Art

Art

The oldest confirmed statue ever discovered, known as the Lion Man, 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, found alongside other figurines and the oldest musical instruments unearthed so far, represents the first center of human art and challenges the notion that artistic expression is a modern invention. While a shell engraved by Homo erectus dates back 430,000 to 540,000 years, and Neanderthals manipulated eagle talons 130,000 years ago, the Lion Man stands as a testament to a complex cognitive leap that occurred during the Upper Paleolithic period. These early works, including cave paintings at Lascaux dating to roughly 17,000 BCE, were not merely decorative but served as a profound expression of the human condition, existing almost as long as humanity itself. The precise meaning of such art remains disputed because so little is known about the cultures that produced them, yet their existence proves that the drive to create is an instinct integral to being human.

Ancient Civilizations And Divine Forms

Great traditions in art have a foundation in the art of one of the great ancient civilizations, including Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, India, China, Ancient Greece, Rome, as well as the Inca, Maya, and Olmec. Each of these centers developed a unique and characteristic style, with the Greek period seeing a veneration of the human physical form and the development of skills to show musculature, poise, beauty, and anatomically correct proportions. In Byzantine and Medieval art of the Western Middle Ages, much art focused on the expression of subjects about biblical and religious culture, using styles that showed the higher glory of a heavenly world through the use of gold in the background of paintings or glass in mosaics. Islamic art, influenced by the rejection of iconography, led to an emphasis on geometric patterns, calligraphy, and architecture, exemplified by the Great Mosque of Kairouan in Tunisia, which is one of the most significant and best preserved artistic and architectural examples of early great mosques. In China, the flourishing of many art forms included jade carving, bronzework, pottery, and the stunning Terracotta Army of Emperor Qin, while Japanese styles varied from the monochromatic and sparse Tang dynasty paintings to the busy and colorful Ming dynasty works that focused on telling stories via setting and composition.

The Renaissance And The Enlightenment

Renaissance art had a greatly increased emphasis on the realistic depiction of the material world and the place of humans in it, reflected in the corporeality of the human body and the development of a systematic method of graphical perspective to depict recession in a three-dimensional picture space. Leonardo da Vinci, whose Mona Lisa dates to 1506, demonstrated that art was a manifestation of skill, treating it neither more nor less than his other endeavors. 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 era laid the groundwork for the Romantic rejections of rationalism 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, each challenging the conventions of the time and setting the stage for the radical breaks that would follow in the 20th century.

Ancient Civilizations And Divine Forms

The Renaissance And The Enlightenment

The Modernist Break And The Avant-Garde

The arrival of Modernism in the late 19th century led to a radical break in the conception of the function of art, and then again in the late 20th century with the advent of postmodernism. Clement Greenberg's 1960 article Modernist Painting defined modern art as the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, treating the limitations of the medium, such as the flat surface and the shape of the support, as positive factors acknowledged openly. Pablo Picasso's Guernica, created in 1937, used arresting cubist techniques and stark monochromatic oils to depict the harrowing consequences of a contemporary bombing of a small, ancient Basque town, while Andy Warhol became both noteworthy and influential through work including and possibly critiquing popular culture. The avant-garde movements, including Dadaism, Surrealism, and Russian constructivism, sought to use visual images to bring about political change, with artists like Marcel Duchamp proposing that art is any activity of any kind. Duchamp's Fountain, an ordinary urinal created in 1917, achieved considerable prominence and influence on art, serving as one of the first examples of pieces wherein the artist used found objects and exercised no traditionally recognized set of skills.

The Philosophy Of Meaning And Value

The definition and evaluation of art has become especially problematic since the 20th century, with Richard Wollheim distinguishing three approaches to assessing the aesthetic value of art: the Realist, the Objectivist, and the Relativist position. The debate over the intentional fallacy, introduced by William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley in 1946, argued strongly against the relevance of an author's intention in the analysis of a literary work, suggesting that the words on the page were all that mattered. This philosophical shift led to the linguistic turn controversy, which discussed the encounter of the work of art as being determined by the relative extent to which the conceptual encounter with the work of art dominates over the perceptual encounter. Theorists such as Judith Butler, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida explored the power of language in art history, while Ernst Gombrich and Nelson Goodman held that the conceptual encounter predominated exclusively over the perceptual and visual encounter during the 1960s and 1970s.

Public Access And The Museum

In 1661, the city of Basel, in Switzerland, opened the first public museum of art in the world, the Kunstmuseum Basel, marking a significant shift from art as a deliberate display of wealth or power to a resource available to the general public. The opening of the Musée du Louvre during the French Revolution in 1793 as a public museum for much of the former French royal collection certainly marked an important stage in the development of public access to art, transferring ownership to a republican state. Museums in the United States tend to be gifts from the very rich to the masses, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, which was created by John Taylor Johnston, a railroad executive whose personal art collection seeded the museum. Despite these efforts, at least one of the important functions of art in the 21st century remains as a marker of wealth and social status, leading to attempts by artists to create art that cannot be bought and sold, such as performance art and conceptual art, which leave nothing behind or exist only as ideas.

Controversy And The Nature Of Art

Art has long been controversial, that is to say disliked by some viewers, for a wide variety of reasons, including religious ones such as iconoclasm and aniconism, which has been a crucial factor in the history of Islamic art where depictions of Muhammad remain especially controversial. The Last Judgment by Michelangelo was controversial for various reasons, including breaches of decorum through nudity and the Apollo-like pose of Christ, while Édouard Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe was considered scandalous not because of the nude woman, but because she is seated next to men fully dressed in the clothing of the time. In the 20th century, Andres Serrano's Piss Christ, a photograph of a crucifix submerged in a glass of the artist's own urine, led to an uproar and comments in the United States Senate about public funding of the arts. These controversies highlight that the passionate concerns and interests that humans vest in their social life are so much a part of all classificatory disputes about art, questioning the value of works like pickled sheep and soiled beds rather than advancing a definition or theory about art.

The Future Of Art And Law

Intellectual property law plays a significant role in the art world, with copyright protection granted to artists for their original works, providing them with exclusive rights to reproduce, distribute, and display their creations. The development of generative artificial intelligence, especially in regard to artificial intelligence art, necessitates a re-evaluation of aesthetic theory in art history today and a reconsideration of the limits of human creativity. Music and artificial intelligence has taken a similar path, as has the use of large language models in generating creative texts. 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 what is aesthetically appealing, allowing for a re-invigoration of aesthetic sensibility. Art is often intended to appeal to and connect with human emotion, arousing aesthetic or moral feelings, and can be understood as a way of communicating these feelings, serving as an exploration of the human condition and what it is to be human.

Ancient Civilizations And Divine Forms

The Renaissance And The Enlightenment

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The Modernist Break And The Avant-Garde

The Philosophy Of Meaning And Value

Public Access And The Museum

Controversy And The Nature Of Art

The Future Of Art And Law

Ancient Civilizations And Divine Forms

The Renaissance And The Enlightenment

The Modernist Break And The Avant-Garde

The Philosophy Of Meaning And Value

Public Access And The Museum

Controversy And The Nature Of Art

The Future Of Art And Law