Dictionary Definition
art
Noun
1 the products of human creativity; works of art
collectively; "an art exhibition"; "a fine collection of art" [syn:
fine
art]
2 the creation of beautiful or significant
things; "art does not need to be innovative to be good"; "I was
never any good at art"; "he said that architecture is the art of
wasting space beautifully" [syn: artistic
creation, artistic
production]
3 a superior skill that you can learn by study
and practice and observation; "the art of conversation"; "it's
quite an art" [syn: artistry, prowess]
4 photographs or other visual representations in
a printed publication; "the publisher was responsible for all the
artwork in the book" [syn: artwork, graphics, nontextual
matter]
User Contributed Dictionary
see Art
English
Etymology 1
From art.Noun
- Human effort to imitate, supplement, alter, or counteract the work of nature.
- The conscious production or arrangement of sounds, colours, forms, movements, or other elements in a manner that affects the sense of beauty, specifically the production of the beautiful in a graphic or plastic medium.
- Activity intended to make something special
- A recreation of reality according to the artist's metaphysical value-judgements
- The study and the product of these processes.
- Aesthetic value.
- In the context of "uncountable|printing}} Artwork.
Extensive Definition
The ultimate derivation of fine in fine art comes
from the philosophy
of Aristotle, who
proposed four causes or explanations of a thing. The final cause
of a thing is the purpose for its existence, and the term fine art
is derived from this notion. If the final cause of an artwork is
simply the artwork itself, "art for art's sake", and not a means to
another end, then that artwork could appropriately be called fine.
The closely related concept of beauty is classically defined as
"that which when seen, pleases". Pleasure is the final cause of
beauty and thus is not a means to another end, but an end in
itself.
Art can describe several things: a study of
creative skill, a process of using the creative skill, a product of
the creative skill, or the audience’s experience with the creative
skill. The creative arts (art as discipline) are a collection of
disciplines (arts) that produce artworks (art as objects) that are
compelled by a personal drive (art as activity) and echo or reflect
a message, mood, or symbolism for the viewer to interpret (art as
experience). Artworks can be defined by purposeful, creative
interpretations of limitless concepts or ideas in order to
communicate something to another person. Artworks can be explicitly
made for this purpose or interpreted based on images or objects.
Art is something that stimulates an individual's thoughts,
emotions, beliefs, or ideas through the senses. It is also an
expression of an idea and it can take many different forms and
serve many different purposes. Although the application of
scientific theories to derive a new scientific theory involves
skill and results in the "creation" of something new, this
represents science only and is not categorized as art.
Theories
In the nineteenth century, artists were primarily concerned with ideas of truth and beauty. The aesthetic theorist John Ruskin, who championed the raw naturalism of J. M. W. Turner, saw art's role as the communication by artifice of an essential truth that could only be found in nature. The arrival of Modernism in the early twentieth century lead to a radical break in the conception of the function of art, and then again in the late twentieth century with the advent of postmodernism. Clement Greenberg's 1960 article "Modernist Painting" defines Modern Art as "the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself". Greenberg originally applied this idea to the Abstract Expressionist movement and used it as a way to understand and justify flat (non-illusionistic) abstract painting: Realistic, naturalistic art had dissembled the medium, using art to conceal art; modernism used art to call attention to art. The limitations that constitute the medium of painting – the flat surface, the shape of the support, the properties of the pigment — were treated by the Old Masters as negative factors that could be acknowledged only implicitly or indirectly. Under Modernism these same limitations came to be regarded as positive factors, and were acknowledged openly. Philosopher David Novitz has argued that disagreement about the definition of art are rarely the heart of the problem. Rather, "the passionate concerns and interests that humans vest in their social life" are "so much a part of all classificatory disputes about art" (Novitz, 1996). According to Novitz, classificatory disputes are more often disputes about our values and where we are trying to go with our society than they are about theory proper. For example, when the Daily Mail criticized Hirst's and Emin">Tracey EminEmin’s work by arguing "For 1,000 years art has been one of our great civilising forces. Today, pickled sheep and soiled beds threaten to make barbarians of us all" they are not advancing a definition or theory about art, but questioning the value of Hirst’s and Emin’s work. In 1998, Arthur Danto, suggested a thought experiment showing that "the status of an artifact as work of art results from the ideas a culture applies to it, rather than its inherent physical or perceptible qualities. Cultural interpretation (an art theory of some kind) is therefore constitutive of an object’s arthood."Controversial art
Theodore Gericault's "Raft of the Medusa" (1820), was a social commentary on a current event, unprecedented at the time. Edouard Manet's "Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe" (1863), was considered scandalous not because of the nude woman, but because she is seated next to fully-dressed men. John Singer Sargent's "Madame Pierre Gautreau (Madam X)" (1884), caused a huge uproar over the reddish pink used to color the woman's ear lobe, considered far too suggestive and supposedly ruining the high-society model's reputation.In the twentieth century,
Pablo
Picasso's Guernica
(1937) used arresting cubist techniques and stark
monochromatic oils, to depict the harrowing consequences of a
contemporary bombing of a small, ancient Basque town. Leon Golub's
Interrogation III (1981), depicts a female nude, hooded detainee
strapped to a chair, her legs open to reveal her sexual organs,
surrounded by two tormentors dressed in everyday clothing. Andres
Serrano's Piss Christ
(1989) is a photograph of a crucifix, sacred to the Christian
religion and representing Christ's
sacrifice and final suffering, submerged in a glass of the artist's
own urine. The resulting uproar led to comments in the United
States Senate about public funding of the arts.
In the twenty-first century,
Eric
Fischl created Tumbling Woman as a memorial to those who jumped
or fell to their death in the attacks on the World
Trade Center on September
11, 2001. Initially installed at Rockefeller
Center in New York City, within a year the work was removed as
too disturbing.
Art, class and value
Art has been perceived by some as belonging to some social classes and often excluding others. In this context, art is seen as an upper-class activity associated with wealth, the ability to purchase art, and the leisure required to pursue or enjoy it. For example, the palaces of Versailles or the Hermitage in St. Petersburg with their vast collections of art, amassed by the fabulously wealthy royalty of Europe exemplify this view. Collecting such art is the preserve of the rich, or of governments and institutions.Fine and expensive goods have
been popular markers of status in many cultures, and continue to be
so today. There has been a cultural push in the other direction
since at least 1793, when the Louvre, which had been a private
palace of the Kings of France, was opened to the public as an art
museum during the French
Revolution. Most modern public museums and art education
programs for children in schools can be traced back to this impulse
to have art available to everyone. Museums in the United States
tend to be gifts from the very rich to the masses (The
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York
City, for example, was created by John
Taylor Johnston, a railroad executive whose personal art
collection seeded the museum.) But despite all this, at least one
of the important functions of art in the 21st century remains as a
marker of wealth and social status.
There have been attempts by
artists to create art that can not be bought by the wealthy as a
status object. One of the prime original motivators of much of the
art of the late 1960s and 1970s was to create art that could not be
bought and sold. It is "necessary to present something more than
mere objects" said the major post war German artist Joseph Beuys.
This time period saw the rise of such things as performance
art, video art, and
conceptual
art. The idea was that if the artwork was a performance that
would leave nothing behind, or was simply an idea, it could not be
bought and sold. "Democratic precepts revolving around the idea
that a work of art is a commodity impelled the aesthetic innovation
which germinated in the mid-1960s and was reaped throughout the
1970s. Artists broadly identified under the heading of Conceptual
art... substituting performance and publishing activities for
engagement with both the material and materialistic concerns of
painted or sculptural form... [have] endeavored to undermine the
art object qua object."
In the decades since, these
ideas have been somewhat lost as the art market has learned to sell
limited edition DVDs of video works, invitations to exclusive
performance art pieces, and the objects left over from conceptual
pieces. Many of these performances create works that are only
understood by the elite who have been educated as to why an idea or
video or piece of apparent garbage may be considered art. The
marker of status becomes understanding the work instead of
necessarily owning it, and the artwork remains an upper-class
activity. "With the widespread use of DVD recording technology in
the early 2000s, artists, and the gallery system that derives its
profits from the sale of artworks, gained an important means of
controlling the sale of video and computer artworks in limited
editions to collectors."
Forms, genres, mediums, and styles
The creative arts are often divided into more specific categories, such as decorative arts, plastic arts, performing arts, or literature. So for example painting is a form of visual art, and poetry is a form of literature. An art form is a specific form for artistic expression to take; it is a more specific term than art, but less specific than genre. An artistic medium is the substance the artistic work is made out of. So for example, stone and bronze are both mediums that sculpture uses sometimes. Multiple forms can share a medium (poetry and music, both use sound), or one form can use multiple media.A genre is a set of
conventions and styles within an art form and media. For instance,
well recognized genres in film are western,
horror and
romantic
comedy. Genres in music include death metal
and trip
hop. Genres in painting include still life,
and pastoral
landscape. A particular work of art may bend or combine genres
but each genre has a recognizable group of conventions, clichés and
troupes. (One note: the word genre has a second older meaning
within painting; genre
painting was a phrase used in the 17th to 19th century to refer
specifically to paintings of scenes of everyday life and can still
be used in this way.)
An artwork, artist’s, or
movement's style is the distinctive method and form that art takes.
Any loose brushy, dripped or poured abstract painting is called
expressionistic (with a lower case "e" and the "ic" at the end).
Often these styles are linked with a particular historical period,
set of ideas, and particular artistic movement. So Jackson
Pollock is called an Abstract
Expressionist. Because a particular style has very specific
cultural meanings it is important to be sensitive to differences in
technique. Roy
Lichtenstein's paintings are not pointillist,
despite his uses of dots, because they are not aligned with the
original proponents of Pointillism. Lichtenstein used Ben-Day dots:
they are evenly-spaced and create flat areas of color. These types
of dots were used to color comic strips and are intended to combine
the "high" art of painting with the "low" art of comics - to
comment on culture and its unreality. Pointillism employs dots that
are spaced in a way to create variation in color and depth - it was
an attempt to paint images that were closer to the way we really
see color - an attempt to get closer to reality. They both use dots
but the meaning is opposite.
These are all ways of
beginning to define a work of art, to narrow it down. "Imagine you
are an art critic whose mission is to compare the meanings you find
in a wide range of individual artworks. How would you proceed with
your task? One way to begin is to examine the materials each artist
selected in making an object, image video, or event. The decision
to cast a sculpture in bronze, for instance, inevitably effects its
meaning; the work becomes something different than if it had been
cast in gold or plastic or chocolate, even if everything else about
the artwork remained the same. Next, you might examine how the
materials in each artwork have become an arrangement of shapes,
colors, textures, and lines. These, in turn, are organized into
various patterns and compositional structures. In your
interpretation, you would comment on how salient features of the
form contribute to the overall meaning of the finished artwork.
[But in the end] the meaning of most artworks... is not exhausted
by a discussion of materials, techniques, and form. Most
interpretations also include a discussion of the ideas and feelings
the artwork engenders."
History
Art predates history;
sculptures, cave
paintings, rock paintings, and petroglyphs from the
Upper
Paleolithic starting roughly 40,000 years ago have been found,
but the precise meaning of such art is often disputed because so
little is known about the cultures that produced them. The oldest
art objects in the world: a series of tiny, drilled snail shells
about 75,000yrs old, were discovered in a South African
cave.
The great traditions in art
have a foundation in the art of one of the great ancient
civilizations: Ancient
Egypt, Mesopotamia,
Persia,
India, China, Ancient Greece, Rome, or Arabia (ancient
Yemen and
Oman). Each of
these centers of early civilization developed a unique and
characteristic style in their art. Because of the size and duration
these civilizations, more of their art works have survived and more
of their influence has been transmitted to other cultures and later
times. They have also provided the first records of how artists
worked. For example, this period of 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
In Byzantine
and Gothic
art of the Western Middle Ages, art focused on the expression
of Biblical and not material truths, and emphasized methods which
would show the higher unseen glory of a heavenly world, such as the
use of gold in paintings, or glass in mosaics or windows, which
also presented figures in idealized, patterned (flat) forms. In the
east, Islamic art's
rejection of iconography led to emphasis
on geometric patterns, Islamic
calligraphy, and architecture.
Further east, religion dominated artistic styles and forms too.
India and Tibet saw emphasis on painted sculptures and dance with
religious painting borrowing many conventions from sculpture and
tending to bright contrasting colors with emphasis on outlines.
China saw many art forms flourish, jade carving, bronzework,
pottery (including the stunning terracotta
army of Emperor Qin), poetry, calligraphy, music, painting,
drama, fiction, etc. Chinese styles vary greatly from era to era
and are traditionally named after the ruling dynasty. So, for
example, Tang Dynasty
paintings are monochromatic and sparse, emphasizing idealized
landscapes, but Ming Dynasty
paintings are busy, colorful, and focus on telling stories via
setting and composition. Japan names its styles after imperial
dynasties too, and also saw much interplay between the styles of
calligraphy and painting. Woodblock
printing became important in Japan after the 17th
century.
The western Age of
Enlightenment in the 18th century saw artistic depictions of
physical and rational certainties of the clockwork universe, as
well as politically revolutionary visions of a post-monarchist
world, such as Blake’s portrayal of Newton as a divine geometer, or
David’s propagandistic paintings. This led to Romantic
rejections of this in favor of pictures of the emotional side and
individuality of humans, exemplified in the novels of Goethe. The late
19th century then saw a host of artistic movements, such as
academic
art, symbolism,
impressionism and
fauvism among
others.
By the 20th century these
pictures were falling apart, shattered not only by new discoveries
of relativity by Einstein and of
unseen psychology by Freud, but also by
unprecedented technological development accelerated by the
implosion of civilisation in two world wars. The history of
twentieth century art is a narrative of endless possibilities and
the search for new standards, each being torn down in succession by
the next. Thus the parameters of Impressionism,
Expressionism,
Fauvism,
Cubism,
Dadaism,
Surrealism, etc
cannot be maintained very much beyond the time of their invention.
Increasing global
interaction during this time saw an equivalent influence of other
cultures into Western art, such as Pablo Picasso being influenced
by African
sculpture. Japanese woodblock prints (which had themselves been
influenced by Western Renaissance draftsmanship) had an immense
influence on Impressionism and subsequent development. Later,
African sculptures were taken up by Picasso and to some extent by
Matisse.
Similarly, the west has had huge impacts on Eastern art in 19th and
20th century, with originally western ideas like Communism and
Post-Modernism
exerting powerful influence on artistic styles.
Modernism, the idealistic
search for truth, gave way in the latter half of the 20th century
to a realization of its unattainability. Relativity was accepted as
an unavoidable truth, which led to the period of contemporary
art and
postmodern criticism, where cultures of the world and of
history are seen as changing forms, which can be appreciated and
drawn from only with irony. Furthermore the separation of cultures
is increasingly blurred and some argue it is now more appropriate
to think in terms of a global culture, rather than regional
cultures.
Characteristics
Art tends to facilitate intuitive rather than rational understanding, and is usually consciously created with this intention. Fine art intentionally serves no other purpose. As a result of this impetus, works of art are elusive, refractive to attempts at classification, because they can be appreciated in more than one way, and are often susceptible to many different interpretations. In the case of Gericault's Raft of the Medusa, special knowledge concerning the shipwreck that the painting depicts is not a prerequisite to appreciating it, but allows the appreciation of Gericault's political intentions in the piece. Even art that superficially depicts a mundane event or object, may invite reflection upon elevated themes.Traditionally, the highest
achievements of art demonstrate a high level of ability or fluency
within a medium. This characteristic might be considered a point of
contention, since many modern artists (most notably, conceptual
artists) do not themselves create the works they conceive, or do
not even create the work in a conventional, demonstrative sense.
Art has a transformative capacity: confers particularly appealing
or aesthetically satisfying structures or forms upon an original
set of unrelated, passive constituents.
Skill and craft
Somewhat in relation to the above, the word art is also used to apply judgments of value, as in such expressions like "that meal was a work of art" (the cook is an artist), or "the art of deception," (the highly attained level of skill of the deceiver is praised). It is this use of the word as a measure of high quality and high value that gives the term its flavor of subjectivity.Making judgments of value
requires a basis for criticism. At the simplest level, a way to
determine whether the impact of the object on the senses meets the
criteria to be considered art, is whether it is perceived to be
attractive or repulsive. Though perception is always colored by
experience, and is necessarily subjective, it is commonly taken
that - that which is not aesthetically satisfying in some fashion
cannot be art. However, "good" art is not always or even regularly
aesthetically appealing to a majority of viewers. In other words,
an artist's prime motivation need not be the pursuit of the
aesthetic. Also, art often depicts terrible images made for social,
moral, or thought-provoking reasons. For example, Francisco
Goya's painting depicting the Spanish shootings of 3rd of May
1808, is a
graphic depiction of a firing squad executing several pleading
civilians. Yet at the same time, the horrific imagery demonstrates
Goya's keen artistic ability in composition and execution and
produces fitting social and political outrage. Thus, the debate
continues as to what mode of aesthetic satisfaction, if any, is
required to define 'art'.
The assumption of new values
or the rebellion against accepted notions of what is aesthetically
superior need not occur concurrently with a complete abandonment of
the pursuit of that which is aesthetically appealing. Indeed, the
reverse is often true, that in the revision of what is popularly
conceived of as being aesthetically appealing, allows for a
re-invigoration of aesthetic sensibility, and a new appreciation
for the standards of art itself. Countless schools have proposed
their own ways to define quality, yet they all seem to agree in at
least one point: once their aesthetic choices are accepted, the
value of the work of art is determined by its capacity to transcend
the limits of its chosen medium in order to strike some universal
chord by the rarity of the skill of the artist or in its accurate
reflection in what is termed the zeitgeist.
Communication
Art is often intended to appeal and connect with human emotion. It can arouse aesthetic or moral feelings, and can be understood as a way of communicating these feelings. Artists express something so that their audience is aroused to some extent, but they do not have to do so consciously. Art explores what is commonly termed as the human condition that is essentially what it is to be human. Effective art often brings about some new insight concerning the human condition either singly or en-mass, which is not necessarily always positive, or necessarily widens the boundaries of collective human ability. The degree of skill that the artist has, will affect their ability to trigger an emotional response and thereby provide new insights, the ability to manipulate them at will shows exemplary skill and determination.See also
Notes
Synonyms, Antonyms and Related Words
American, Art Nouveau, Ashcan
school, Barbizon,
Bauhaus, Bolognese, British, Cobra, Dadaism, Dutch, Fauvism, Flemish, Fontainebleau, French, Gothicism, Italian, Italian hand, Mannerist, Milanese, Modenese, Momentum, Neapolitan, New York,
Paduan, Parisian, Phases, Pre-Raphaelite, Raphaelite, Reflex, Restany, Roman, Scottish, Sienese, Spur, Suprematism, The Ten,
Tuscan, Umbrian, Venetian, Washington, abstract
expressionism, abstractionism, academic
discipline, academic specialty, action painting, acuteness, address, adroitness, alphabet, applied science,
area, arena, art nouveau, art schools,
artful dodge, artfulness, artifice, artistic skill,
artistry,
arty-craftiness, astuteness, baroque, blind, blueprint, business, cageyness, callidity, calling, canniness, capability, career, career building, careerism, charactering, characterization,
chart, chicanery, choreography, classicalism, classicism, cleverness, cloisonnism, competence, conceptual art,
concern, conspiracy, constructivism, contrivance, conventional
representation, conventionalism,
coup, craft, craftiness, cubism, cunning, cunningness, cute trick,
dance notation, deceit,
delineation,
demonstration,
department of knowledge, depiction, depictment, design, device, dexterity, diagram, discipline, dodge, domain, drama, drawing, earth art, eclectic, elementarism, exemplification,
existentialism,
expedient, expertise, expressionism, fakement, feel, feint, fetch, field, field of inquiry, field of
study, figuration,
fine Italian hand, finesse, flair, foxiness, free abstraction,
futurism, gambit, game, gamesmanship, gimmick, grift, groups, guile, hallucinatory painting,
handicraft, handiness, hang, hieroglyphic, iconography, idealism, ideogram, illustration, imagery, imaging, impressionism, ingeniousness, insidiousness, intimism, intrigue, intuitionism, inventiveness, jugglery, kinetic art, knack, knavery, know-how, letter, lifework, limning, line, line of business, line of
work, linear chromatism, little game, logogram, logograph, maneuver, map, matter painting, mechanics, mechanism, method, metier, minimal art, mission, modernism, move, musical notation, mystery, mysticism, natural science,
naturalism, neoclassicism, neoconcrete
art, neoconstructivism,
nonobjectivism,
notation, nuagism, number, occupation, ology, one-upmanship, op art,
photomontage,
pictogram, picturization, plan, plein-air, plot, ploy, poetic realism, poetic
tachism, pointillism, portraiture, portrayal, postexpressionism,
practice, prefigurement, preimpressionism,
presentment,
primitivism,
printing, profession, proficiency, projection, province, pure science,
purism, pursuit, quietistic painting,
racket, readiness, realism, realization, red herring,
rendering, rendition, representation, representationalism,
representationism,
resourcefulness,
romanticism,
ruse, satanic cunning,
savvy, schema, scheme, science, score, script, sharpness, shift, shiftiness, shrewdness, skill, sleight, slipperiness, slyness, sneakiness, social science,
sophistry, specialization, specialty, sphere, stealth, stealthiness, stratagem, strategy, study, subterfuge, subtilty, subtleness, subtlety, suppleness, suprematism, surrealism, syllabary, symbol, symbolism, synchromism, synthesism, tablature, tachism, tactic, talent, technic, technical know-how,
technical knowledge, technical skill, technicology, technics, technique, technology, touch, trade, traditionalism, trick, trickery, trickiness, unism, virtu, vocation, vorticism, walk, walk of life, wariness, way, wile, wiles, wiliness, wily device, wit, work, writing