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, 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 dried teasel pods (pictured) were used to raise the nap on woolen fabrics?
- ... that Barbette, a female impersonator aerialist, served as inspiration to such artists as Jean Cocteau, Man Ray and Alfred Hitchcock?
- ... that French writer Honoré de Balzac's 1831 novel La Peau de chagrin was the last book read by Sigmund Freud before he committed suicide?
In this month
- 4 October 1974 – American poet Anne Sexton dies by suicide at her home in Weston, Massachusetts
- 10 October 1881 – London's Savoy Theatre, built by the impresario Richard D'Oyly Carte to showcase the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, opens with a production of Patience
- 11 October 1910 – Italian composer and musicologist Francesco Balilla Pratella completes his Manifesto of Futurist Musicians, one of the earliest signs of Futurism's influence in fields outside the visual arts
- 17 October 1896 – The first performance of Anton Chekhov's play The Seagull is booed by the audience, after which Chekhov decides to give up writing plays
- 25 October 1881 – Spanish painter and sculptor Pablo Picasso (pictured), one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, is born in Málaga
- 4 October 1927 - Gutzon Borglum began working on Mt. Rushmore
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
Matthew Brettingham (1699–1769) was an 18th-century Englishman who rose from humble origins to supervise the construction of Holkham Hall, and eventually became one of the country's better-known architects of his generation. Much of his principal work has since been demolished, particularly his work in London, where he revolutionised the design of the grand townhouse. As a result he is often overlooked today, remembered only for his Palladian remodelling of numerous country houses, many of them situated in East Anglia. As Brettingham neared the pinnacle of his career, Palladianism began to fall out of fashion and neoclassicism was introduced, championed by a young Robert Adam. Brettingham was the second son of Launcelot Brettingham, a bricklayer or stonemason from Norwich, the county town of Norfolk, England. (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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