really is shocked when he is exposed, since he had created around himself a community of trust, of which he himself was a member.

The fake is a person who has rebuilt himself, with a view to occupying another social position than the one that would be natural to him. Such is Molière's Tartuffe, the religious imposter who takes control of a household through a display of scheming piety. Like Shakespeare Molière perceived that faking goes to the very heart of the person engaged in it. Tartuffe is not simply a hypocrite, who pretends to ideals that he does not believe in. He is a fabricated person, who believes in his own ideals since he is just as illusory as they are.

Tartuffe's faking was a matter of sanctimonious religion. With the decline of religion during the 19th century there came about a new kind of faking. The romantic poets and painters turned their backs on religion and sought salvation through art. They believed in the genius of the artist, endowed with a special capacity to transcend the human condition in creative ways, breaking all the rules in order to achieve a new order of experience. Art became an avenue to the transcendental, the gateway to a higher kind of knowledge.

Originality therefore became the test that distinguishes true from fake art. It is hard to say in general terms what originality consists in, but we have examples enough: Titian, Beethoven, Goethe, Baudelaire. But those examples teach us that originality is hard: it cannot be snatched from the air, even if there are those natural prodigies like Rimbaud and Mozart who seem to do just that. Originality requires learning, hard work, the mastery of a medium and - most of all - the refined sensibility and openness to experience that have suffering and solitude as their normal cost.

To gain the status of an original artist is therefore not easy. But in a society where art is revered as the highest cultural achievement, the rewards are enormous. Hence there is a motive to fake it. Artists and critics get together in order to take themselves in, the artists posing as the originators of astonishing breakthroughs, the critics posing as the penetrating judges of the true avant-garde.

In this way Duchamp's famous urinal became a kind of paradigm for modern artists. This is how it is done, the critics said. Take an idea, put it on display, call it art and brazen it out. The trick was repeated with Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes, and then later with the pickled sharks and cows of Damien Hirst. In each case the critics have gathered like clucking hens around the new and inscrutable egg, and the fake is projected to the public with all the apparatus

required for its acceptance as the real thing. So powerful is the impetus towards the collective fake that it is now rare to be a finalist for the Turner Prize without producing some object or event that shows itself to be art only because nobody would conceivably think it to be so until the critics have said that it is.

It is worth asking ourselves why the cult of fake originality has such a powerful appeal to our cultural institutions, so that every museum and art gallery, and every publicly funded concert hall, has taken it seriously. The early modernists - Stravinsky and Schoenberg in music, Eliot and Pound in poetry, Matisse in painting and Loos in architecture - were united in the belief that popular taste had become

corrupted, that sentimentality, banality and kitsch had invaded the various spheres of art and eclipsed their messages. Tonal harmonies had been corrupted by popular music, figurative painting had been trumped by photography; rhyme and meter had become the stuff of Christmas cards, and the stories had been too often told. Everything out there, in the world of naive and unthinking people, was kitsch.

Modernism was the attempt to rescue the sincere, the truthful, the arduously achieved, from the plague of fake emotion. No one can doubt that the early modernists succeeded in this enterprise, endowing us with works of art that keep the human spirit alive in the new circumstances of modernity, and which establish continuity with the great traditions of our culture. But modernism gave way to routines of fakery: the arduous task of maintaining the tradition proved less attractive than the cheap ways of rejecting it. Instead of Picasso's lifelong study, to present the modern woman's face in a modern idiom, you could just do what Duchamp did, and paint a moustache on the Mona Lisa.

The interesting fact, however, is that the habit of faking it has arisen from the fear of fakes. Modernist art was a reaction against fake emotion, and the comforting clichés of popular culture. The intention was to sweep away the pseudo-art that cushions us with sentimental lies and to put reality, the reality of modern life, with which real art alone can come to terms, in the place of it. Hence for a long time now it has been assumed

that there can be no authentic creation in the sphere of high art which is not in some way a 'challenge' to the complacencies of our public culture. Art must give offence, stepping out of the future fully armed against the bourgeois taste for the conforming and the comfortable, which are simply other names for kitsch and cliché. But the result of this is that offence becomes a cliché. If the public has become so immune to shock that only a dead shark in formaldehyde will awaken a brief spasm of outrage, then the artist must produce a dead shark in formaldehyde - this, at least, is an authentic gesture.