Portal:The arts Information
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
- culinary arts (including cooking, chocolate making and winemaking).
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 Frank Lloyd Wright's textile block work, Storer House (pictured), was restored in the 1980s by Joel Silver, producer of the films Die Hard and The Matrix?
- ... that Swiss illustrator Albert Lindegger was responsible for murals at the headquarters of the cantonal police and the crematorium in Berne?
- ... that U.S. Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Harry S. Truman once lived in the Kennedy-Warren Apartment Building?
In this month
- 10 August 1793 – The Musée du Louvre (pictured), one of the world's largest museums, opens with an exhibition of 537 paintings
- 16 August 1945 – American ballerina Suzanne Farrell for whom George Balanchine created many new ballets is born in Cincinnati, Ohio
- 18 August 1933 – Polish director and screen-writer Roman Polanski, whose Academy Award winning films include Knife in the Water, Rosemary's Baby, and The Pianist, is born in Paris
- 19 August 1953 – Gholam-Hossein Saedi, one of the first modern playwrights of Iran, is arrested during the 1953 Iranian coup d'état
- 30 August 1953 – Gaetano Merola, the Italian conductor and founder of the San Francisco Opera, dies in San Francisco while conducting a performance of Madame Butterfly
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
Adolfo Farsari (1841–1898) was an Italian photographer based in Yokohama, Japan. Following a brief military career, including service in the American Civil War, he became a successful entrepreneur and commercial photographer.
His photographic work was highly regarded, particularly his hand-coloured portraits and landscapes,of which he sold mostly to foreign residents and visitors to the country. Farsari's images were widely distributed, presented or mentioned in books and periodicals, and sometimes recreated by artists in other media; they shaped foreign perceptions of the people and places of Japan and to some degree did affect how Japanese saw themselves and their country.
His studio – the last notable foreign-owned studio in Japan – was one of the country's largest and most prolific commercial photographic firms. Largely due to Farsari's exacting technical standards and his entrepreneurial abilities, it had a significant influence on the development of photography in Japan. ( Full article...)
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“ | Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad. | ” |
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