The arts

The arts encompass diverse and plural modes of thinking, doing, and being in an extensive range of media.

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.

They can employ skill and imagination to produce objects and performances, convey insights and experiences, and construct new environments and spaces.

As both a means of developing capacities of attention and sensitivity and ends in themselves, the arts can simultaneously be a form of response to the world.

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 with each other and the world.

The arts are considered various practices or objects done by people with skill, creativity, and imagination across cultures and history, viewed as a group.

[2] Art refers to the way of doing or applying human creative skills, typically in visual form.

Ancient Greek art brought the veneration of the animal form and the development of equivalent skills to show musculature, poise, beauty, and anatomically correct proportions.

Ancient Roman art depicted gods as idealized humans, shown with characteristic distinguishing features, e.g. Zeus' thunderbolt.

Islamic art avoids the representation of living beings, particularly humans and other animals, in religious contexts.

[7] In the Middle Ages, liberal arts were taught in European universities as part of the Trivium, an introductory curriculum involving grammar, rhetoric, and logic,[8] and of the Quadrivium, a curriculum involving the "mathematical arts" of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.

[18] In modern usage, architecture is the art and discipline of creating or inferring an implied or apparent plan for a complex object or system.

[19] Some types of architecture manipulate space, volume, texture, light, shadow, or abstract elements, to achieve pleasing aesthetics.

The role of the architect, though changing, has been central to the design and implementation of pleasingly built environments, in which people live.

[26] Through its association with the Young British Artists and the Turner Prize during the 1990s,[27] its popular usage, particularly in the United Kingdom, developed as a synonym for all contemporary art that does not practice the traditional skills of painting and sculpture.

[37] Some modern painters incorporate different materials, such as sand, cement, straw, wood, or strands of hair, for their artwork texture.

A wide variety of materials may be worked by removal such as carving, assembled by welding or modelling, or moulded or cast.

The term has generally come to identify a collection of writings, which in Western culture are mainly prose (both fiction and non-fiction), drama, and poetry.

[44] Artists who participate in these arts in front of an audience are called performers, including actors, magicians, comedians, dancers, musicians, and singers.

[45] Dance generally refers to human movement, either used as a form of expression or presented in a social, spiritual, or performance setting.

[57] Though considered a cultural universal, definitions of music vary wildly throughout the world as they are based on diverse views of nature, the supernatural, and humanity.

[60] Theatre or theater (from Greek theatron (θέατρον); from theasthai, "behold"[61]) is the branch of the performing arts concerned with acting out stories in front of an audience using combinations of speech, gesture, music, dance, sound, and spectacle.

[69] The applied arts are the application of design and decoration to everyday, functional objects to make them aesthetically pleasing.

Video games are multidisciplinary works that include non-controversially artistic elements such as visuals and sound, as well as an emergent experience from the nature of their interactivity.

[73][74] In the social sciences, cultural economists show how playing video games is conducive to involvement in more traditional art forms.

Art criticism and appreciation can be subjective based on personal preference toward aesthetics and form, or on the elements and principles of design and by social and cultural acceptance.

For instance Pushkin, a well-regarded writer,[92] attracted the irritation of Russian officialdom and particularly the Tsar, since he "instead of being a good servant of the state in the rank and file of the administration and extolling conventional virtues in his vocational writings (if write he must), composed extremely arrogant and extremely independent and extremely wicked verse in which dangerous freedom of thought was evident in the novelty of his versification, in the audacity of his sensual fancy, and in his propensity for making fun of major and minor tyrants.