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| The Mona Lisa, by
Leonardo da Vinci, is one of the most
recognizable artistic paintings in the Western
world. |
Arts
The arts are a large part of culture, and the word means
much more than "art". The arts include visual arts,
literary arts (i.e. books and other writings) and
performing arts (i.e. music, dance, drama).
Sometimes, in universities, it is shorthand for a wider
group of subjects which are properly called the
humanities. These include philosophy, theology,
literature, languages, and history as well.
"The arts" are usually contrasted with "The sciences".
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 colour pencils, crayons, charcoals, pastels, and
markers. Digital tools which can 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 drafter,
draftswoman, or draughtsman. Drawing can be used to
create art used in cultural industries such as
illustrations, comics and animation.
Painting
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, and 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 painters have extended the practice considerably
to include, for example, collage. Collage is not
painting in the strict sense since it includes other
materials. Some modern painters incorporate different
materials such as sand, cement, straw, wood or strands
of hair for their artwork texture. Examples of this are
the works of Elito Circa, Jean Dubuffet or Anselm
Kiefer. Broadly speaking, Modern and contemporary
painting seems to move away from the historic value of
craft in favour of concept; which becomes more apparent
from early-twentieth century onwards. This transition
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. Indigenouism is
also considered as Modern and contemporary Art in early
20th Century. |
|
Ceramics
Ceramic art is art made from ceramic materials
(including clay), which may take forms such as pottery,
tile, figurines, sculpture, and tableware. While some
ceramic products are considered fine art, some are
considered to be decorative, industrial, or applied art
objects. Ceramics may also be considered artefacts in
archaeology.Ceramic art can be made by one person or by
a group of people. In a pottery or ceramic factory, a
group of people design, manufacture, and decorate the
pottery. Products from a pottery are sometimes referred
to as "art pottery." In a one-person pottery studio,
ceramists or potters produce studio pottery. In modern
ceramic engineering usage, "ceramics" is the art and
science of making objects from inorganic, non-metallic
materials by the action of heat. It excludes glass and
mosaic made from glass tesserae.
Photography
Photography as an art form refers to photographs that
are created in accordance with the creative vision of
the photographer. Art photography stands in contrast to
photojournalism, which provides a visual account for
news events, and commercial photography, the primary
focus of which is to advertise products or services.
Architecture
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 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, or inferring an implied or apparent plan
of, a 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, 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.
Sculpture
Sculpture is the branch of the visual arts that operates
in three dimensions. It is one of the plastic arts.
Durable sculptural processes originally used carving
(the removal of material) and modelling (the addition of
material, as clay), in stone, metal, ceramics, wood and
other materials; but since modernism, shifts in
sculptural process led to an almost complete freedom of
materials and process. A wide variety of materials may
be worked by removal such as carving, assembled by
welding or modelling, or moulded, or cast.
Conceptual art
Conceptual art is art in which the concept(s) or idea(s)
involved in the work takes 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. 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. |
|
Literary arts
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. Comics, the combination
of drawings or other visual arts with narrating
literature, are often called the "ninth art" (le
neuvième art) in Francophone scholarship.
Performing arts
Performing arts comprise dance, music, theatre, opera,
mime, and other art forms in which a human performance
is the principal product. Performing arts are
distinguished by this performance element in contrast
with disciplines such as visual and literary arts where
the product is an object that does not require a
performance to be observed and experienced. Each
discipline in the performing arts is temporal in nature,
meaning the product is performed over a period of time.
Products are broadly categorized as being either
repeatable (for example, by script or score) or
improvised for each performance. 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 with tools such
as costume and stage makeup.
Music
Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence,
occurring in time. Common elements of music are pitch
(which governs melody and harmony), rhythm (and its
associated concepts tempo, metre, 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 pieces. 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
Dance (from Old French dancier, 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.
Areas exist in which artistic works incorporate multiple
artistic fields, such as film, opera and performance
art. While opera is often categorized in the performing
arts of music, the word itself is Italian for "works,"
because opera combines several artistic disciplines in a
singular artistic experience. In a typical traditional
opera, the entire work utilizes the following: the sets
(visual arts), costumes (fashion), acting (dramatic
performing arts), the libretto, or the words/story
(literature), and singers and an orchestra (music).
The composer Richard Wagner recognized the fusion of so
many disciplines into a single work of opera,
exemplified by his cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen ("The
Ring of the Nibelung"). He did not use the term opera
for his works, but instead Gesamtkunstwerk ("synthesis
of the arts"), sometimes referred to as "Music Drama" in
English, emphasizing the literary and theatrical
components which were as important as the music.
Classical ballet is another form which emerged in the
17th century in which orchestral music is combined with
dance.
Other works in the late 19th, 20th and 21st centuries
have fused other disciplines in unique and creative
ways, such as performance art. Performance art is a
performance over time which combines any number of
instruments, objects, and art within a predefined or
less well-defined structure, some of which can be
improvised. Performance art may be scripted, unscripted,
random or carefully organized; even audience
participation may occur. John Cage is regarded by many
as a performance artist rather than a composer, although
he preferred the latter term. He did not compose for
traditional ensembles. Cage's composition Living Room
Music composed in 1940 is a "quartet" for unspecified
instruments, really non-melodic objects, which can be
found in a living room of a typical house, hence the
title. |
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