Art

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The Mona Lisa

Although today the word art usually refers to the visual arts, the concept of what art is has continuously changed over centuries. Perhaps the most concise definition is its broadest—art refers to all creative human endeavors, excluding actions directly related to survival and reproduction. From a wide perspective, art is simply a generic term for any product of the creative impulse, out of which sprang all other human pursuits — such as science via alchemy, and religion via shamanism. The term art offers no true definition besides those based within the cultural, historical and geographical context in which it is applied.

Artists, deliberately or not, work under the influence of other artists of the past and present. Much of the development of individual artists deals with finding structured principles for how to express certain ideas through various kinds of symbolism. For example, Vasily Kandinsky famously developed his use of color in painting through a system of stimulus response, where over time he gained an understanding of the emotions that can be evoked by color and combinations of color. Contemporary artist Andy Goldsworthy, on the other hand, chose to use the medium of found natural objects and materials to arrange temporary sculptures; the only record of these sculptures brought back to the world comes in the form of a modest photograph.