How art has positively influenced and/or crafted our society today - Essay Example

? 4 How art has positively influenced and/or crafted our society today Many years ago a word “art” used to mean any kind of mastery that was peculiar and higher in comparison with others (the art of thinking, the art of war and so forth). In general sense, it means masterfulness from the aesthetic viewpoint, and things, created by means of art – various pieces of art that, on the one hand, differ from nature creations and, on the other hand – from the inventions of science, trade or technical innovations. Besides, the borders between all these fields of human activity are very blurry, because the power of art is really important for grand achievements of mankind. Materialistic and mental sources of art can be observed in different phenomena: fantasy (romanticism), striving for changes (Sheller) or imitation (Aristotle, contemporary naturalism), striving for symbolical depiction (German idealism, expressionism) and in lots of other things. Wollheim once said that art is “one of the most elusive of the traditional problems of human culture"(Wollheim, 1998). Without art no civilized society can exist. It is difficult and even impossible to underestimate the significance of art in our life and its integrity with human society. “Art can bring awareness to people. It is a powerful means of presenting truths about humankind that cannot be expressed any other way. Art also connects people in a society by presenting an idea that everyone can relate to in a universal way. The awareness that comes from art will only lead to a better society if the people take action based on the ideas they discover in art” (Liou Ming Law, 2002). Still, all these definitions fall into category of figurative ones. It is important that art also turns to be a special form of social consciousness and mental activity; its specific is in reflecting the reality by means of artistic images. In practice, people acquire and developed some esthetic perception, in which various existing phenomena are reflected and treated as beautiful or ugly, tragic or funny, that is to say, esthetically. People of art represent their aesthetic views by means of different material tools (paints, sounds, words, etc.) and thus, they become pieces of art. Any art is directed only to the present, but also to the past and future, to the world of fantasy and dreams. Very often we become witnesses of such moments, when children are reaching for some beautiful picture, trying to touch it, to feel it; moreover, people in their childhood adore painting, drawing and sculpting. Children, being more sensitive and creative, study the world with the help of art, they can demonstrate their world perception by creating various pieces of art, they ask and answer questions, they communicate by means of art. So, people who happened to approach the source of inspiration can also communicate by means of art. The famous Russian writer Lev Tolstoy described art as a use of indirect means to communicate from one person to another (Lev Tolstoy, 1897). Some scientists assert that the art appeared simultaneously with civilization. But even at the dawn of civilization people started drawing at the walls of the caves. So, in ancient time people already had the desire to create something qualitatively new, something especial, something that could single them out of the rest. But time change as well as social consciousness does. People ceased being satisfied with primitive cloths and dwelling, since the time immemorial people reach for improving their lives, changing them for the better. Thus, Liou Ming Law states in his article “Should Art reflect Society?” that “with each civilization, we form a society, a group of people with individual characteristics, philosophies and cultures within which all sorts of ideas, thoughts and opinions are always brought to challenge and evaluation. These may be recorded in literature or in different forms of expression we known as Art.” (Liou Ming Law, 2002). Any personal or social attitude to world is assessed from the positions of main aesthetical categories, such as “beautiful”, “ironical”, “tragic” and “sublime”. In its aesthetical assessment art proceeds from certain aesthetical ideal, though this ideal can be perceived only subconsciously or even remains unperceived. The comprehension of beauty and other categories, arising from it, is a basis of the ideal. It doesn’t mean that the beautiful remains the only obligatory and, moreover, the only object of art. The beauty is - and this is what distinguishes art from other forms of social consciousness - fundamental and principal criteria in assessing the reflected life. The aesthetic approach differentiates art and religion, which also remains a special type of spiritual and practical development of the world. But there is no aesthetics at heart of religion, there is only a strong belief in sacred, supernatural, in God. At the same time, the moral orientation of religion was and still remains a cause of close connection between arts and religion throughout their historical development. From the very beginning the art was just a form of ancient religion, the means of expression of religious beliefs. Yes, at first there was a blind reliance on Gods, on superpowers. The art served as a means, necessary for holding different religious ceremonies: people sang, and dance, and created poems, still all that creativity did not serve them. Afterwards, some people came to realize that they can sing, and dance, and create poems just for pleasure, they were able to express themselves in their creations, and they were able to share their creativity with the rest. Thus, the art became independent, it started serving people’s interests and it started moving forward. All of the above makes art a powerful factor of human development. The specific function of art is that it condenses a variety of accumulated experience of mankind in the process of living interaction with the world, rather than by mastering the finished results. This is not just the result of aesthetic cognition of phenomena, but the process of evaluation and aesthetic treatment of the knowable objective and subjective world. Liou Ming Law emphasized that “art also involves a connection between the viewer and society. Art can encourage understanding or expose misunderstandings. These are parts of the human experience that relate the individual to society. The new awareness can be a benefit to both the society and the individual. The individual gains better understanding about his or her place in society and about the society as a whole. The society will profit if the individual puts this new understanding into practice” (Liou Ming Law, 2002). Being aesthetically ordered, the world of the true art is presented as logically proportioned, harmonious, beautiful, even if low-lying events, ugly and hideous phenomena are depicted. To verify this, it suffices to recall the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch or Kaprichos Goya's etchings, full of grotesque images of human vices. The man in the true art works according to the laws of beauty. The viewer or listener, perceiving the artwork, commits an act of creative appropriation of the aesthetic object. He or she becomes implicated to the practical and spiritual experience of creative artist’s personality. This evokes the specific sense of spiritual joy and aesthetic pleasure. This pleasure inherently accompanies the act of creativity and artistic perception. Public awareness of art significance, perceiving it as a means of social education can be found in the works of ancient authors (Plato, Aristotle), in ancient aesthetics of the East (Confucius). If the medieval philosophers advanced the religious art to the forefront, the thinkers of the Renaissance emphasized the role of art in the full and free development of personality (Campanella). Representatives of the Enlightenment emphasized the moral, educational (Shaftesbury) and socio-catalytic (Diderot) functions of art. Representatives of the classical German aesthetics (Goethe, Schiller, and Hegel) treated art as an "image of freedom," as an active social force in the struggle for human emancipation. In the words of Goethe, the pathos of art is to be considered worthy of a man, who’s "every day is a fight" (Goethe, 1987). Russian revolutionary thinkers have treated the art as a "living textbook" and appreciated its function to be a "sentence" to the phenomena of reality. The question about the role of art in human life is as old as the first attempts of its theoretical understanding. However, at the dawn of aesthetic thought, often expressed in mythological form, there was no question, in fact. Indeed, our distant ancestor was sure that piercing the picture of a bison with a real or drawn arrow - meant to ensure a successful hunt, as well as performing martial dance will help to defeat the enemies. The question is what kind of doubt in practical effectiveness of art could appear, if it was organically woven into the practical life of people, it was irremovable from craft that made the world of objects and things, so necessary for the existence of people, if art was associated with magical rites, and people wanted to influence the reality surrounding them? In recent times the issue was raised repeatedly, but there was no definite answer. At the present time it is even more difficult to answer the question about the significance of art. Today all scientists’ opinions are divided into two camps. The representatives of the first one think that modern society is radically different from all previous forms of human existence. There is an epoch without standards, which does not take any models, nothing acceptable to it. All examples, samples, standards are useless. (Ortega Gasset, 1967). Today, in the world of electronic media, communication spaces, entertainment parks, where interpersonal communication is replaced and is symbolized by goods, the individual is experiencing a kind of subjectivity vacuum. He or she does not feel the national identity; we become a kind of "hollow" entity, devoid of any stable characteristics and spiritual orientation. Scientists indicate the loss of any hope not only for changing the society, but also for understanding it. The main striving is a desire to live a moment for yourself, not for the glory of the ancestors and not for future generations. We lost a sense of historical extent, - wrote American philosopher Christopher Lash, - a sense of belonging to a generation, which being born in the past, extends into the future. This determining trend in society was called as the "collective narcissism.” And for society having no future, it is normal to live the present moment, to fix attention on our "personal representation". In this case, the desire for personal survival is the only strategy. This concentration on ourselves forms the moral climate of contemporary society. Thus, the researchers belonging to the first group believe that modern man has failed to produce art for the present and future generations; he does not apply to works of art past ages, as well. And this, in turn, will lead to the art’ ceasing to exist. The representatives of the second camp say that in today's society the role of art and culture is growing as an important mechanism of self-development and self- knowledge in its interaction with the outside world as a means of accumulation and assimilation of this knowledge, as a way of creation and selection of specific value orientations for the individual and the collective people lives. Now modern society is in the so-called "transition period". A transitional development of the national consciousness leads to the fact that a wide range of people, who previously did not come into contact with the artistic culture in there spiritual development, gradually approach it and contact it. Scientists of this group believe that the world is possessed with mass culture of Western countries. But this dominance is gradually eroding. And today, many people are more than ever eager to touch the true art, not a substitute in the form of mass culture. Who is right and who's not - it's a rhetorical question. And it is clear that it is impossible to answer it. But we would like to believe that in this case the members of the second camp proved to be right. Indeed, all over the world people’s interest to the world-renowned works of art and the elite art in general is gradually growing. Art serves as an artistic program of the changing world - a world accelerating social progress based on advanced technology, and urbanization. At the same time, art is defined as a process in which there is a vital procedure of values exchanging take place; these values serve as social constructors and obtain variable, depending on time and place, character. Art tends to provoke an intellectual complicity of the viewer, awake every day’s consciousness, offering a radically new experience of world understanding. Art plays a great role in developing personality. There are empirically real and ideal value levels in the present structure of personality. Art can help to overcome this discrepancy between them, since art increases the level of personality’s consciousness, prediction of the behavior, world vision and moral choice, since the goal of true art is to promote the spiritual and creative, socio-moral and personal growth. As remarked R. Collingwood: "Art heals society from the ailment - from the corruption of consciousness" (Collingwood, 1992). Values ??of society and the individual values ??may not coincide, and here art plays the role of social-aesthetical phenomenon: works of art perform, figuratively speaking, the function of “pumping” values from socially significant to universally significant. Aesthetic theories have come to recognize the integrity of the interaction effect of art on human and on all the constituents of his or her spiritual organization. Art forms not only the mind and heart - it forms the whole person. Thus, art, as a specific and unique way of human self-realization, serves as a form of building personality, while it shows up as the only human natural shape, an artifact of vitality of the individual. At the same time, art, as a specific system of values ??and forms, affects not only individuals, but also interpersonal relations and social relations in general. In art, there is a great humanist potential created by mankind over many centuries of history. Investigation of the influence of art on personality development opens the prospect of accurate and reliable choice of ways for this personal development. So, taking everything best from the art, people became better. They created their own masterpieces; they represented their own view of beauty. Nowadays we have an opportunity to live in comfort, to use all the modern conventions without thinking about what price was actually paid for such luxury. Our contemporary society can be called a civilized and legal one. We do not live among the barbarians due to the fact that art, being the main constituent of culture and civilization, promoted the personal growth of each person, and society is people. Art may depict positive aspects of life such as love, beauty, honor, and devotion. The negative human conditions like fear, hatred, and injustice may be just as meaningful in art. It follows that a viewer will have a strong emotional response to art because the ideas expressed are universal in nature (Liou Ming Law, 2002). Works cited Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory, Oxford University Press, 1970. Print. Gombrich, Ernst. (2005). "Press statement on The Story of Art". The Gombrich Archive. Web. 18 Aplil 2011. Graham, Gordon. Philosophy of the arts: an introduction to aesthetics. Taylor & Francis, 2005. Print. Law, Liou Ming. “Art & Society Should Art Reflect Society?”. Artshole.com, 2002. Web. 17 April 2011. Novitz, David. The Boundaries of Art, Belfast NOX Press.1992. Print. Tolstoy, Leo. What Is Art?, 1897. Web. 18 April 2011. Wollheim, Richard, Art and its Objects. Oxford University Press, 1998. Print. Read More