Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Lion Man statue dates back between 35,000 and 41,000 years and was carved from mammoth ivory in the caves of the Swabian Jura in Germany. This artifact represents the first center of human art and challenges the notion that artistic expression is a modern invention.
Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, India, China, Ancient Greece, Rome, the Inca, Maya, and Olmec developed unique and characteristic styles. The Greek period saw a veneration of the human physical form and the development of skills to show musculature, poise, beauty, and anatomically correct proportions.
The city of Basel in Switzerland opened the Kunstmuseum Basel as the first public museum of art in the world in 1661. This event marked a significant shift from art as a deliberate display of wealth or power to a resource available to the general public.
Pablo Picasso created Guernica in 1937 and used arresting cubist techniques and stark monochromatic oils to depict the harrowing consequences of a contemporary bombing of a small, ancient Basque town.
Marcel Duchamp created the artwork known as Fountain in 1917 and it is an ordinary urinal that achieved considerable prominence and influence on art. This piece serves as one of the first examples of works wherein the artist used found objects and exercised no traditionally recognized set of skills.
The debate over the intentional fallacy was introduced by William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley in 1946. This argument strongly opposed the relevance of an author's intention in the analysis of a literary work and suggested that the words on the page were all that mattered.