Portal:The arts
T H E A R T S P O R T A L
The arts or creative arts are a 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 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.
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)
They can employ skill and imagination to produce objects and 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, 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...)
Featured articles -
Featured picture
Did you know...
- ... that Hebrew publisher Hayyim Selig Slonimski (pictured) was awarded the Demidov prize of 2,500 rubles in 1844 by the Russian Academy of Sciences for the invention of a calculating machine?
- ... that the Pasco-Kennewick Bridge in Washington was the first of its size to be financed entirely by sales of stock?
- ... that the 1974 film Lost in the Stars, set in apartheid-era South Africa, was actually shot in Oregon?
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
Pierre Rossier was a pioneering Swiss photographer whose albumen photographs, which include stereographs and cartes-de-visite, comprise portraits, cityscapes and landscapes. He was commissioned by the London firm of Negretti and Zambra to travel to Asia and document the progress of the Anglo-French troops in the Second Opium War and, although he failed to join that military expedition, he remained in Asia for several years, producing the first commercial photographs of China, the Philippines, Japan and Siam (now Thailand). He was the first professional photographer in Japan, where he trained Ueno Hikoma, Maeda Genzō, Horie Kuwajirō, as well as lesser known members of the first generation of Japanese photographers. In Switzerland he established photographic studios in Fribourg and Einsiedeln, and he also produced images elsewhere in the country. Rossier is an important figure in the early history of photography not only because of his own images, but also because of the critical impact of his teaching in the early days of Japanese photography. (Full article...)
Featured audio
Selected quote
“ | The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act. | ” |
Categories
|
WikiProjects
Parent project
Descendant projects
Related portals
Things you can do
- Check the recent changes page for improvements, other changes, and vandalism to these articles
- Article requests: Requests articles (arts and entertainment)
- Deletion discussions: Listed at Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Arts
- Expand: check Visual arts stubs to expand
- Notability: Articles with notability concerns, listed at WikiProject Notability
- Requested pictures: Arts topics, requested pictures