Portal:The arts
T H E A R T S P O R T A L
The arts are a very 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 highly 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, judgments, 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) and
They can employ skill and imagination to produce objects, 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 and 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 re-defined. 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 one novelty of Hans Gieng's 1543 statue on the Fountain of Justice (pictured) in Berne was the portrayal of Lady Justice as blindfolded or blind?
- ... that in 1656, German violinist Thomas Baltzar helped premiere The Siege of Rhodes, thought to have been the first all-sung English opera?
- ... that the Franklin County Courthouse incorporates the walls and columns left after Confederate forces burned the previous courthouse during the American Civil War?
In this month
- 1 January 1818 – Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein is published anonymously in London
- 7 January 1927 – The Scottish Arts and Crafts architect Fred Rowntree (pictured) dies in London at the age of 66
- 13 January 1782 – Friedrich Schiller's play The Robbers, an important work in the German Sturm and Drang movement, premieres in Mannheim and is an overnight sensation
- 22 January 1956 – Camera Three, a Sunday morning television program devoted to the arts is launched by CBS
- 24 January 1925 – Maria Tallchief, the first Native American to become a prima ballerina, is born in Fairfax, Oklahoma
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
Henry Moore was a British artist and sculptor. Born into a poor mining family in the Yorkshire town of Castleford, he became well-known for his large-scale abstract cast bronze and carved marble sculptures; substantially supported by the British art establishment, Moore helped to introduce a particular form of modernism into Britain. His ability to satisfy large-scale commissions made him exceptionally wealthy towards the end of his life. However, he lived frugally and most of his wealth went to endow the Henry Moore Foundation, which continues to support education and promotion of the arts. His signature form is a pierced reclining figure, first influenced by a Toltec-Maya sculpture known as "Chac Mool", which he had seen as a plaster cast in Paris in 1925. Early versions are pierced conventionally as a bent arm reconnects with the body. Later, more abstract versions, are pierced directly through the body in order to explore the concave and convex shapes. These more extreme piercings developed in parallel with Barbara Hepworth's sculptures. Hepworth first pierced a torso after misreading a review of one of Henry Moore's early shows. (Full article...)
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“ | I adore art... when I am alone with my notes, my heart pounds and the tears stream from my eyes, and my emotion and my joys are too much to bear. | ” |
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