Portal:The arts
T H E A R T S P O R T A L
The arts or creative arts are a vast range of human practices of creative expression, storytelling, and cultural participation. The arts encompasses multiple diverse and plural modes of thinking, doing, and being, in an extremely broad range of media. Both 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.
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
- 9 June 1904 – The London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Hans Richter, plays its first concert
- 18 June 1964 – Italian painter Giorgio Morandi, whose still lifes and landscapes were noted for their tonal subtlety, dies in Bologna at the age of 73
- 20 June 1703 – The Love Suicides at Sonezaki by Chikamatsu Monzaemon, often considered the greatest Japanese dramatist, receives its first performance
- 24 June 1924 – Efua Sutherland, a foundational figure in modern Ghanaian drama, is born in the Cape Coast region of Ghana
- 29 June 1861 – Elizabeth Barrett Browning (pictured), one of the most prominent poets of the Victorian era, dies in Florence at the age of 55
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
El Greco was a prominent painter, sculptor and architect of the Spanish Renaissance.
El Greco was born in Crete, which was at that time part of the Republic of Venice. When he was 26 travelled from Crete to the city of Venice to study. In 1570 he moved to Rome, where he opened a workshop and executed a series of works. During his stay in Italy, El Greco enriched his style with elements of Mannerism and of the Venetian Renaissance. In 1577, he emigrated to Toledo, Spain, where he lived and worked until his death. In Toledo, El Greco received several major commissions and produced his best known paintings.
El Greco's dramatic and expressionistic style was met with puzzlement by his contemporaries but found appreciation in the 20th century. El Greco is regarded as a precursor of both Expressionism and Cubism, while his personality and works were a source of inspiration for poets and writers such as Rainer Maria Rilke and Nikos Kazantzakis. El Greco has been characterized by modern scholars as an artist so individual that he belongs to no conventional school. He is best known for tortuously elongated figures and often fantastic or phantasmagorical pigmentation, marrying Byzantine traditions with those of Western civilization. (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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