Art, even in its simplest form, has a culture embedded on it. It cannot be separated from the artist’s way of life. It differentiates a culture from all the rest and defines itself to an extent where nobody but the artist can even grasp. Traces of art forms have been identified alongside the evolution of mankind and flourished since the establishment of civilizations. These earlier art masterpieces in the form of sculptures, cave paintings, petroglyphs and the like were found from different parts of the world. These represented the perception of the people in the ancient times about their way of life and so despite its uniqueness in form, the similarities in these perceptions became the binding thread that connected every culture to the other thereby making art a shared experience.
The concept of art is hard to define; not because it is vague or abstract, but because it has had many different reasons for being created. It takes us to a journey to the past, the present and the future. It may reveal a community’s way of life, a person’s imagination, or merely a form of entertainment. It must be taken into consideration that art is culture-bound, something that is in a person’s field of experience. This paper aims to show that art is a shared experience by the artist, the artwork itself and the viewers of it. By looking at two different paintings, created in different times, of artists having different backgrounds, the paper intends to provide an understanding of how art threads time and links all cultures abound.
(Figure 1) – The Cutting Scene, Mandan O-kee-pa Ceremony by George Catlin
Medium: Oil paint on canvass
The Cutting Scene, Mandan O-kee-pa Ceremony, an oil canvas painting by George Cat...
... middle of paper ...
... look at it hence explaining the inter-connectedness of people regardless of race and culture. In conclusion, it is still within the viewers’ openness that they will truly appreciate the beauty and find the importance of art to mankind.
Works Cited
Catlin Virtual Exhibition. George Catlin and his Indian Gallery. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://americanart.si.edu/catlin/highlights.html.
Eanger Irving Couse. Saginaw Images. December 2000. Retrieved from http://www.saginawimages.org/essay.asp?ItemID=SMES0005.
E. Irving Couse,(1866 1936). Fine Old Art. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.fineoldart.com/browse_by_essay.html?essay=230.
George Catlin. Indeginous Peoples’ Literature. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.indians.org/welker/catlin.htm.
Who is George Catlin. Essortment. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.essortment.com/george-catlin-63651.html.
Long before Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic to the ‘New World’, the Western Hemisphere had already divided and developed civilizations. Some of these civilizations were extremely advanced for the time. As people settled in the Americas and developed cultures, so did differences in the life styles, religions, and art of these peoples. The cultures of Mesoamerica, South America, and North America all developed many different types of art, most notably ceramics and larger scale items that still baffle historians today.
My friends, after traveling through the Asian continent and Japan, I continued on to the Americas. The art in the Americas has three regions, North America, Central America, and South America. Each region has a very distinct aspect to their forms of art. All cultures have some kind of art. Being curious about art, I have collected samples from five different areas. The following works of art are very different from European art, but there are still some similarities. The similarities of the human spirit are evident in the following images.
Over the decades, art has been used as a weapon against the callousness of various social constructs - it has been used to challenge authority, to counter ideologies, to get a message across and to make a difference. In the same way, classical poetry and literature written by minds belonging to a different time, a different place and a different community have somehow found a way to transcend the boundaries set by time and space and have been carried through the ages to somehow seep into contemporary times and shape our society in ways we cannot fathom.
Art can mean many different things to many different people and was one of the earliest ways in which man has expressed him or herself to others, whether it was through cave drawings or hieroglyphics. It does not begin or end with just drawing or painting, items typically considered art, or the many other recognized facets of art including architecture, drama, literature, sculpting, and music. My research is based on Vincent van Gogh art, and two art paintings that I choose to study is The Starry Night, 1889, and the second art is The Sower 1888. Vincent van Gogh’s is known for Impressionism, that occurs to us in these times, much more to affirm close links with tradition, and to represent
Though most works of art have some underlying, deeper meaning attached to them, our first impression of their significance comes through our initial visual interpretation. When we first view a painting or a statue or other piece of art, we notice first the visual details – its size, its medium, its color, and its condition, for example – before we begin to ponder its greater significance. Indeed, these visual clues are just as important as any other interpretation or meaning of a work, for they allow us to understand just what that deeper meaning is. The expression on a statue’s face tells us the emotion and message that the artist is trying to convey. Its color, too, can provide clues: darker or lighter colors can play a role in how we judge a piece of art. The type of lines used in a piece can send different messages. A sculpture, for example, may have been carved with hard, rough lines or it may have been carved with smoother, more flowing lines that portray a kind of gentleness.
Even though an individual’s response is subjective, hermeneutical aesthetics focuses on interpretive incompleteness as part of the way human, viewers of artworks included, are in the world. An artwork is always experienced in the present from a particular present point of view and its interpretation is the transmission of meanings across time. In this way the artworks discussed in this thesis bear witness to particular historical events and allow for possible projections of those past events into the future. Contemporary life is permeated with a diversity of visual information. In such an atmosphere the hermeneutic approach provides a way of understanding the applications of the meaning we make of visual input. In light of it, the responsibility of both artist and viewer is among the issues discussed in the last part ‘Beyond Horizons’. Here the perspective moves to weave together the threads of ideas and issues that have been identified in the ‘Fusion of Horizons’ section, and reflects on aspects that reverberate beyond the shifting possibilities within the
Sayre, H. M. (2010). A World of Art: Sixth Edition. In H. M. Sayre, A World of Art: Sixth Edition (pp. 511, 134, 29, 135, 152, 313-314, 132). Lake St., Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, Inc.,.
Over the course of history, art has been used for many different purposes. It has been used to relay a message to the illiterate and show off the face of an emperor. Presently, art has no other purpose except to be aesthetically pleasing to the eye. Back in the days of ancient Greece and Crete, that was not the case. The Minoans were a people who lived on an island near one of the oldest and most well-documented civilizations of the Western world. While they may have been advanced for their time, much of what we now know about their culture has come from examining their art. In the Minoan culture, different forms of artwork held different religious and political meaning.
In order to familiarise myself with the above topic, I have invested much time reading vast selection of the portraiture art themes with aim to get acquainted with the knowledge and the language used in this particular subject. It was very challenging and entertaining to read comprehensive range of various critiques and analysis of the world best paintings stretching from ancient classic to contemporary western image. Developing understanding of the diverse art expressions and social and political influences tha...
... over time – and the viewer’s personal experience, essentially her history. This gets very near to a common sense perspective – what we look at, and what we think about what we see has much to do with who we are and what we have experienced in life. Thus, art may be described as an interaction between the viewer, influenced by her experiences, with the work of art, inclusive of its history and the stories built up around it over time. When we look at art, we must acknowledge that the image is temporally stretched – there is more to it than meets the eye at present. What we learn from Didi-Huberman’s approach is to give this temporal ‘tension’ its due. Didi-Huberman describes and defends the importance of of how we look at artistic works: images that represent something determinate, while always remaining open to the presentation of something new and different.
All in all, the artworks of Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, Aegean cultures, and Ancient Greece have similarities that not only reflect objects and images, but also the media, style and representation, these cultures are vastly exclusive works ranging from triangular depictions of form, to breezy depictions of nature, to sturdy architectural innovations for their citadels. Because of the existence of these major cultures of art in our world, it has made what art is today. These four unbelievable time periods have learned from each other and improved the way they accomplish their art techniques. These amazing cultures set a foundation that we were able to build on for thousands of years now with much more to come.
For over two thousand years, various philosophers have questioned the influence of art in our society. They have used abstract reasoning, human emotions, and logic to go beyond this world in the search for answers about arts' existence. For philosophers, art was not viewed for its own beauty, but rather for the question of how art and artists can help make our society more stable for the next generation. Plato, a Greek philosopher who lived during 420-348 B.C. in Athens, and Aristotle, Plato’s student who argued against his beliefs, have no exceptions to the steps they had to take in order to understand the purpose of art and artists. Though these two philosophers made marvelous discoveries about the existence of art, artists, and aesthetic experience, Plato has made his works more controversial than Aristotle.
Modern art runs a very important role in man’s life throughout history, because it that does not only give us inspiration but also the freedom to express ourselves through the use of different mediums.
“Art is a recurring form of human practice. Some have argued that all human societies have shown evidence of artistic activities.” (Carroll 5)
Subsequent to the study of different philosophies of art, as well as completing projects asking for personal preference in art as well as objective “fine art,” a personal philosophy may, by necessity, include subjective and objective facets. In determining what fine art is, the quality of universality is important. There also does not have to be a traditional presentation of beauty for a work of art to be fine art. Contrary to R. G. Collingwood’s philosophy, for fine art the culture and setting in which art is created should not matter, because if art is universal and timeless, meaning endures outside of where and when it was created. Evaluation of art can be subjective, but fine art is universally appreciated regardless of understanding background,