Unit 6, Lesson 1, Ex.2a

I: Our world has become a very visual one - we have art all around us. Understanding art is understanding our world! A good first step is to try to understand what we mean by art. Let’s Shelley Esaak, a portrait artist, graphic designer, writer and educator. Hi, Shelley, could you clarify this question?

L: I’d be delighted to. First of all, there’s the arts that are a great subdivision of culture. It is a broader term than art, which usually means only the visual arts. The arts includes visual arts, literary arts and the performing arts, like music, theatre, and film, among others.

If you ask people in the street what art is, paintings and statues are common answers. But actually that’s a bit more than that. The types of visual art include architecture, animation, collage, comics, design, drawing, graffiti, illustration, installation art, photography, sculpture and so on.

I: All right. But how do you know it’s art that you are looking at?

L: The first time that the question of what art is came up was in the 19th century in an essay by Leo Tolstoy. In his work he argues against numerous theories which define art in terms of the good, truth, and especially beauty. In Tolstoy's opinion, art at the time was much more than that. According to him, art must create an emotional link between artist and audience, one that "infects" the viewer.

The idea that art is actually about communicating the feelings of the artists is a romantic one which is widely popular among the researchers.

Or as Frank Zappa once said “ Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.”

I: Ha-ha-ha. For all that, how would you personally answer this question today?

L: I could tell you that art plays a large part in making our lives infinitely rich. Imagine, just for a minute, a world without art! (You may think "So what?" but please consider the effect that lack of graphics would have on your favorite video game.) Art stimulates different parts of our brains to make us laugh or cry, calm down or start shouting. For some people, art is the entire reason they get out of bed in the morning. You could say "Art is something that makes us more thoughtful and well-balanced humans."

On the other hand, art is such a large part of our everyday lives that we may hardly even stop to think about it. Look at the desk or table where you are, right this minute. Someone designed that. It is art. Your shoes are art. Your coffee cup is art. All functional design, well done, is art. So, you could say "Art is something that is both functional and (hopefully) beautiful."

Art is form and content.

Form means: The elements of art, the principles of design and the actual, physical materials that the artist has used. Form, in this context, is fairly easily described--no matter which piece of art we are studying.

Content, now, gets a little more tricky. Content is idea-based and means: What the artist meant to say, what the artist actually did say and how we react, as individuals, to the authors messages.

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