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| Richard Wagner's Bayreuth Festspielhaus Bavaria, ca. 1895 |
The arts are a vast subdivision of culture, composed of many endeavors (or art
forms) united by their employment of the human creative impulse. The term
implies a broader range of disciplines than "art",
which in modern usage usually refers only to the visual arts. The other major constituents of
the arts are the literary arts, more often called literature – including poetry, novels and short stories, among others – and the performing arts, among them music,
dance, magic, theater, opera
and film.
Literary arts and creative writing
are actually interchangeable terms. These divisions are by no means absolute as
there are art forms which combine a visual element with performance (e.g. film)
and the written word (e.g. comics). This list is by
no means comprehensive, but only meant to introduce the concept of the arts.
Whether or not a
form of creative endeavor can be considered one of "the arts" can be
contentious due to the cultural values attached in Western culture to the term
"art", which can imply that it is a field elevated above popular culture.
Definition
Collins English
Dictionary defines 'the arts' as "imaginative, creative, and nonscientific
branches of knowledge considered collectively, esp. as studied
academically". The singular term art is defined by the Irish
Art Encyclopedia as follows: "Art is created when an artist
creates a beautiful object, or produces a stimulating experience that is
considered by his audience to have artistic merit." So, one could conclude
that art is the process that leads to a product (the artwork or piece
of art), which is then examined and analyzed by experts or simply enjoyed
by those who appreciate it. The same source states:
Art is a global
activity which encompasses a host of disciplines, as evidenced by the range of
words and phrases which have been invented to describe its various forms.
Examples of such phraseology include: Fine Arts, Liberal Arts, Visual
Arts, Decorative Arts, Applied Arts, Design, Crafts,
Performing Arts, and so on.
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| Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York City, United States |
The term art
commonly refers to the "Visual Arts", as an abbreviation of creative
art or fine art. For example, the history of art is described as
"the history of the visual arts of painting, sculpture and architecture.
It is the history of one of the fine arts, others of which are the performing
arts and the literature. It is also one of the humanities. The term sometimes
encompasses theory of the visual arts, including aesthetics." In the
article for fine art, we read:
Confusion often
occurs when people mistakenly refer to the Fine Arts but mean the Performing
Arts (Music, Dance, Drama, etc.). However, there is some disagreement here: e.g.,
at York University
(Toronto, Canada) Fine Arts is a faculty that
includes Dance, Design, Digital Media, Film, Music, Theater and Visual Arts.
Furthermore, creative writing is frequently considered a fine art as well.
To illustrate the
previous statements, the College of Fine Arts at Stephen F. Austin State
University (Nacogdoches, TX) consists of the
Schools of "Art, Music and Theatre", while one of the Bachelor of Fine
Arts degrees at the University
of British Columbia is attached to the Creative Writing Program.
More work would be required to standardize the use of the terms "art"
and "fine art", but for the purpose of this article the definition of
"the arts" is not problematic, because it includes all the arts. One
artist has even suggested that "[it] would really simplify matters if we
could all just stick with visual, auditory, performance or literary – when we
speak of The Arts – and eliminate “Fine” altogether".
History
For all intents
and purposes, the history of the arts begins with the history of art, as dealt with
elsewhere. Furthermore, the history of the Performing Arts and Literature have
been described in other articles --(Please see: Outline of
performing arts; History of
literature; prehistoric music).
Some examples of creative art through the ages can be summarized here, as
excerpted from the history of art.
The arts might
have origins in early human evolutionary prehistory. According to a recent
suggestion, several forms of audio and visual arts (rhythmic singing and drumming
on external objects, dancing, body and face
painting) were developed very early in hominid evolution by the forces of natural selection in order to reach an altered
state of consciousness. In this state, which Jordania calls battle trance, hominids and early human
were losing their individuality, and were acquiring a new collective identity,
where they were not feeling fear or pain, and were religiously dedicated to the
group interests, in total disregards of their individual safety and life. This
state was needed to defend early hominids from predators, and also to help to
obtain food by aggressive scavenging.
Ritualistic actions involving heavy rhythmic music, rhythmic drill, coupled sometimes with dance
and body painting had been universally used in
traditional cultures before the hunting or military sessions in order to put
them in a specific altered state of consciousness and raise the morale of participants. More generally, evolutionary
psychology and applications in fields such as evolutionary
musicology, Darwinian
literary studies, and evolutionary
aesthetics have given several different explanations for the
evolutionary origins of the arts.
Ancient Greek art
saw the veneration of the animal 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.
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.
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| An artist pallette |
Religious Islamic
art forbids iconography, and expresses religious ideas through geometry
instead. The physical and
rational certainties depicted by the Enlightenment
in the late 17th and 18th centuries were shattered not only by new discoveries
of relativity by Einstein, the
development of the quantum
mechanics —in the words of Richard Feynman, quantum mechanics deals
with "nature as She is, absurd"— and of
unseen psychology by Freud[2], but also by unprecedented
technological development. Paradoxically the expressions of new technologies
were greatly influenced by the ancient tribal arts of Africa and Oceania, through the works of Paul Gauguin and the
Post-Impressionists, Pablo Picasso and the Cubists, as well as the Futurists
and others.
Disciplines
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| Lawrence Alma-Tadema's Catullus - at - Lesbia's 1865 |
In the Middle Ages, the Artes Liberales (liberal arts) were
taught in universities
as part of the Trivium
—an introductory curriculum involving grammar, rhetoric, and logic
- and of the Quadrivium —a
curriculum involving the “mathematical arts” of arithmetic, geometry, music,
and astronomy. The Artes Mechanicae (mechanical arts, such
as vestiaria -tailoring, weaving-, agricultura -agriculture-, architectura -architecture, masonry-, militia and venatoria
-warfare
and hunting, "martial arts"-, mercatura -trade,
commerce-, coquinaria -cooking-, and metallaria -blacksmithing, metallurgy —division made, somewhat
arbitrarily, by Johannes Scotus
Eriugena, already in the 9th century) were practiced and developed
in guild environments. The modern distinction between "artistic" and
"non-artistic" skills did not develop until the Renaissance.
In modern academia, the arts are usually grouped with
or as a subset of the Humanities. Some
subjects in the Humanities are history, linguistics, literature, and philosophy. Newspapers typically include a section on
the arts.
Traditionally,
the arts are classified as seven although the list has been expanded to nine.
These being Architecture, Sculpture, Painting, Music,
Poetry, Dance,
Theater/Cinema,
with the modern additions of Photography and Comics.
Visual arts
Drawing
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 draftswoman
or draughtsman.
Architecture
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| The Parthenon on top of the Acropolis, Athens, Greece |
Architecture is
the art and science of designing buildings and structures. The word architecture
comes from the Greek arkhitekton, "master builder, director of
works," from αρχι- (arkhi) "chief" + τεκτων
(tekton) "builder, carpenter".
A wider
definition would include 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.
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| Table of architecture, Cyclopaedia, 1728 |
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 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.
Painting
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| The Mona Lisa, is one of the most recognizable artistic paintings in the West world |
Painting taken
literally is the practice of applying pigment suspended in a vehicle (or medium) and a binding agent (a glue) to a surface (support) such as paper,
canvas, wood panel 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 an abstraction 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 formalized register of different colours in the way
that there is agreement on different notes in music, such as C
or C#, 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.
Conceptual art
Conceptual art is
art in which the concept(s) or idea(s) involved in the work take precedence
over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. The inception of the term in
the 1960s referred to a strict and focused practice of idea-based art that
often defied traditional visual criteria associated with the visual arts in its
presentation as text. However, through its association with the Young British
Artists and the Turner Prize
during the 1990s, its popular usage, particularly in the UK, developed as a synonym for all contemporary art that does not practise the
traditional skills of painting and sculpture.
Video games
A debate exists
in the fine arts and video game cultures
over whether video games can be counted as an art form.. Some cite games such as Shadow of the
Colossus, Myst and Journey
as prime examples of video games as an art form. Others, such as game designer Hideo Kojima, profess that video games are
a type of service, not an art form. In May 2011, the National
Endowment of the Arts included video games in its redefinition of
what is considered a work of art.
Literary arts
Shakespeare wrote some of the best known
works in English literature.
Literature is
literally "acquaintance with letters" as in the first sense given in
the Oxford English
Dictionary. The noun "literature" comes from the Latin
word littera meaning "an individual written character (letter)".
The term has generally come to identify a collection of writings, which in Western culture are
mainly prose (both fiction and non-fiction), drama
and poetry. In much, if not all of the world,
the artistic linguistic expression can be oral as well, and include such genres
as epic, legend, myth, ballad, other forms of oral poetry, and as folktale.
Performing arts
Between the Plastic Arts and the Performing Arts there
are some methodological differences. To create its artistic purpose, that generally is an
experience, the performing artist mainly uses its own body, face, or presence.
The artistic purpose of a plastic artist normally is an object, and she or he
uses materials (such as clay, metal or paint) to create it.
Performing arts
include acrobatics, busking, comedy, dance, magic, music,
opera, operetta, film,
juggling, martial arts, marching arts such as brass bands and theatre.
Artists who
participate in these arts in front of an audience are called performers,
including actors, magicians, comedians, dancers, musicians, and singers. Performing arts are also supported by the
services of other artists or essential workers, 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. Dance was often referred
to as a plastic art during the Modern dance era.
Music
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| A musical score by Mozart |
Music is an art
form whose medium is sound.
Common elements of music are pitch (which governs melody and harmony), rhythm (and its associated concepts tempo, meter, and
articulation), dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture. The creation, performance,
significance, and even the definition of music vary according to culture and
social context. Music ranges from strictly organized compositions (and their
reproduction in performance), through improvisational music to aleatoric forms.
Music can be divided into genres and subgenres, although the dividing lines and
relationships between music genres are often subtle, sometimes open to
individual interpretation, and occasionally controversial. Within "the
arts", music may be classified as a performing art, a fine art, and auditory art.
Theatre
Theatre or
theater (from Greek theatron —θέατρον—, from theasthai,
"behold") 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
and mummers' plays.
Dance
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| A Ballroom dance exhibition |
Dance
(from Old French dancer [verb], dance
[noun], of unknown origin) 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. People danced to
relieve stress.
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.
Gastronomy
Gastronomy is the study of the relationship between culture and
food. It is often thought erroneously that the term gastronomy refers
exclusively to the art of cooking (see Culinary art), but this is only a small
part of this discipline; it cannot always be said that a cook is also a
gourmet. Gastronomy studies various cultural components with food as its
central axis. Thus it is related to the Fine Arts and Social Sciences, and even
to the Natural Sciences in terms of human nutritious activity and digestive
function.
Renee de Ramirez, MS
Master Degree Arts and Letters
Critic of Arts
