The Arts
The Arts is a broad subdivision of
culture, comprised of many expressive disciplines. In modern usage, it is a broader term than
"art", which usually means the
visual arts (comprised of both
fine art and
crafts).
A precise definition of
the arts can be contentious, but the following areas of activity are usually included:
*
Architecture*
Art &
Visual arts*
Crafts*
Dance*
Design*
Drawing*
Film*
Literature*
Music*
Opera*
Painting*
Photography*
Poetry*
Sculpture*
Theatre &
Performing artsHistorically, the arts also included the
liberal arts taught in medieval universities as part of the
Trivium and the
Quadrivium (
grammar,
rhetoric,
logic,
arithmetic,
geometry,
music, and
astronomy.)
In modern
academia, the Arts are usually grouped with or a subset of the
Humanities. Some subjects in the Humanities are
history,
linguistics,
literature,
philosophy,
women's studies.
Newspapers such as the
New York Times and
The Times of
London typically include a section on the Arts.
Visual art
History
|
"Quatrain on Heavenly Mountain" by Emperor Gaozong (source:www.metmuseum.org) |
The great traditions in
art have a foundation in the art of one of six ancient civilizations:
*
Ancient Egypt,
*
Greece,
*
Rome,
*
China,
*
India, or
*
Mesopotamia.
Ancient Greek art saw a veneration of the human physical form and the development of equivalent skills to show musculature, poise, beauty and anatomically correct proportions.
Ancient Roman art depicted gods as idealized humans, shown with characteristic distinguishing features (i.e.
Zeus' thunderbolt).
In
Byzantine and
Gothic art of the
Middle Ages, the dominance of the church insisted on the expression of biblical and not material truths.
The
Renaissance saw the return to valuation of the material world, and this shift is reflected in art forms, which show the corporeality of the human body, and the three-dimensional reality of landscape.
Eastern art has generally worked in a style akin to Western medieval art, namely a concentration on surface patterning and local colour (meaning the plain colour of an object, such as basic red for a red robe, rather than the modulations of that colour brought about by light, shade and reflection). A characteristic of this style is that the local colour is often defined by an outline (a contemporary equivalent is the cartoon). This is evident in, for example, the art of India, Tibet and Japan.
Religious
Islamic art forbids iconography, and expresses religious ideas through geometry instead.
The physical and rational certainties depicted by the 19th-century Enlightenment were shattered not only by new discoveries of relativity by
Einstein [
1] and of unseen psychology by
Freud, [
2] but also by unprecedented technological development.
Increasing
global interaction during this time saw an equivalent influence of other cultures into Western art.
Media types
Drawing is a means of making an
image, using any of a wide variety of tools and techniques. It generally involves making marks on a surface by applying pressure from a tool, or moving a tool across a surface. Common tools are
graphite pencils,
pen and ink,
inked
brushes, wax
color pencils,
crayons,
charcoals,
pastels, and
markers. Digital tools which simulate the effects of these are also used. The main techniques used in drawing are: line drawing,
hatching, crosshatching, random hatching, scribbling,
stippling, and blending. An artist who excels in drawing is referred to as a
draftsman or
draughtsman.
=Architecture
=
Architecture (from
Latin,
architectura and ultimately from
Greek,
αρχιτεκτων, "a master builder", from
αρχι- "chief, leader" and
τεκτων, "builder, carpenter") is the
art and
science of
designing buildings and
structures.
A wider definition would include within its scope the design of the total built environment, from the macrolevel of
town planning,
urban design, and
landscape architecture to the microlevel of creating
furniture. Architectural design usually must address both feasibility and
cost for the
builder, as well as function and
aesthetics for the
user.
In modern usage, architecture is the
art and
discipline of creating an actual, or inferring an implied or apparent plan of any complex object or
system. The term can be used to connote the
implied architecture of abstract things such as
music or
mathematics, the
apparent architecture of natural things, such as
geological formations or the
structure of biological cells, or explicitly
planned architectures of human-made things such as
software,
computers,
enterprises, and
databases, in addition to buildings. In every usage, an architecture may be seen as a
subjective mapping from a human perspective (that of the
user in the case of abstract or physical artifacts) to the
elements or
components of some kind of
structure or system, which preserves the relationships among the elements or components.
Planned architecture often
manipulates space,
volume,
texture,
light,
shadow, or abstract elements in order to achieve pleasing
aesthetics. This distinguishes it from
applied science or
engineering, which usually concentrate more on the functional and feasibility aspects of the design of constructions or structures.
In the field of building architecture, the skills demanded of an architect range from the more complex, such as for a
hospital or a
stadium, to the apparently simpler, such as planning
residential houses. Many architectural works may be seen also as cultural and political
symbols, and/or works of art. The role of the architect, though changing, has been central to the successful (and sometimes less than successful) design and implementation of pleasingly built environments in which people live. [[Image:Table of architecture, Cyclopaedia, 1728, volume 1.jpg|thumb|right|160px|Table of architecture,
{{Cyclopaedia}}, 1728
=Painting
=
{{Image:Mona_Lisa.jpg|thumb|250px|The {{Mona Lisa}} is one of the most recognizable artistic paintings in the {{Western world}}.]]
Painting taken literally is the practice of applying
pigment suspended in a carrier (or
medium) and a binding agent (a
glue) to a
surface (support) such as
paper,
canvas or a wall. However, when used in an artistic sense it means the use of this activity in combination with
drawing,
composition and other aesthetic considerations in order to manifest the expressive and conceptual intention of the practitioner. Painting is also used to express spiritual motifs and ideas; sites of this kind of painting range from artwork depicting mythological figures on pottery to
The Sistine Chapel to the human body itself.
Colour is the essence of painting as
sound is of
music. Colour is highly subjective, but has observable psychological effects, although these can differ from one culture to the next. Black is associated with mourning in the West, but elsewhere white may be. Some painters, theoreticians, writers and scientists, including
Goethe,
Kandinsky,
Newton, have written their own
colour theory. Moreover the use of language is only a generalisation for a colour equivalent. The word "
red", for example, can cover a wide range of variations on the pure red of the spectrum. There is not a formalised register of different colours in the way that there is agreement on different notes in music, such as
C or
C# in music, although the
Pantone system is widely used in the printing and design industry for this purpose.
Modern artists have extended the practice of painting considerably to include, for example,
collage. This began with
Cubism and is not painting in strict sense. Some modern painters incorporate different materials such as
sand,
cement,
straw or
wood for their
texture. Examples of this are the works of
Jean Dubuffet or
Anselm Kiefer.
Modern and contemporary art has moved away from the historic value of craft in favour of
concept; this has led some to say that painting, as a serious art form, is dead, although this has not deterred the majority of artists from continuing to practise it either as whole or part of their work.
Literature
|
Shakespeare wrote some of the greatest works in English literature. |
Literature is literally "acquaintance with letters" as in the first sense given in the
Oxford English Dictionary (from the
Latin littera meaning "an individual written character (
letter)"). The term has generally come to identify a collection of
texts, which in Western culture are mainly
prose, both
fiction and
non-fiction,
drama and
poetry. In much, if not all of the world, texts can be
oral as well, and include such
genres as
epic,
legend,
myth,
ballad, other forms of oral poetry, and the
folktale.
Performing arts
The
performing arts differ from the
plastic arts insofar as the former uses the artist's own body, face, presence as a medium, and the latter uses materials such as clay, metal or paint which can be molded or transformed to create some
art object.
Performing arts include
acrobatics,
busking,
comedy,
dance,
magic,
music,
opera,
film,
juggling,
marching arts, such as
brass bands, and
theatre.
Artists who participate in these arts in front of an audience are called performers, including
actors,
comedians,
dancers,
musicians, and
singers. Performing arts are also supported by workers in related fields, such as
songwriting and
stagecraft.
Performers often adapt their
appearance, such as with
costumes and
stage makeup, etc.
There is also a specialized form of
fine art in which the artists
perform their work live to an audience. This is called
Performance art. Most performance art also involves some form of plastic art, perhaps in the creation of
props. Dance was often referred to as a
plastic art during the
Modern dance era.
;Music
Music as an academic discipline mainly focuses on two career paths, music
performance (focused on the
orchestra and the
concert hall) and
music education (training music teachers). Students learn to play
instruments, but also study
music theory,
musicology,
history of music and
composition. In the liberal arts tradition, music is also used to broaden skills of non-musicians by teaching skills such as concentration and listening.
;Theater
Theatre or
theater (Greek "theatron",
θέατρον) is the branch of the
performing arts concerned with
acting out stories in front of an audience using combinations of speech, gesture, music, dance, sound and spectacle — indeed any one or more elements of the other performing arts. In addition to the standard narrative dialogue style, theatre takes such forms as
opera,
ballet,
mime,
kabuki,
classical Indian dance,
Chinese opera,
mummers' plays, and
pantomime.
Dance
Dance (from
Old French dancier, perhaps from
Frankish) generally refers to
human movement either used as a form of
expression or presented in a
social,
spiritual or
performance setting.
Dance is also used to describe methods of
non-verbal communication (see
body language) between humans or
animals (
bee dance, mating dance),
motion in inanimate objects (
the leaves danced in the wind), and certain
musical forms or
genres.
Choreography is the art of making dances, and the person who does this is called a choreographer.
Definitions of what constitutes dance are dependent on
social,
cultural,
aesthetic artistic and
moral constraints and range from functional movement (such as
Folk dance) to codified,
virtuoso techniques such as
ballet. In
sports,
gymnastics,
figure skating and
synchronized swimming are
dance disciplines while
Martial arts '
kata' are often compared to dances.
*
Academic disciplines of the Humanities and Arts*
Art*
Art history*
Arts by region*
Fine art*
Humanities*
Social sciences*
Dictionary of the history of ideas " Classification of the arts*
Open Directory " Arts*
National Endowment for the Arts " USA*
Arts Council " England*
Americans for the Arts*
ArtsJournal " Daily Arts News*
Arts " New York Times*
Arts " The Times*
Association of Hispanic Arts (AHA)*
History of Art: From Paleolithic Age to Contemporary Art
