art

art
art1
/ahrt/, n.
1. the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance.
2. the class of objects subject to aesthetic criteria; works of art collectively, as paintings, sculptures, or drawings: a museum of art; an art collection.
3. a field, genre, or category of art: Dance is an art.
4. the fine arts collectively, often excluding architecture: art and architecture.
5. any field using the skills or techniques of art: advertising art; industrial art.
6. (in printed matter) illustrative or decorative material: Is there any art with the copy for this story?
7. the principles or methods governing any craft or branch of learning: the art of baking; the art of selling.
8. the craft or trade using these principles or methods.
9. skill in conducting any human activity: a master at the art of conversation.
10. a branch of learning or university study, esp. one of the fine arts or the humanities, as music, philosophy, or literature.
11. arts,
a. (used with a sing. v.) the humanities: a college of arts and sciences.
b. (used with a pl. v.) See liberal arts.
12. skilled workmanship, execution, or agency, as distinguished from nature.
13. trickery; cunning: glib and devious art.
14. studied action; artificiality in behavior.
15. an artifice or artful device: the innumerable arts and wiles of politics.
16. Archaic. science, learning, or scholarship.
[1175-1225; ME < OF, acc. of ars < L ars (nom.), artem (acc.)]
art2
/ahrt/, v. Archaic.
2nd pers. sing. pres. indic. of be.
[bef. 950; ME; OE eart, equiv. to ear- (see ARE1) + -t ending of 2nd pers. sing.]

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I
also called visual art

A visual object or experience consciously created through an expression of skill or imagination.

The term art encompasses diverse media such as painting, sculpture, printmaking, drawing, decorative arts, photography, and installation. The various visual arts exist within a continuum that ranges from purely aesthetic purposes at one end to purely utilitarian purposes at the other. This should by no means be taken as a rigid scheme, however, particularly in cultures in which everyday objects are painstakingly constructed and imbued with meaning. Particularly in the 20th century, debates arose over the definition of art. Figures such as Dada artist Marcel Duchamp implied that it is enough for an artist to deem something "art" and put it in a publicly accepted venue. Such intellectual experimentation continued throughout the 20th century in movements such as conceptual art and Minimalism. By the turn of the 21st century, a variety of new media (e.g., video art) further challenged traditional definitions of art. See aesthetics; art conservation and restoration; drawing; painting; printmaking; sculpture; photography; decorative arts.
II
(as used in expressions)
visual art
nonrepresentational art
nonobjective art
Anglo Saxon art
International Exhibition of Modern Art
Ancient Art
New Art
raw art
Blakey Art
Kusana art
outsider art
Optical art
Beaux Arts style
Black Arts movement
École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts

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▪ 2004

Introduction

Art
      Although dogged by persistent questions regarding everything from its relevance to the quality of art works and lack of theoretical coherence, the 2003 Venice Biennale remained the most anticipated and widely covered large-scale international exhibition. Though the early weeks of the 50th Biennale were hampered by extreme summer heat, the sprawling multicuratorial, multisite exhibition organized by Francesco Bonami and his collaborative team generally held its own. Polish-born artist Piotr Uklanski made explicit reference to this group with his red banner depicting the silhouetted figures of the 11 critics, artists, and curators who assisted Bonami. The banner, which alluded to the spread of curatorial power beyond just the Biennale, was prominently installed for maximum visibility on the facade of the offices of municipal culture facing the Grand Canal. More overt political gestures could be found elsewhere. The Mexico City-based Spanish artist Santiago Sierra commented on exclusivity and identity by turning the Spanish pavilion into an exclusive space; only individuals with Spanish passports were permitted entry. As one of two artists chosen to represent Venezuela, Javier Téllez withdrew from the Biennale in February as a gesture of protest against the government of Hugo Chávez. (See World Affairs: Venezuela .) The other Venezuelan, Pedro Morales, whose project for the Venezuelan pavilion was censored by the government, articulated the brutal reality of political oppression; he placed a wheelbarrow full of trash on the pavilion's steps and covered the facade with “Censored” signs and Venezuelan flags; the project he would have shown could be viewed on the Internet.

      Using museum display cases, a large 18th-century-style chandelier of Murano glass, and other blown-glass elements along with mannequins dressed in Renaissance-style garb, Fred Wilson's Speak of Me as I Am in the U.S. pavilion was a historical exploration of Venice's multicultural past and representations of Moors in Italian art. In front of the pavilion, a Senegalese man sold knockoffs of designer bags. As it turned out, the vendor was a tourist who had been hired by Wilson, and the bags had been hand made by the artist. The presence of this “vendor”—such illegal commerce was routinely shut down by the Venetian police—confused both viewers and city officials.

      Not all work at the Biennale was political. Olafur Eliasson's installation for the Danish pavilion, for example, was simply dazzling. Eliasson was obsessed with the nature of perception, and his Blind Pavilion included numerous works intended to heighten the viewer's self-awareness and awareness of his surroundings. This the artist accomplished by requiring viewers to walk on ramps and to face devices such as camera obscuras and a multitude of mirrors, prisms, and kaleidoscopes that magnified, distorted, and sharpened spatial experience.

      In New York City, Matthew Barney (see Biographies (Barney, Matthew )) captured the imagination of critics and the public alike. The Guggenheim Museum's exhibition featured all five films in Barney's epic Cremaster cycle as well as related sculptures, photographs, and drawings centred around Barney's elaborate narrative of procreation, sexual function, and myth. The interior of the museum's Frank Lloyd Wright-designed rotunda was itself transformed by blue Astroturf and white athletic padding—Barney's signature materials.

      Two public art projects in New York City garnered significant attention in 2003. Mariko Mori's Wave UFO was installed in a glass atrium of 590 Madison Avenue. This translucent, tear-shaped “meditation pod” was part sci-fi fantasy and part Buddhist shrine, and it invited viewer participation. Once inside the pod, participants were attached to electrodes, and their brain activity was displayed as active light projections on the pod's ceiling. At nearby Rockefeller Center, Takashi Murakami installed Reversed Double Helix, composed of two 9-m (30-ft) black “eyeball” balloons, a garden of brightly coloured sculpted flowers and mushrooms, and daisy-patterned wallpaper, all presided over by Tongari-kun (known in English as “Mr. Pointy”), a 9-m-tall sculpture reminiscent of a cartoon character. Like Murakami's other works, Reversed Double Helix combined aspects of Pop art with anime (Japanese animation) and manga (adult comic books), as well as more traditional art forms. Popular culture remained a crucial theme and departure point for many artists. Drawing on both his part-aboriginal Canadian ancestry and the wider commercial culture, Brian Jungen addressed questions of cultural authenticity in his sculptural works by juxtaposing the handmade and the ready-made, tribal artifacts and consumer icons. Jungen's “masks,” which he called “prototypes,” were fashioned from Nike athletic shoes arranged to mimic the form and appearance of tribal masks. Tom Sachs also commented on brand-name logos, as well as the commercialization of high Modernism, in his large-scale installation Nutsy's (2002). Basing his work on the idea that anything can be re-created in a do-it-yourself environment, Sachs fashioned a series of “stations” connected by a miniature roadway, along which one encountered a McDonald's stand where burgers and fries were prepared and consumed, a DJ booth with turntables, and a scale-model replica of Le Corbusier's housing complex in Marseille, France.

      The urban context was also examined by Julie Mehretu, whose work combined aspects of cartography, architectural drawing, and painting. Her energetic works—part abstraction, part complex architectonic system—were composed of drawn lines and intersecting coloured planar shapes that together created animated topographies. Philippe Parreno's multipart installations can assume different forms depending on their context. As it was shown in 2003, Parreno's El sueño de una cosa (2002) consisted of a 60-second film of a Scandinavian landscape, the panels on which the film is projected, and the silence that follows. The work makes reference to Robert Rauschenberg's White Painting (1951) in its five white panels and to John Cage's 4′33″ (Four Minutes and Thirty-three Seconds, 1952) in the amount of time between showings of the film. Douglas Gordon's videos similarly explore aspects of narrative, memory, and temporality. He frequently incorporated clips from existing films (most famously, Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, 1976) but Gordon filmed the footage for Play Dead: Real Time himself. The installation, which alluded to Thomas Edison's shocking film (1903) of the staged electrocution of an elephant at Coney Island, consisted of two projections of a film of an elephant's death and seeming resurrection; a third projection was a small close-up of the elephant's eye.

      Unlike Parreno and Gordon, Urs Fischer included readily available materials, such as wax, wood, pigment, glass, and Styrofoam as well as found objects and even organic matter, as part of his eccentric and improvisational works. In Fischer's 2003 exhibition “need no chair when walking,” a life-size sculpture of three women was a clear reference to traditional themes (the female nude; the Three Graces). Fischer's figures, however, were rendered in wax and lit like giant candles at the beginning of the gallery exhibition. Gradually, hideously, the sculptures melted down to a pile of coloured wax and barely distinguishable forms. Tara Donovan also employed nontraditional art materials, such as toothpicks, pencils, Styrofoam cups, and paper plates, usually in enormous quantities. Donovan's Haze, which fronted a wall more than 12 m (40 ft) long, was constructed with some two million drinking straws of differing lengths sticking out horizontally from the wall. Donovan imbued mass-produced goods such as these with an organic, even atmospheric quality so that the accumulations became metaphors for growth and proliferation in the natural world.

      Among the lesser-known painters who received positive critical response in 2003 were Barnaby Furnas and Dan Walsh. Furnas's watercolours were relatively small in scale, but their impact was enormous. They depicted schematic figures, sometimes solitary but also in groups, in a variety of mostly sexual or violent acts that were partially obscured by swirling clouds of bright paint spots. This abstract quality muffled their shock value only somewhat. Walsh, on the other hand, made abstract works that explored what he called “the syntax of construction.” He made a notable series of handmade artist's books, a medium he considered as much a “venue” for his art as the walls of a gallery.

Meghan Dailey

Art Exhibitions
      It was a year of many extraordinary firsts in exhibitions in 2003. A number of shows brought together works that had never been exhibited concurrently and thereby illuminated a particular style or historical moment. One example was “Rembrandt's Journey,” a show organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Although Rembrandt is best known for his paintings, this exhibition instead highlighted his extraordinary graphic output, presenting some 150 etchings and related drawings gathered from international collections. Many of the works on view, including 20 paintings, were shown together for the first time. Another first occurred when three institutions—the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Mass.; the Haggerty Museum of Art at Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wis.; and the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University, New York City—organized the first American retrospective of French postwar artist Jean Fautrier (1898–1964). Usually associated with Art Informel, a movement that emphasized gesture and lyrical abstraction over representation and geometric abstraction, Fautrier himself considered his work to be grounded in reality. His best-known series, Hostages (1944), consisting mainly of thickly impastoed paintings that suggest wounds, was a response to his deeply traumatic wartime experiences.

      Several artists' works were shown at museums for the first time in years or even decades. One of the most anticipated of these “reintroductions” was a retrospective of Lee Bontecou (b. 1931), organized by the UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. In the 1960s Bontecou was considered a major contemporary artist, noted for her eccentric wall-bound sculptures. Using a blowtorch and a soldering iron, she wrought metal, wire, and thick canvas into objects that were unprecedented in their originality. In the early 1970s, however, Bontecou withdrew from the art world and, though she continued to make art, exhibited rarely in the intervening decades.

      A number of younger artists received their first major museum shows during the year. One of these was Laura Owens, whose works had garnered much attention, though critics often found themselves at a loss for words when attempting to describe them. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, showed more than 20 of her airy, freewheeling works that ranged in subject from buzzing beehives and romantic landscapes populated by bespectacled monkeys, owls, and bunnies to riffs on geometric abstraction. Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara also was given his first major U.S. exhibition, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, Ohio. Nara's cartoonish renderings of children—scowling, grinning, alternately devilish and innocent—offered poignant and funny psychological portraits of a bittersweet stage of life.

      Museumgoers had the opportunity to see and compare the work of some roughly contemporaneous but very different American artists. During his 50-year career, Philip Guston changed his style from representation to abstraction and back again. A major retrospective, organized by the Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, charted Guston's early social realism of the late 1930s, his moody abstractions of the 1950s and '60s, and the stark symbolism of his disembodied heads and eyes and still-controversial hooded figures of the '70s. The show later traveled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, and the Royal Academy of Arts, London.

      By contrast, the collages of Romare Bearden (1911–88), created largely from painted paper, magazine clippings, and bits of fabric, vividly captured African American experience in the 20th century. While those works—based on his boyhood memories of life in the rural South and in New York during the Harlem Renaissance—were his signature art form, Bearden was more than an artist; he was also an art historian, teacher, composer, author, and curator, and he owned and operated an art gallery. With its presentation of its first-ever solo retrospective of a black artist and the first major retrospective of Bearden's work in more than 10 years, the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., aimed to demonstrate the full range of his contribution to American art. Another artist whose work sought to express something quintessentially American was James Rosenquist (b. 1933). Reconfiguring the iconography of advertising, Rosenquist created an extraordinary body of work that included Pop art, the movement he helped launch in the late 1950s, and his later abstractions, all painted on the grand scale that remained the former billboard painter's trademark. In addition to paintings, the exhibition offered sundry source collages (which Rosenquist made for many paintings), prints, drawings, and sculptures. The show opened in Houston, Texas, at both the Menil Collection and the Museum of Fine Arts; it then traveled to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City, the organizing venue.

      “The Age of Watteau, Chardin, and Fragonard: Masterpieces of French Genre Painting,” at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, collected about 100 examples of the type of art that was most popular in 18th-century France. These were small paintings depicting scenes of everyday existence: servants going about their daily tasks, children playing games, moments of intimate conversation, and the flirtations of aristocrats. These exquisitely painted narratives remained intriguing to the modern eye. The French painter Édouard Manet was always mindful of the legacy of Antoine Watteau and the genre painters, but he also found great inspiration in the work of the Spanish painters Diego Velázquez and Bartolomé Murillo. That France in the mid-19th century had a passion for all things Spanish was evident in the more than 200 works brought together for “Manet/Velázquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting.” The show allowed viewers to see paintings by Spanish artists such as José de Ribera and El Greco side by side with those of Eugène Delacroix, Edgar Degas, and other artists working in France and to witness firsthand how one group influenced the other. Coorganized by the Réunion des Musées Nationaux and Musée d'Orsay, Paris, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, the exhibition traveled to the Met; it was scheduled to appear at Madrid's Prado museum, where so many of the French artists had themselves come under the spell of the Spanish masterworks.

      In honour of the 100th anniversary of the artist's death, "Gauguin Tahiti," a major exhibition of 150 paintings and other items of Paul Gauguin from his last years in the Pacific, opened on October 3 at the Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, and was slated to move to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, at the end of February 2004.

      When Manny Farber was not writing the trenchant film criticism for which he became known, he was making abstract paintings and still lifes. He had his first solo exhibition in 1956 at Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York City, and his career as a painter developed steadily in tandem with his work as a writer. Some 50 of his paintings, many directly inspired by the films he saw, were on view at California's Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.

      “Seventy-seven albums, twenty-seven wives, over two hundred court appearances  …  Spiritualist. Pan-Africanist. Commune king. Composer, saxophonist, keyboardist, vocalist, dancer. Would-be candidate for the Nigerian presidency. There will never be another like him.” So a journalist described Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. The charismatic Fela, who died in 1997, was the subject of an engrossing show at the New Museum in New York City that explored his contributions as a musical pioneer as well as his vast influence over a generation of artists, including Sanford Biggers, Kendell Geers, Kara Walker, and Fred Wilson, all of whom contributed works inspired by Fela to the exhibition. Music was also at the heart of Christian Marclay's videos, sculptures, and installations, more than 60 of which were shown at the UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. A synthesis of visual art and sound, Marclay's work explored the contexts and significance of listening and seeing. In his Tape Fall (1989), for example, a reel-to-reel tape recorder placed high on a ladder plays the sound of falling water. As the “waterfall” of tape unrolls from one reel, it falls to the floor where it forms a “pool,” so that the visual experience reinforces the auditory.

      An encyclopaedic survey of postwar aesthetics across tendentious political and ideological lines, “Berlin-Moscow/Moscow-Berlin 1950–2000” at Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, brought together nearly 500 works by 200 artists—including German artists such as Joseph Beuys and Bernd and Hilla Becher and Russian artists such as Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid—selected by an equally diverse group of Russian and German curators. The cross-border dialogue would continue in 2004, when the exhibition was scheduled to travel to the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

      German artist Dieter Roth never cared much for traditional venues—he would as readily show his work in a friend's apartment as in a gallery—or for ordinary materials—he made sculptures from materials such as sausage and chocolate—and in 1970 at a Los Angeles gallery he showed 40 suitcases filled with various types of cheese. Remarkably, hundreds of his works survived (though the rotting cheese was destroyed), and Roth's photographs, paintings, sculptures, and other works in a great variety of media were shown at Schaulager, Basel, Switz., in the first major exhibition of the artist's work since his death in 1998.

Meghan Dailey

Photography
      The year 2003 was one of resurgent interest in documentary and street photography. This trend was acknowledged in a groundbreaking exhibition at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York City. Entitled “Strangers: The First ICP Triennial of Photography and Video,” the show—one-third of which comprised videos and two-thirds photographs—presented the works of 40 artists worldwide. It took as its theme the changed relationship of the self to others in a new technological and global environment. Many of the pieces mined the concept of the crowd, looking at the ways in which individuals respond to one another in urban public spaces. Other work, such as that of Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra, touched on the notion of estrangement; her portraits of adolescence struck a note of uneasy empathy.

      Many of the artists in the show were contemporary photographers on the cusp of their careers. The work of Magnum photographer Luc Delahaye, whose panoramic image Jenin Refugee Camp (2002) featured prominently in the triennial, was exhibited in a solo show called “History” at Ricco/Maresca Gallery (New York City) in February and March. In a traveling show that had originated at the Musée d'Art Contemporain de Montréal in 2001, works by Iranian-born Shirin Neshat examined the female experience in contemporary Islamic society; her first major solo exhibition in North America included stops at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minn., in 2002 and at the Miami (Fla.) Art Museum and the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, Texas, in 2003. The exhibition consisted of 12 large-format photographs, six audiovisual works, and two recent films. South African portraitist Zwelethu Mthethwa showed at Jack Shainman Gallery (New York City) in February and later was featured in “Interior Portraits: Zwelethu Mthethwa Photographs” at the Cleveland (Ohio) Museum of Art.

      In “Cruel and Tender: The Real in the Twentieth-Century Photograph,” the Tate Modern, London, presented an exhibition exclusively composed of photography for the first time in its history. It included the work of 24 artists displayed in “sympathetic clusters” rather than chronologically. “Cruel and Tender” shared two notable artists, Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Dijkstra, with the ICP Triennial. During the summer diCorcia's pivotal exhibition, “Philip-Lorca diCorcia: A Storybook Life,” opened at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, the first stop in a traveling show scheduled to visit Centre Nationale de la Photographie, Paris; Museum Folkwang, Essen, Ger.; and Centro de Arte de Salamanca (Spain) in 2004. The show received much popular acclaim when it was exhibited at PaceWildenstein Chelsea in New York City. The artist's book, A Storybook Life, contained all 76 exhibition images. Dijkstra's multiple portraits of a young female Israeli soldier and a French Foreign Legion officer were exhibited at the Marian Goodman Gallery (New York City) in the fall. The book Rineke Dijkstra: Beach Portraits (2002) presented the photos for which she first received recognition in the 1990s.

      The influence of German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher, the legendary instructors of Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky, was ubiquitous throughout the exhibition “Cruel and Tender.” Famous for their formalist approach, the Bechers received the Getty Images Lifetime Achievement Award, one of the highest honours presented at the 19th Annual Infinity Awards in New York City. Their work was also notably featured at DIA:Beacon (Beacon, N.Y.), a venue that opened in May 2003 to house the permanent collection of large-scale and site-specific work of the DIA Art Foundation. “Bernd and Hilla Becher: Industrial Landscapes” was on view at Sonnabend Gallery (New York City) and Fraenkel Gallery (San Francisco). The Bechers also figured in the group show “German Photography: From the Bauhaus to the Bechers” at Lawrence Miller Gallery (New York City) from January to March. The traveling show of their student Struth, organized by the Dallas (Texas) Museum of Art, visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. In 2003 Photo District News (PDN) named Struth's portrait of painter Gerhard Richter and his family, published in The New York Times Magazine, one of the best photos of the year.

      In a technical fashion similar to that of Struth and an aesthetic in tune with the American topologists of the 1970s, the work of Edward Burtynsky was exhibited in several solo shows, including “Manufactured Landscapes: The Photographs of Edward Burtynsky,” National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; “In the Wake of Progress: Images of the Industrial Landscape,” Canadian embassy, Washington, D.C.; “Oil Fields,” Charles Cowles Gallery, New York City; and “Before the Flood,” Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco.

      Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris, dedicated to preserving the master photographer's legacy, was inaugurated in 2003. Its opening was accompanied by an exhibition showing 250 images by Cartier-Bresson at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France; it traveled to Caixa-Forum, Barcelona, Spain, and was scheduled to travel to Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, and the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome. Cartier-Bresson turned 95 in August.

      In a similar documentary tradition, William Eggleston's exhibition “Los Alamos” presented his newly recovered photographs of the American South from 1965 to 1974. The exhibition traveled from Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Ger., to Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto, Port.; Museet for Samtidskunst, Oslo; the Louisiana Museum of Art, Humlebæk, Den.; Albertina, Vienna; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Dallas Museum of Modern Art. A number of images from the exhibition were published in William Eggleston: Los Alamos, and one was chosen by PDN as one of the year's best photos.

      American photographer Joel Sternfeld, whose work was noted for its sense of drama and use of intense colour, had his first solo show in the U.K. at the Photographer's Gallery, London, in January. That gallery also administered the $30,000 Citibank Photography Prize, awarded in 2003 to German fashion photographer Jürgen Teller, whose exhibition “Daddy You're So Cute” was shown at Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York City.

      Portrait photographer Yousuf Karsh, who died in 2002 at age 93, was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame, Oklahoma City, Okla. Another noteworthy portraitist, Rosalie (“Rollie”) Thorne McKenna, died on June 15, 2003, at age 84. Dylan Thomas, Truman Capote, W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, and Robert Frost were among the many literary figures she captured. McKenna's work was the subject of a 2001 retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery, London. The publication of John Coplans's Body Parts: A Self-Portrait coincided with the artist's death.

      In the auction world, Christie's of London sold Athenes (Temple de Jupiter), a daguerreotype by Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey, for $810,000, a world record for a photograph sold at auction.

Marla Caplan

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also called  visual art 

      a visual object or experience consciously created through an expression of skill or imagination. The term art encompasses diverse media such as painting, sculpture, printmaking, drawing, decorative arts, photography, and installation.

      The various visual arts exist within a continuum that ranges from purely aesthetic purposes at one end to purely utilitarian purposes at the other. Such a polarity of purpose is reflected in the commonly used terms artist and artisan, the latter understood as one who gives considerable attention to the utilitarian. This should by no means be taken as a rigid scheme, however. Even within one form of art, motives may vary widely; thus a potter or a weaver may create a highly functional work that is at the same time beautiful—a salad bowl, for example, or a blanket—or may create works that have no purpose beyond being admired. In cultures such as Africa and Oceania, a definition of art that encompasses this continuum has existed for centuries. In the West, however, by the mid-18th century the development of academies for painting and sculpture established a sense that these media were “art” and therefore separate from more utilitarian media. This separation of art forms continued among art institutions until the late 20th century, when such rigid distinctions began to be questioned.

      Particularly in the 20th century, a different sort of debate arose over the definition of art. A seminal moment in this discussion occurred in 1917, when Dada artist Marcel Duchamp (Duchamp, Marcel) submitted a porcelain urinal entitled Fountain to a public exhibition in New York City. Through this act, Duchamp put forth a new definition of what constitutes a work of art: he implied that it is enough for an artist to deem something “art” and put it in a publicly accepted venue. Implicit within this gesture was a challenge to the established art institutions—such as museums, exhibiting groups, and galleries—that have the power to determine what is and is not considered art. Such intellectual experimentation continued throughout the 20th century in movements such as conceptual art and minimalism. By the turn of the 21st century, a variety of new media (e.g., video art) further challenged traditional definitions of art.

      Art is treated in a number of articles. For general discussions of the foundations, principles, practice, and character of art, see aesthetics. See also art conservation and restoration.

      For the technical and theoretical aspects of traditional categories of art, see drawing, painting, printmaking, and sculpture. For technical and historical discussions of decorative arts and furnishings, see basketry, enamelwork, floral decoration, furniture, glassware, interior design, lacquerwork, metalwork, mosaic, pottery, rug and carpet, stained glass, and tapestry. See photography (photography, history of) for a complete history of that medium.

      For treatments of the various arts as practiced by specific peoples and cultures, see art, African; arts, Central Asian (Central Asian arts); arts, East Asian; art and architecture, Egyptian; arts, Islamic (Islamic arts); arts, Native American (Native American art); art and architecture, Oceanic; arts, South Asian (South Asian arts); arts, Southeast Asian (Southeast Asian arts); painting, Western; and sculpture, Western (Western sculpture).

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Universalium. 2010.

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  • art — art …   Dictionnaire des rimes

  • art — [ ar ] n. m. • Xe, d ab. « science, savoir », puis « moyen, méthode »; lat. ars, artis; souv. fém. jusqu au XVIe I ♦ Ensemble de moyens, de procédés réglés qui tendent à une fin. 1 ♦ (1160) Vx Moyen d obtenir un résultat (par l effet d aptitudes… …   Encyclopédie Universelle

  • art — 1. (ar ; le t ne se lie pas : l art oratoire, dites : ar oratoire, et non l ar t oratoire ; au pluriel l s ne se lie pas, les arts et les sciences, dites : les ar et les sciences ; cependant cette liaison plaît à quelques uns, qui disent : les ar …   Dictionnaire de la Langue Française d'Émile Littré

  • art — ART. s. m. Méthode pour faire un ouvrage selon certaines règles. Art noble. Art vil et abject. Savoir un art. Savoir l art. Les termes de l art. Les préceptes de l art. Les règles de l art, les procédés de l art. Les secrets de l art. Le sublime… …   Dictionnaire de l'Académie Française 1798

  • art — ART. s. m. La regle & la methode de bien faire un ouvrage. Arts liberaux. Arts mechaniques. les sept Arts liberaux. Art noble. Art vil & abjet. sçavoir un Art. sçavoir l Art. les termes de l Art. les preceptes de l Art. reduire quelque chose en… …   Dictionnaire de l'Académie française

  • art — n 1 Art, skill, cunning, artifice, craft can mean the faculty of performing or executing expertly what is planned or devised. Art is not actually a comprehensive term but is so variable in its implications that it is interchangeable with any one… …   New Dictionary of Synonyms

  • art — art; art·ful; art·ful·ly; art·ful·ness; art·i·ly; art·i·ness; art·ist; art·ist·ry; art·less; art·less·ly; art·less·ness; art·o·gra·vure; land·art; ly·art; stew·art·ite; stew·art·ry; stew·art; tu·art; art·mo·bile; stu·art; …   English syllables

  • art — Art, Ars, Artificium, Techna. Ars liberaux, Artes ingenuae. L art de tailler images, Statuaria ars. Art magique et d enchanterie, Magice, magices, Magia, magiae. Appartenant à art Magique, Magicus. Art de Musique, Musica ars. L art de nombrer et… …   Thresor de la langue françoyse

  • Art — ([aum]rt), n. [F. art, L. ars, artis, orig., skill in joining or fitting; prob. akin to E. arm, aristocrat, article.] 1. The employment of means to accomplish some desired end; the adaptation of things in the natural world to the uses of life;… …   The Collaborative International Dictionary of English

  • Art — bezeichnet: Art (Biologie), Grundeinheit der biologischen Systematik Art (Philosophie), Begriff, der aus gemeinsamen Merkmalen von Individualbegriffen gebildet ist Art (Texas), Ort in den USA art – Das Kunstmagazin, deutsche Zeitschrift Art… …   Deutsch Wikipedia

  • ART — o ART puede referirse a: Arte Arte, en varios idiomas. Art decó, un movimiento de diseño popular a partir de 1920 hasta 1939 Art rock, un amplio subgénero de la música rock que se caracteriza por su tendencia experimental. Op art, un movimiento… …   Wikipedia Español

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