Art: History of the concept of art
Art
Art (from the Latin Ars artis "skill, craft, technical knowledge" is a human activity, or the proceeds of this activity is to arrange these elements in addressing deliberately sense, the emotions and intellect.
The definitions of the concept varies according to times and places, and none of them is universally accepted. Therefore, products and art practices have been classified differently in different cultures, authors and institutions. According to the most common use of the word in XXI century, the art includes mainly products of "fine arts" as the architecture, the sculpture, the painting, the music, the dance and poetry (and therefore literature), which are added frequently cinema, the engraving, the theater, the photography, the comics, the TV or the digital art. The classification of the arts is not universal and left for the 7th art (cinema) which has been particularly successful, a unanimous classification seems impossible, even without interest
In Europe, the conception of art as production by artists of items that we agree to find beautiful, or at least challenging for the senses, when the eighteenth century. Today relativism prevails and we abandon the notion of beauty to see in art a creation of man. The contemporary art with the simple goal of being a creation, it does not try to be nice but there is the simple act of artistic creation as opposed to mere nature.
The attributes of painting, sculpture and architecture by Anne Vallayer-Coster.
The Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci, Musée du Louvre
Detail of a painting Arab XIII century.
History of the concept of art: what is art?
Historically , the philosophy has questioned the nature of art.
Pompeii, House VII, 2, 6: Paquius Proculus and his wife. National Archaeological Museum of Naples, fresco of the 1st century.
Plato in the Ion and the Hippias Major, or Aristotle in XXX wonder about the art as beautiful. However, aesthetics antique sometimes differs significantly from the aesthetic and the subsequent word Greek τέχνη (techne), which is the nearest equivalent of French art, refers to the ancient Greeks all activities subject to certain rules. It thus encompasses both knowledge, arts and crafts. The Muses Greek are not all related to the arts to be defined later and poetry, for example, is not a "techne".
The Roman civilization did not distinguish clearly the field of art and knowledge of the trades although Cicero and Quintilian will have contributed their thoughts. Thus, in Galen, the term "art" means a set of processes used to produce a certain result:
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Ars is systema praeceptorum universalium, verorum, utilium, consentientium, eumdemque ad unum finem tendentium.
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Art is the system of universal education, real, useful, shared by all, tending towards a single end
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In this sense of the word, which prevailed until the late Middle Ages, art objects to both the science conceived as pure knowledge, independent applications, and the nature produces without thinking . With the idea of production rule is added the consideration of the effort involved in this activity. When the word is used, it is usually attached as an epithet for the precise form of words such as "liberal arts", "mechanical arts", "military art", etc.. And if sometimes the liberal arts are covered by the employment of unqualified word "ars", it is still far from the contemporary sense, the astronomy was a "liberal art" while the spectacle of "theatrics" was a "mechanical art"
Until the Renaissance, there is no precise difference between the artist and the craftsman: is called "artist" a craftsman whose production is of exceptional quality. The difference will start to become clearer that when artists start to break free of corporate allegiance to the academies and the nobles command Then the now familiar sense of the word "art" begins to emerge: Not only are many techniques separate from, but again, after the discovery rules of perspective, the visual aspect will be important growing.
This is the Age of Enlightenment that date the concept of art now generally accepted. Starting from a reflection on the sense and taste, a design based on the idea of beauty finally settled. With Immanuel Kant, the aesthetic acquires its sense of a theory of art which the Romantic movement give examples paradigm. The importance of observing rules then passes into the background while the intention of the artist who designed our senses and our emotions, becomes paramount.
But the twentieth century, by its practices and ideologies, calls into question everything that had been upheld in the previous century. He objects in particular the existence of an essence of art that is found throughout the ages and civilizations, and therefore the dream of a universal definition. It also highlights the sometimes ambiguous relationship between "beauty" and "art", for example when the artwork is the nature of how scary or repulsive
Therefore the European discourse on contemporary art is a risk of anachronism since, according to this discourse, art implies an intention that does not necessarily exist in other times or other places . The Prehistoric Art by instance, refers to artistic elements such as paintings or sculptures, but no text does not specify whether these were intended for contemplation, ritual celebrations or other uses. In some cultures (eg Indian or Chinese), such laws exist, but it is unclear to what extent the concepts used, including those translated into French by the words "fair" or "beautiful" are recognizable to those used in the West The introduction of a case of art unconscious or involuntary may help circumvent such difficulties.
We often give lists of more or less complete incorporation of areas of art, noting that following from Wittgenstein-called "family resemblances": art becomes a set of practices and outcomes that share a number of features, although none of them is universal
The list of classical art, as proposed in the nineteenth century by Hegel in Aesthetics and philosophy of art, however, continues to serve as a reference It indicates that the major arts are five in number: architecture, sculpture, painting, literature, music. From them, by combination or by extension, we arrive at a more comprehensive list that may include for example the dance, the film (often called "seventh art"), the comic, the opera, the photography, etc. .
History of art
The different conceptions of art and the difficulties of addressing a whole are reflected in the designs of its history.
In its most classic design, history of art has been incorporated in the nineteenth century by adopting without question the progressiveness and the valuations of his time. In this naturalistic view, which sees art as a constant in human, she described instances that reveal the "essence" of art through different eras.
The anthropology of art is such a social science that seeks to explore the visual and pictorial production of human societies 'traditional', "without writing" or "primitive."
But this assumption of autonomy of artistic phenomena and their development intelligible was gradually abandoned in favor of a much more social and contextualist. As noted by Antoine Hennion, "The method of the sociology of art and the history of art are opposed to each other," the former tends to eliminate the second try instead to thicken In this context, the history of art can obviously be constructed by taking into account the developments of the concept of art and is therefore constantly rebuilding.
Another difficulty lies in the fact that recount the developments of the art requires to carry groups, most often by geographical areas and historical periods. But the relevance of such boundaries is always relative: when, for example, separating the Late Antiquity the Middle Ages? Must present the art of the Ptolemaic Egypt alongside that of the ancient Greek? Or, if we agree to consider poetry as an art, or does it not present the poems of Léopold Sédar Senghor on the side of African art?
Consequences of these differences, disputes over the classification of the arts are numerous in the history of art and the aesthetic. Claude Roy sums up the concept of pluralism of art, including but size religious symbolism is still central:
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The concept of art, whether negro art, art Cretan or impressionist art, is both vague, ineffable and irritating. Art is what keeps alive the dead idols as idol. Art is what in an object continues to serve when it outlived its usefulness
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