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Arts
The arts are a vast subdivision of culture, composed of many creative endeavors
and disciplines. It is a broader term than "art", which as a description of a field
usually means only the visual arts. The arts encompass visual arts, literary arts
and the performing arts – music, theatre, dance and film, among others. This list
is by no means comprehensive, but only meant to introduce the concept of the arts.
Definition
A good definition of the arts is given by the Free Dictionary 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 in the field of
the arts or simply enjoyed by those who appreciate the arts. The same source states:
Art is a global activity which encompasses a host of disciplines,
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Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts
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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.
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 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
the [visual arts], design and the "Performing 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".
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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). Some examples of creative art through the ages can
be summarized here, as excerpted from the history of art.
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.
An artist's palette 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 and of unseen
psychology by Freud, 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.By Arun
The various arts
In the Middle Ages, Artes Liberales (liberal arts) taught in medieval universities
as part of the Trivium: (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) and the Quadrivium (arithmetic,
geometry, music, and astronomy), and the Artes Mechanicae (mechanical arts) such
as metalworking, farming, cooking, business and the making of clothes or cloth.
The modern distinctions between "artistic" and non-artistic skills did not develop
until the Renaissance.
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The Mona Lisa is one of the most recognizable
artistic paintings in the Western world.
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In modern academia, the arts are usually grouped with or 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 non-traditional additions of Photography and Comics
Visual arts
Drawing
Main article: 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.
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 the digestive system
of the human body.
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 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
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 a generalization 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
Main article: Video game 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 and Myst 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 of 2011, the National Endowment of the Arts included video games in its redefinition
of what is considered a work of art.
Literary arts
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 writings, 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
as folktale.
Performing arts
Main article: 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,
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, 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. Dance was often referred
to as a plastic art during the Modern dance era.
Music
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
recreation 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.
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Theatre
Main article: Theatre
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 and mummers' plays.
Dance
Main article: 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. People danced to relieve stress.
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A Ballroom dance exhibition
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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.
Arts criticism
• Architecture criticism
• Visual art criticism
• Dance criticism
• Film criticism
• Literary criticism
• Music journalism
• Television criticism
• Theatre criticism
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Humanities
The humanities are academic disciplines that study the human condition, using methods
that are primarily analytical, critical, or speculative, as distinguished from the
mainly empirical approaches of the natural sciences.
The humanities include ancient and modern languages, literature, history, philosophy,
religion, and visual and performing arts such as music and theatre. The humanities
that are also regarded as social sciences include technology, history, anthropology,
area studies, communication studies, cultural studies, law and linguistics. Scholars
working in the humanities are sometimes described as "humanists". However, that
term also describes the philosophical position of humanism, which some "antihumanist"
scholars in the humanities reject.
Humanities fields
Classics
The classics, in the Western academic tradition, refer to cultures of classical
antiquity, namely the Ancient Greek and Roman cultures. The study of the classics
is considered one of the cornerstones of the humanities; however, its popularity
declined during the 20th century. Nevertheless, the influence of classical ideas
in many humanities disciplines, such as philosophy and literature, remains strong;
for example, the Gilgamesh Epic from Mesopotamia, the Egyptian Book of the Dead,
the Vedas and Upanishads in India and various writings attributed to Confucius,
Lao-tse and Chuang-tzu in China.
History
History is systematically collected information about the past. When used as the
name of a field of study, history refers to the study and interpretation of the
record of humans, societies, institutions, and any topic that has changed over time.
Knowledge of history is often said to encompass both knowledge of past events and
historical thinking skills.
Traditionally, the study of history has been considered a part of the humanities.
In modern academia, history is occasionally classified as a social science.
Languages
The study of individual modern and classical languages forms the backbone of modern
study of the humanities.
While the scientific study of language is known as linguistics and is a social science,
the study of languages is still central to the humanities. A good deal of twentieth-century
and twenty-first-century philosophy has been devoted to the analysis of language
and to the question of whether, as Wittgenstein claimed, many of our philosophical
confusions derive from the vocabulary we use; literary theory has explored the rhetorical,
associative, and ordering features of language; and historians have studied the
development of languages across time. Literature, covering a variety of uses of
language including prose forms (such as the novel), poetry and drama, also lies
at the heart of the modern humanities curriculum. College-level programs in a foreign
language usually include study of important works of the literature in that language,
as well as the language itself. What would we do if we couldnt talk?
Law
In common parlance, law means a rule which (unlike a rule of ethics) is capable
of enforcement through institutions. The study of law crosses the boundaries between
the social sciences and humanities, depending on one's view of research into its
objectives and effects. Law is not always enforceable, especially in the international
relations context. It has been defined as a "system of rules",as an "interpretive
concept" to achieve justice, as an "authority" to mediate people's interests, and
even as "the command of a sovereign, backed by the threat of a sanction". However
one likes to think of law, it is a completely central social institution. Legal
policy incorporates the practical manifestation of thinking from almost every social
science and discipline of the humanities. Laws are politics, because politicians
create them. Law is philosophy, because moral and ethical persuasions shape their
ideas. Law tells many of history's stories, because statutes, case law and codifications
build up over time. And law is economics, because any rule about contract, tort,
property law, labour law, company law and many more can have long lasting effects.
The noun law derives from the late Old English lagu, meaning something laid down
or fixed and the adjective legal comes from the Latin word lex.
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Literature
"Literature" is a highly ambiguous term: at its broadest, it can mean any sequence
of words that has been preserved for transmission in some form or other (including
oral transmission); more narrowly, it is often used to designate imaginative works
such as stories, poems, and plays; more narrowly still, it is used as an honorific
and applied only to those works which are considered to have particular merit.
Performing arts
The performing arts differ from the plastic arts insofar as the former uses the
artist's own body, face, and 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 can take a number of different paths, including
music performance, music education (training music teachers), musicology, music
theory and composition. Undergraduate music majors generally take courses in all
of these areas, while graduate students focus on a particular path. In the liberal
arts tradition, music is also used to broaden skills of non-musicians by teaching
skills such as concentration and listening.
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Shakespeare wrote some of the greatest
acclaimed works in English literature.
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Theatre
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), and motion
in inanimate objects (the leaves danced in the wind). 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.
Philosophy
The works of Søren Kierkegaard overlap into many fields of the humanities, such
as philosophy, literature, theology, psychology, music, and classical studies. Philosophy
— etymologically, the "love of wisdom" — is generally the study of problems concerning
matters such as existence, knowledge, justification, truth, justice, right and wrong,
beauty, validity, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways
of addressing these issues by its critical, generally systematic approach and its
reliance on reasoned argument, rather than experiments (Experimental philosophy
being an exception).
Philosophy used to be a very comprehensive term, including what have subsequently
become separate disciplines, such as physics. (As Immanuel Kant noted, "Ancient
Greek philosophy was divided into three sciences: physics, ethics, and logic.")[10]
Today, the main fields of philosophy are logic, ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology.
Still, there continues to be plenty of overlap with other disciplines; the field
of semantics, for example, brings philosophy into contact with linguistics.
Since the early twentieth century, the philosophy done in universities (especially
in the English-speaking parts of the world) has become much more analytic. Analytic
philosophy is marked by a clear, rigorous method of inquiry that emphasizes the
use of logic and more formal methods of reasoning.[11] This method of inquiry is
largely indebted to the work of philosophers such as Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell,
G.E. Moore, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
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Religion
New philosophies and religions arose in both east and west, particularly around
the 6th century BC. Over time, a great variety of religions developed around the
world, with Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism in India, Zoroastrianism in Persia being
some of the earliest major faiths. In the east, three schools of thought were to
dominate Chinese thinking until the modern day. These were Taoism, Legalism, and
Confucianism. The Confucian tradition, which would attain predominance, looked not
to the force of law, but to the power and example of tradition for political morality.
In the west, the Greek philosophical tradition, represented by the works of Plato
and Aristotle, was diffused throughout Europe and the Middle East by the conquests
of Alexander of Macedon in the 4th century BC.
Abrahamic religions are those religions deriving from a common ancient Semitic tradition
and traced by their adherents to Abraham (circa 1900 BCE), a patriarch whose life
is narrated in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, where he is described as a prophet
(Genesis 20:7), and in the Quran, where he also appears as a prophet. This forms
a large group of related largely monotheistic religions, generally held to include
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and comprises over half of the world's religious
adherents.
Visual arts
History of visual arts
The great traditions in art have a foundation in the art of one of the ancient civilizations,
such as Ancient Japan, Greece and Rome, China, India, Mesopotamia and Mesoamerica.
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 (e.g., Zeus' thunderbolt).
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The compass in this 13th century manuscript
is a symbol of God's act of creation.
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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
and of unseen psychology by Freud, but also by unprecedented technological development.
Increasing global interaction during this time saw an equivalent influence of other
cultures into Western art.
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An artist's palette
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Media types
Drawing
Drawing is a means of making an pictureimage, 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.
Painting
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 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, Isaac Newton, have written their own colour
theories. Moreover the use of language is only a generalization 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# 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 or Anselm Kiefer. Modern and
contemporary art has moved away from the historic value of craft in favour of concept;
this has led some[who?] 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.
History of the humanities
In the West, the study of the humanities can be traced to ancient Greece, as the
basis of a broad education for citizens. During Roman times, the concept of the
seven liberal arts evolved, involving grammar, rhetoric and logic (the trivium),
along with arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music (the quadrivium). These subjects
formed the bulk of medieval education, with the emphasis being on the humanities
as skills or "ways of doing."
A major shift occurred with the Renaissance humanism of the fifteenth century, when
the humanities began to be regarded as subjects to be studied rather than practiced,
with a corresponding shift away from the traditional fields into areas such as literature
and history. In the 20th century, this view was in turn challenged by the postmodernist
movement, which sought to redefine the humanities in more egalitarian terms suitable
for a democratic society.
Humanities today
In the United States
Main article: Humanities in the United States
The Humanities Indicators, unveiled in 2009 by the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences, are the first comprehensive compilation of data about the humanities in
the United States, providing scholars, policymakers and the public with detailed
information on humanities education from primary to higher education, the humanities
workforce, humanities funding and research, and public humanities activities. Modeled
after the National Science Board’s Science and Engineering Indicators, the Humanities
Indicators are a source of reliable benchmarks to guide analysis of the state of
the humanities in the United States.
Many[weasel words] American colleges and universities believe in the notion of a
broad "liberal arts education",[original research?] which requires all college students
to study the humanities in addition to their specific area of study.[citation needed]
The University of Chicago and Columbia University were among the first[weasel words]
schools to require an extensive core curriculum in philosophy, literature, and the
arts for all students.[citation needed] Other colleges with nationally recognized,
required two year programs in the liberal arts are St. John's College, Saint Anselm
College and Providence College. Prominent proponents of liberal arts in the United
States have included Mortimer J. Adler and E. D. Hirsch, Jr..
The 1980 United States Rockefeller Commission on the Humanities described the humanities
in its report, The Humanities in American Life:
Through the humanities we reflect on the fundamental question: What does it mean
to be human? The humanities offer clues but never a complete answer. They reveal
how people have tried to make moral, spiritual, and intellectual sense of a world
in which irrationality, despair, loneliness, and death are as conspicuous as birth,
friendship, hope, and reason.
"Increasing numbers of critics view education in the liberal arts as irrelevant"
or as "learning more and more about less and less" which no longer prepares the
students for the American job market in the face of increased competition due to
more graduates . After World War II, many millions of veterans took advantage of
the GI Bill. Further expansion of federal education grants and loans have expanded
the number of adults in the United States that have attended a college. In 2003,
roughly 53% of the population had some college education with 27.2% having graduated
with a Bachelor's degree or higher, including 8% who graduated with a graduate degree.
The counter view is that "A familiarity with the body of knowledge and methods of
inquiry and discovery of the arts and sciences and a capacity to integrate knowledge
across experience and discipline may have far more lasting value in such a changing
world than specialized techniques and training, which can quickly become outmoded."
In the digital age
Researchers in the humanities have developed numerous large- and small-scale digital
corpora, such as digitized collections of historical texts, along with the digital
tools and methods to analyze them. Their aim is both to uncover new knowledge about
corpora and to visualize research data in new and revealing ways. The field in which
much of this activity occurs is called the Digital Humanities.
Legitimation of the humanities
Compared to the growing numbers of undergraduates enrolled in private and public
post-secondary institutions, the percentage of enrollments and majors in the humanities
is shrinking, although in absolute terms, overall enrollment in the humanities has
not significantly changed (and by some measurements has actually increased slightly).
The modern "crisis" facing humanities scholars in the university is multifaceted:
universities in the United States in particular have adopted corporate guidelines
requiring profit both from undergraduate education and from academic scholarship
and research, resulting in an increased demand for academic disciplines to justify
their existence based on the applicability of their disciplines to the world outside
of the university. Increasing corporate emphasis on "life-long learning" has also
affected the university’s role as educator and researcher. Responses to those changing
institutional norms, and to changing emphasis on what constitutes "useful skills"
in an increasingly technological world, have varied greatly both inside and outside
of the university system.
Citizenship, self-reflection, and the humanities
Since the late 19th century, a central justification for the humanities has been
that it aids and encourages self-reflection, a self-reflection which in turn helps
develop personal consciousness and/or an active sense of civic duty.
Wilhelm Dilthey and Hans-Georg Gadamer centered the humanities’ attempt to distinguish
itself from the natural sciences in humankind’s urge to understand its own experiences.
This understanding, they claimed, ties like-minded people from similar cultural
backgrounds together and provides a sense of cultural continuity with the philosophical
past.
Scholars in the late 20th and early 21st centuries extended that “narrative imagination”
to the ability to understand the records of lived experiences outside of one’s own
individual social and cultural context. Through that narrative imagination, it is
claimed, humanities scholars and students develop a conscience more suited to the
multicultural world in which we live. That conscience might take the form of a passive
one that allows more effective self-reflection[28] or extend into active empathy
which facilitates the dispensation of civic duties in which a responsible world
citizen must engage. There is disagreement, however, on the level of influence humanities
study can have on an individual and whether or not the understanding produced in
humanistic enterprise can guarantee an “identifiable positive effect on people.”
Truth, meaning, and the humanities
The divide between humanistic study and natural sciences informs arguments of meaning
in humanities as well. What distinguishes the humanities from the natural sciences
is not a certain subject matter, but rather the mode of approach to any question.
Humanities focuses on understanding meaning, purpose, and goals and furthers the
appreciation of singular historical and social phenomena—an interpretive method
of finding “truth”—rather than explaining the causality of events or uncovering
the truth of the natural world. Apart from its societal application, narrative imagination
is an important tool in the (re)production of understood meaning in history, culture
and literature.
Imagination, as part of the tool kit of artists or scholars, serves as vehicle to
create meaning which invokes a response from an audience. Since a humanities scholar
is always within the nexus of lived experiences, no "absolute" knowledge is theoretically
possible; knowledge is instead a ceaseless procedure of inventing and reinventing
the context in which a text is read. Poststructuralism has problematized an approach
to the humanistic study based on questions of meaning, intentionality, and authorship.[dubious
– discuss] In the wake of the death of the author proclaimed by Roland Barthes,
various theoretical currents such as deconstruction and discourse analysis seek
to expose the ideologies and rhetoric operative in producing both the purportedly
meaningful objects and the hermeneutic subjects of humanistic study. This exposure
has opened up the interpretive structures of the humanities to criticism humanities
scholarship is “unscientific” and therefore unfit for inclusion in modern university
curricula because of the very nature of its changing contextual meaning.
Pleasure, the pursuit of knowledge, and humanities scholarship
Some, like Stanley Fish, have claimed that the humanities can defend themselves
best by refusing to make any claims of utility. (Fish may well be thinking primarily
of literary study, rather than history and philosophy.) Any attempt to justify the
humanities in terms of outside benefits such as social usefulness (say increased
productivity) or in terms of ennobling effects on the individual (such as greater
wisdom or diminished prejudice) is ungrounded, according to Fish, and simply places
impossible demands on the relevant academic departments. Furthermore, critical thinking,
while arguably a result of humanistic training, can be acquired in other contexts.
And the humanities do not even provide any more the kind of social cachet (what
sociologists sometimes call "cultural capital") that was helpful to succeed in Western
society before the age of mass education following World War II
Instead, scholars like Fish suggest that the humanities offer a unique kind of pleasure,
a pleasure based on the common pursuit of knowledge (even if it is only disciplinary
knowledge). Such pleasure contrasts with the increasing privatization of leisure
and instant gratification characteristic of Western culture; it thus meets Jürgen
Habermas’ requirements for the disregard of social status and rational problematization
of previously unquestioned areas necessary for an endeavor which takes place in
the bourgeois public sphere. In this argument, then, only the academic pursuit of
pleasure can provide a link between the private and the public realm in modern Western
consumer society and strengthen that public sphere which, according to many theorists,
is the foundation for modern democracy.
Romanticization and rejection of the humanities
Implicit in many of these arguments supporting the humanities are the makings of
arguments against public support of the humanities. Joseph Carroll asserts that
we live in a changing world, a world in which "cultural capital" is being replaced
with "scientific literacy" and in which the romantic notion of a Renaissance humanities
scholar is obsolete. Such arguments appeal to judgments and anxieties about the
essential uselessness of the humanities, especially in an age when it is seemingly
vitally important for scholars of literature, history and the arts to engage in
"collaborative work with experimental scientists" or even simply to make "intelligent
use of the findings from empirical science." The notion that 'in today's day and
age,' with its focus on the ideals of efficiency and practical utility, scholars
of the humanities are becoming obsolete was perhaps summed up most powerfully in
a remark that has been attributed to the artificial intelligence specialist Marvin
Minsky: “With all the money that we are throwing away on humanities and art - give
me that money and I will build you to be a better student."
Minsky's faith in the superiority of technical knowledge and his reduction of the
humanities scholar of today to an obsolete relic of the past supported by the tax
dollars of romantics fondly recalling the days of the G.I. Bill echoes arguments
put forth by scholars and cultural commentators that call themselves "post-humanists"
or "transhumanists." The idea is that current trends in the scientific understanding
of human beings are calling the basic category of "the human" into question. Examples
of these trends are assertions by cognitive scientists that the mind is simply a
computing device, by geneticists that human beings are no more than ephemeral husks
used by self-propagating genes (or even memes, according to some postmodern linguists),
or by bioengineers who claim that one day it may be both possible and desirable
to create human-animal hybrids[citation needed]. Rather than engage with old-style
humanist scholarship, transhumanists in particular tend to be more concerned with
testing and altering the limits of our mental and physical capacities in fields
such as cognitive science and bioengineering in order to transcend the essentially
bodily limitations that have bounded humanity. Despite the criticism of humanities
scholarship as obsolete, however, many of the most influential post-humanist works
are profoundly engaged with film and literary criticism, history, and cultural studies
as can be seen in the writings of Donna Haraway and N. Katherine Hayles. And in
recent years there has been a spate of books and articles re-articulating the importance
of humanistic study. Examples include: Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why (2001),
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence (2004), Frank B. Farrell, Why Does
Literature Matter? (2004), John Carey, What Good Are the Arts? (2006), Lisa Zunshine,
Why We Read Fiction (2006), Alexander Nehamas, Only A Promise Of Happiness (2007),
Rita Felski, Uses of Literature (2008).
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