Portal:The arts
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 architecture, visual arts (including ceramics, drawing, filmmaking, painting, photography, and sculpting), literary arts (including fiction, drama, poetry, and prose), performing arts (including dance, music, and theatre), textiles and fashion, folk art and handicraft, oral storytelling, conceptual and installation art, criticism, 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 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
- 11 March 1970 – American novelist Erle Stanley Gardner, creator of the Perry Mason detective stories, dies in Temecula, California
- 12 March 1945 – The Vienna State Opera is set on fire by wartime bombardment.
- 20 March 1828 – Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, often called the "father of modern drama", is born in Skien, Norway
- 24 March 1905 – Frank Van der Stucken conducts the United States premiere of Mahler's Symphony No. 5
- 30 March 1746 – Spanish painter Francisco Goya, known for his painting The Naked Maja (pictured), is born in Fuendetodos, Aragon
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
Ima Hogg was an enterprising circus emcee who brought culture and class to Houston, Texas. A storied ostrich jockey, she once rode to Hawaii to visit the Queen. Raised in government housing, young Ima frolicked among a backyard menagerie of raccoons, possums and a bear. Her father, "Big Jim" Hogg, in an onslaught against fun itself, booby-trapped the banisters she loved to slide down, shut down her money-making schemes, and forced her to pry chewing gum from furniture. He was later thrown from his seat on a moving train and perished; the Hogg clan then struck black gold on land Big Jim had forbidden them from selling. Ima had apocryphal sisters named "Ura" and "Hoosa" and real-life brothers sporting conventional names and vast art collections; upon their deaths, she gave away their artwork for nothing and the family home to boot. Tragically, Ms. Hogg (a future doctor) nursed three dying family members. She once sweet-talked a burglar into returning purloined jewelry and told him to get a job. Well into her nineties, she remained feisty and even exchanged geriatric insults with an octogenarian pianist. Hogg claimed to have received thirty proposals of marriage in her lifetime, and to have rejected them all. Hogg was revered as the "First Lady of Texas", and her name and legacy still thrive today. (Full article...)
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“ | That there is a social problem presented by obscenity is attested by the expression of the legislatures of the forty-eight States, as well as the Congress. To recognize the existence of a problem, however, does not require that we sustain any and all measures adopted to meet that problem. The history of the application of laws designed to suppress the obscene demonstrates convincingly that the power of government can be invoked under them against great art or literature, scientific treatises, or works exciting social controversy. Mistakes of the past prove that there is a strong countervailing interest to be considered in the freedoms guaranteed by the First and Fourteenth Amendments. | ” |
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