ART APP 3

• Art has been used as a form of communication since prehistoric times, with evidence of cave paintings dating back over 40,000 years ago.
• Art can be defined as any activity that involves creating something new using one's imagination and creativity.
• Art


  Derived from the Latin word ars meaning ability or skill. It covers those areas of artistic creativity that seek to communicate beauty primarily through the sense. Art embraces the visual arts, literature, music and dance.
• Art


  • A highly diverse range of human activities engaged in creating visual, auditory, or performed artifacts — artworks — that express the author's imaginative or technical skill, and are intended to be appreciated for their beauty or emotional power
• Art may be characterized in terms of

  Mimesis (its representation of reality), expression, communication of emotion, or other qualities
• When colonizing forces of Europeans encountered African wood sculptural nkisi figures, primarily in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, they considered them to be evidence of idolatry and witchcraft or opposition to the colonizing forces
• Defining art from Medieval Period to Renaissance

  Art was defined within the realm of functional crafts, such as goldsmithing. The idea of autonomous art or art for art's sake developed later, over many eras.
• Defining art from Academy to Avant-Garde

  The most important idea is the concept of art itself, which came to be defined in the way that we still broadly understand it today during the course of the centuries explored here. This concept rests on a distinction between art, on the one hand, and craft, on the other.
• Bürger's Functions of Art: The Sacred


  The primary function was religious, especially in the seventeenth century when the Counter Reformation gave a great boost to Roman Catholic patronage of the arts.
• Bürger's Functions of Art: The Courtly


  Courtly art can be defined as consisting primarily of art actually produced at a royal or princely court, but also extending beyond it to include works of art that more generally promote the leisured lifestyle of an aristocratic elite.
• Bürger's Functions of Art: Bourgeois Art


  Bourgeois art owed its existence to the growing importance of trade and industry in Europe since the late medieval period, which gave rise to an increasingly large and influential wealthy middle class.
• Art increasingly functioned during this period as a cult in its own right, sometimes referred to as the artwork's aura, one in which the artist of genius replaces God the creator as the source of meaning and value
• From Patronage to the Public Sphere

  Art historians employ a social history of art approach, which takes account of the institutional and commercial conditions in which works of art were produced and consumed and of the broader cultural, social, economic and political conditions of the period.
• With the establishment of the art museum, the autonomy of art gained its defining institutional expression
• Social history of art

  An approach that represents a reaction against an older model of art history, which relied on the notion of the zeitgeist (or 'spirit of the age') to explain artistic developments
• Style-based art history


  An older model of art history that focused on style, each style being assumed to reflect the spirit of a different age
• Artistic practice within a period is invariably more diverse and complex than a style-based art history admits
• Works of art are primarily shaped by the structures and values of the art world, but also connected to society at large in myriad subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) ways
• Autonomy of art


  The idea that in a museum, a work of art could be viewed purely for its own sake, without reference to its traditional functions
• From around 1800 onwards, the public sphere opened up the possibility that artists might try to bridge the gap dividing art from society by independently producing works that engaged with current events
• Works that engaged with current events

  • The Raft of the Medusa by Théodore Géricault
  • Liberty Leading the People by Eugène Delacroix
• Avant-garde art


  A new tradition of politically committed modern art that came to the fore towards the end of the nineteenth century
• The French military term 'avant garde' (meaning a section of an army that goes ahead of the rest) came to be applied to works of art in a text published in 1825 under the name of the Utopian Socialist Henri de Saint-Simon
• Saint-Simon argued that artists could help to transform society by spreading 'new ideas among men'
• In the first part of the twentieth century, artists began to radically revise picture making and sculpture
• Changes in art in the first part of the twentieth century

  • Painters flattened out pictorial space, broke with conventional viewpoints and discarded local color
  • Sculptors began to leave the surface of their works in a rough, seemingly unfinished state; they increasingly created partial figures and abandoned plinths or, alternatively, inflated the scale of their bases
  • Architects abandoned revivalist styles and rich ornamentation
• In fifteen years some artists would take the problem of the recognition that making art involved attention to its own formal conditions that are not reducible to representing external things through Cubism to a fully abstract art
• The rapid turnover of small groups and personal idioms in modern art can seem bewildering
• Whether they sought new expressive resources, novel ways of conveying experience or innovative techniques for representing the modern world, modern artists turned their backs on the tried and tested forms of mimetic resemblance
• Bits of the everyday world began to be incorporated into artworks - as collage or montage in two-dimensional art forms; in construction and assemblage in three-dimensional ones
• The inclusion of found materials and the use of modern materials and technologies played a fundamental role in modern art
• Some artists abandoned easel painting or sculpture to make direct interventions in the world through the production of usable things, whether chairs or illustrated news magazines
• Not all artists elected to work with these new techniques and materials, and many carried on in the traditional ways or attempted to adapt them to new circumstances
• Art


  Something that is both functional and aesthetically pleasing
• Examples of art in everyday life

  • Coins, medals and pendants (relief sculptures)
  • Paper bills and postage stamps (engravings)
  • Statues of angels or saints (free-standing sculptures)
  • Multi-coloured designs inside the jeepney (decorative arts)
• Art as expression and communication

  Art is a way for people to express their emotional state, personal and social values, and psychological insights into reality
• Art as creation


  Art involves the skill or expertness in handling materials and organizing them into new, structurally pleasing, and significant units
• Art and experience


  Three major kinds of experiences involved in artistic activity: the artist's experience they want to communicate, the artist's experience of creating the art object or form, and the artist's gratifying experience of having accomplished something significant
• Experiences of the onlookers and listeners

  • Sensory response (delight or joy in the senses)
  • Emotional response (recognition of familiar situations)
  • Intellectual response (delight of the mind in unique arrangements of elements)
• Art is not nature, it is made by human beings