What Is the Relationship Between Visual Arts and Humanities

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Didactics

The humanities are a group of academic subjects united by a commitment to studying aspects of the human being condition and a qualitative approach that by and large prevents a single epitome from coming to define any discipline. The humanities are commonly distinguished from the social sciences and the natural sciences and include subjects such every bit the classics, languages, literature, music, philosophy, the performing arts, religion and the visual arts. Other subjects at times included as humanities in some parts of the world include archaeology, area studies, communications, cultural studies and history, although these are often regarded as social sciences elsewhere.

The philosopher Plato

Branches

Arts

The arts are usually considered as part of the humanities. These include visual arts such equally painting and sculpture, as well as performing arts such as theatre and dance, and literature. Other humanities such as linguistic communication are sometimes considered to be part of the arts, for example as the language arts.

Visual fine art

History

"Quatrain on Heavenly Mountain" by

Emperor Gaozong

The smashing traditions in fine art have a foundation in the art of ane of the ancient civilizations:

• Ancient Egypt,
• Greece and Rome,
• Cathay,
• Bharat, or
• Mesopotamia.

Ancient Greek fine art saw a veneration of the homo physical form and the evolution of equivalent skills to prove musculature, poise, beauty and anatomically correct proportions. Ancient Roman art depicted gods as idealized humans, shown with feature distinguishing features (i.e. Zeus' thunderbolt).

In Byzantine and Gothic art of the Middle Ages, the say-so of the church building insisted on the expression of biblical and not textile truths.

The Renaissance saw the return to valuation of the cloth world, and this shift is reflected in art forms, which show the corporeality of the human body, and the 3-dimensional reality of landscape.

Eastern art has mostly worked in a mode akin to Western medieval art, namely a concentration on surface patterning and local colour (meaning the manifestly colour of an object, such as basic red for a scarlet robe, rather than the modulations of that colour brought about past lite, shade and reflection). A feature of this style is that the local colour is frequently defined by an outline (a contemporary equivalent is the drawing). This is evident in, for instance, the art of India, Tibet and Japan.

An creative person'due south palette

Religious Islamic fine art forbids iconography, and expresses religious ideas through geometry instead.

The physical and rational certainties depicted by the 19th-century Enlightenment were shattered not just past new discoveries of relativity by Einstein and of unseen psychology by Freud, simply as well by unprecedented technological evolution.

Increasing global interaction during this time saw an equivalent influence of other cultures into Western art.

Classics

The classics, in the Western bookish tradition, refer to cultures of classical antiquity, namely the Ancient Greek and Roman cultures. Classical study was formerly considered i of the cornerstones of the humanities, merely the classics declined in importance during the 20th century. Nevertheless, the influence of classical ideas in humanities such equally philosophy and literature remain stiff.

History

History is systematically collected data about the past. When used equally the proper name of a bailiwick, history refers to the written report and interpretation of the tape of humans, families, and societies. Noesis of history is often said to encompass both knowledge of past events and historical thinking skills.

Traditionally, the study of history has been considered a office of the humanities. However, in modern academia, history is increasingly classified as a social science, particularly when chronology is the focus.

Languages and literature

Shakespeare wrote some of the greatest works in English language literature.

The report of individual modern and classical languages form the backbone of modernistic study of the humanities, while the scientific report of language is known as linguistics and is a social science. Since many areas of the humanities such as literature, history and philosophy are based on language, changes in language can accept a profound outcome on the other humanities. Literature, covering a variety of uses of language including prose forms (such equally the novel), poetry and drama, as well lies at the heart of the modern humanities curriculum. College-level programs in a foreign language normally include study of important works of the literature in that language, as well as the linguistic communication itself (grammer, vocabulary, etc.).

Performing arts

The performing arts differ from the plastic arts insofar every bit the one-time uses the artist's own body, face, presence as a medium, and the latter uses materials such equally clay, metallic or paint which tin can be molded or transformed to create some art object.

Performing arts include acrobatics, busking, comedy, dance, magic, music, opera, film, juggling, marching arts, such equally brass bands, and theatre.

Artists who participate in these arts in front of an audition are chosen performers, including actors, comedians, dancers, musicians, and singers. Performing arts are besides supported by workers in related fields, such as songwriting and stagecraft.

Performers often adapt their advent, such as with costumes and phase makeup, etc.

There is also a specialized form of fine art in which the artists perform their piece of work live to an audience. This is called Performance art. Most functioning fine art besides involves some form of plastic fine art, mayhap in the cosmos of props. Dance was often referred to every bit a plastic art during the Modernistic dance era.

Music

Music as an academic discipline mainly focuses on two career paths, music functioning (focused on the orchestra and the concert hall) and music education (training music teachers). Students learn to play instruments, but also report music theory, musicology, history of music and composition. In the liberal arts tradition, music is also used to broaden skills of non-musicians past education skills such as concentration and listening.

Theatre

Theatre or theatre (Greek "theatron", θέατρον) is the branch of the performing arts concerned with acting out stories in front of an audition using combinations of speech, gesture, music, dance, sound and spectacle — indeed any one or more elements of the other performing arts. In addition to the standard narrative dialogue style, theatre takes such forms as opera, ballet, mime, kabuki, classical Indian dance, Chinese opera, mummers' plays, and pantomime.

Trip the light fantastic toe

Dance (from Quondam French dancier, perhaps from Frankish) by and large refers to human being movement either used as a grade of expression or presented in a social, spiritual or performance setting.

Trip the light fantastic toe is likewise used to describe methods of non-verbal communication (run across torso language) betwixt humans or animals ( bee trip the light fantastic, mating dance), motion in inanimate objects (the leaves danced in the wind), and certain musical forms or genres.

Choreography is the art of making dances, and the person who does this is called a choreographer.

Definitions of what constitutes dance are dependent on social, cultural, aesthetic artistic and moral constraints and range from functional motion (such as Folk dance) to codified, virtuoso techniques such as ballet. In sports, gymnastics, figure skating and synchronized swimming are dance disciplines while Martial arts ' kata' are often compared to dances.

Religion and philosophy

Nearly historians trace the ancestry of religious conventionalities to the Neolithic Menstruation. Most religious conventionalities during this fourth dimension catamenia consisted of worship of a Mother Goddess, a Sky Father, and also worship of the Sun and the Moon as deities. (see too Sun worship)

New philosophies and religions arose in both east and due west, particularly around the 6th century BC. Over time, a nifty variety of religions developed around the earth, with Hinduism and Buddhism in India, Zoroastrianism in Persia existence some of the earliest major faiths.

In the east, three schools of thought were to dominate Chinese thinking until the modern day. These were Taoism, Legalism, and Confucianism. The Confucian tradition, which would attain predominance, looked not to the strength of law, but to the ability and example of tradition for political morality. In the west, the Greek philosophical tradition, represented by the works of Plato and Aristotle, was diffused throughout Europe and the Centre E past the conquests of Alexander of Macedon in the 4th century BC.

Abrahamic religions are those religions deriving from a common ancient Semitic tradition and traced past their adherents to Abraham (circa 1900 BCE), a patriarch whose life is narrated in the Hebrew Bible/ Former Testament, and equally a prophet in the Quran and also called a prophet in Genesis 20:vii. This forms a large group of related largely monotheistic religions, more often than not held to include Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and the Bahá'í Faith, and comprises near half of the world'south religious adherents.

History of the humanities

In the West, the study of the humanities can exist traced to aboriginal Hellenic republic, as the footing of a broad education for citizens. During Roman times, the concept of the seven liberal arts evolved, involving grammer, rhetoric and logic (the trivium), along with arithmetics, geometry, astronomia and music (the quadrivium). These subjects formed the bulk of medieval instruction, with the emphasis existence on the humanities as skills or "ways of doing."

A major shift occurred during the Renaissance, when the humanities began to be regarded as subjects to exist studied rather than practised, with a corresponding shift abroad from the traditional fields into areas such as literature and history. In the 20th century, this view was in turn challenged past the postmodernist motility, which sought to redefine the humanities in more than egalitarian terms suitable for a democratic society.

Humanities today

Humanities in the Usa

Many American colleges and universities believe in the notion of a broad "liberal arts education", which places an emphasis on all college students studying the humanities in addition to their specific expanse of study. Prominent proponents of liberal arts in the United States take included Mortimer J. Adler and Eastward.D. Hirsch.

The 1980 U.s. Rockefeller Commission on the Humanities described the humanities in its report, The Humanities in American Life:

Through the humanities we reflect on the key question: What does it mean to be human? The humanities offer clues but never a complete answer. They reveal how people accept tried to brand moral, spiritual, and intellectual sense of a world in which irrationality, despair, loneliness, and death are as conspicuous as birth, friendship, hope, and reason.

Criticism of the traditional humanities/liberal arts degree program has been leveled past many that see them as both expensive and relatively "useless" in the modern American job marketplace, where several years of specialized study is required in many/most job fields. This is in directly contrast to the early 20th century when approximately 3% to vi% of the public at big had a university caste, and having one was a direct path to a professional life.

Later Earth War Ii, many millions of veterans took advantage of the GI Nib. Further expansion of federal teaching grants and loans have expanded the number of adults in the United States that have attended a college or university to be at least 60% of the population. As a result, degrees in such things as literature, art history, classics, etc, are no longer viewed every bit viable career path options by many. As a upshot, many graduates discover themselves returning to school to earn some other degree or waiting much longer than average to boot off their career successfully.

Meanwhile, there are many changes and debates occurring today in the humanities:

Questioning distinctions

The very concept of the 'humanities' as a class or kind, distinct from the 'sciences', has come under repeated assail in the twentieth century. T.South. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions argued that the forces driving scientific progress often have less to do with objective inference from unbiased ascertainment than with much more value-laden sociological and cultural factors. More than recently, Richard Rorty has argued that the stardom between the sciences and the humanities is harmful to both pursuits, placing the former on an undeserved pedestal and condemning the latter to irrationality. Rorty's position requires a wholesale rejection of such traditional philosophical distinctions as those between appearance and reality, subjective and objective, replacing them with what he endorses as a new 'fuzziness'. This leads to a kind of pragmatism where" the oppositions between the humanities, the arts, and the sciences, might gradually fade away... In this situation, 'the humanities' would no longer think of themselves equally such...."

Modernism and postmodernism

Vladimir Sorokin, Russian postmodernist writer

In the United States, the late 20th century saw a challenge to the "elitism" of the humanities, which Edward Said has characterized as a "conservative philosophy of gentlemanly refinement, or sensibility." Such postmodernists argue that the humanities should become beyond the study of " dead white males" to include work by women and people of colour, and without religious bias. The French philosopher Michel Foucault has been a very influential function of this motility, stating in The Guild of Things that "nosotros tin can study only individuals, not human nature."

However some in the humanities believe that such changes may exist detrimental, as they lead to moral relativism and the concept that ane person'due south estimation is as good equally any other. The literary critic Denis Donoghue suggests that modern criticism reduces the rich symbolism of a play similar Macbeth to a simplistic "discover the villain", with Lady Macbeth regarded equally the victim of encarmine-minded, power-mad masculine society; the outcome is said to be what E. D. Hirsch Jr. refers to as declining cultural literacy.

The modernist considers that there is a canon of "great works" in literature and art which have an inherent quality, but the postmodernist argues that such ideas of greatness have been heavily biased by gender and civilization. The modernist advocates shut reading of a few works in literature, merely the postmodernist by and large favors more "extensive reading" of a large variety of works.

National institutions

President Lyndon Johnson signed the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act in 1965 , creating the National Council on the Humanities and funded the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in 1969. NEH is an contained grant-making bureau of the United States government dedicated to supporting inquiry, education, preservation, and public programs in the humanities.

NEH facilitated the cosmos of Country Humanities Councils in the 56 U.S. states and territories. Each council operates independently, defining the "humanities" in relationship to the disciplines, subjects, and values valued in the regions they serve. Councils give grant funds to individuals, scholars, and nonprofit organizations dedicated to the humanities in their region. Councils too offer diverse programs and services that respond to the needs of their communities and according to their own definitions of the humanities.

Humanities in the digital historic period

Language and literature are considered to lie at the heart of the humanities, and so the affect of electronic advice is of groovy concern to those in the field. The immediacy of modern technology and the internet speeds upwards communication, but may threaten "deferred" forms of advice such as literature and "dumb down" linguistic communication. The library is also changing rapidly as bookshelves are replaced past computer terminals. The humanities will take to suit rapidly to these changes, though it is unlikely that the traditional pen and newspaper will disappear altogether.

Terminology

• Scholars working in the humanities are sometimes described as humanists. But that term besides describes the philosophical position of humanism, which some antihumanist scholars in the humanities pass up.

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Source: https://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~rwest/wikispeedia/wpcd/wp/h/Humanities.htm

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