Portal:The arts
T H E A R T S P O R T A L
The arts or creative arts are a wide range of human practices of creative expression, storytelling, and cultural participation. They encompass multiple diverse and plural modes of thinking, doing, and being, in an extremely broad range of media. Both dynamic and a characteristically constant feature of human life, they have developed into innovative, stylized, and sometimes intricate forms. This is often achieved through sustained and deliberate study, training, and/or theorizing within a particular tradition, across generations, and even between civilizations. The arts are a vehicle through which human beings cultivate distinct social, cultural, and individual identities while transmitting values, impressions, judgements, ideas, visions, spiritual meanings, patterns of life, and experiences across time and space.
Prominent examples of the arts include:
- visual arts (including architecture, ceramics, drawing, filmmaking, painting, photography, and sculpting)
- literary arts (including fiction, drama, poetry, and prose)
- performing arts (including dance, music, and theatre)
They can employ skill and imagination to produce objects and performances, convey insights and experiences, and construct new environments and spaces.
The arts can refer to common, popular, or everyday practices as well as more sophisticated, systematic, or institutionalized ones. They can be discrete and self-contained or combine and interweave with other art forms, such as the combination of artwork with the written word in comics. They can also develop or contribute to some particular aspect of a more complex art form, as in cinematography. By definition, the arts themselves are open to being continually redefined. The practice of modern art, for example, is a testament to the shifting boundaries, improvisation and experimentation, reflexive nature, and self-criticism or questioning that art and its conditions of production, reception, and possibility can undergo.
As both a means of developing capacities of attention and sensitivity and as ends in themselves, the arts can simultaneously be a form of response to the world and a way that our responses and what we deem worthwhile goals or pursuits are transformed. From prehistoric cave paintings to ancient and contemporary forms of ritual to modern-day films, art has served to register, embody, and preserve our ever-shifting relationships to each other and to the world. (Full article...)
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Did you know...
- ... that The Fairman Rogers Four-in-Hand (pictured) was the first painting to demonstrate, based on systematic photographic analysis, how horses move?
- ... that Cheyenne artist Bently Spang satirized anthropologists' depictions of Native Americans as a "lost culture" with a museum exhibit showcasing ordinary objects?
- ... that Bagyi Aung Soe, now recognized as one of Burma's most important modern artists, lived in poverty and was considered by some to be mad?
In this month
- 5 May 1726 – Handel's opera Alessandro premieres at the King's Theatre in London with Italian castrato singer Senesino in the title role
- 12 May 1926 – Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No. 1, which he composed at the age of 19 while a student at Leningrad Conservatory, receives its first performance
- 22 May 1844 – Impressionst painter and printmaker Mary Cassatt (self-portrait pictured) is born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania
- 26 May 1897 – Bram Stoker's novel Dracula, which later became the subject of numerous theatrical, film and television interpretations, is published by Constable & Co.
- 29 May 1913 – Igor Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring premieres in Paris and causes a riot in the audience between supporters and opponents of the work
News
- August 5: DaBaby Levitating remix losing US radio audiences after the rapper's comments on HIV/AIDS
- June 11: Taylor Swift's Evermore records biggest sales week of the year as it returns to No 1 on album chart
- May 27: Olivia Rodrigo's song good 4 u debuts at No 1 on US Billboard Hot 100 chart
- May 25: 'Rock and roll never dies': Italy wins Eurovision after 30 years
- February 10: Disney to shut down Blue Sky Studios, animation studio behind 'Ice Age'
Featured biography
El Greco was a prominent painter, sculptor and architect of the Spanish Renaissance.
El Greco was born in Crete, which was at that time part of the Republic of Venice. When he was 26 travelled from Crete to the city of Venice to study. In 1570 he moved to Rome, where he opened a workshop and executed a series of works. During his stay in Italy, El Greco enriched his style with elements of Mannerism and of the Venetian Renaissance. In 1577, he emigrated to Toledo, Spain, where he lived and worked until his death. In Toledo, El Greco received several major commissions and produced his best known paintings.
El Greco's dramatic and expressionistic style was met with puzzlement by his contemporaries but found appreciation in the 20th century. El Greco is regarded as a precursor of both Expressionism and Cubism, while his personality and works were a source of inspiration for poets and writers such as Rainer Maria Rilke and Nikos Kazantzakis. El Greco has been characterized by modern scholars as an artist so individual that he belongs to no conventional school. He is best known for tortuously elongated figures and often fantastic or phantasmagorical pigmentation, marrying Byzantine traditions with those of Western civilization. (Full article...)
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“ | It [the movie art form] combines so many other art forms, as do theater and opera, but the essence of cinema is editing. It's the combination of what can be extraordinary images, images of people during emotional moments, or just images in a general sense, but put together in a kind of alchemy. A number of images put together a certain way become something quite above and beyond what any of them are individually. | ” |
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