Part 1: Artistic Vision or How Art Pursues Meaning.
Q: What are the basic questions of Art?
A: Who, what, where, when, how, & why.
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Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items (often with symbolic significance) in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect.
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Art is one of the three basic human inquries. Art was traditionally used to refer to any skill or mastery. This conception changed during the Romantic period, when art came to be seen as "a special faculty of the human mind to be classified with religion and science".
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Art encompasses a diverse range of human activities, creations, and modes of expression, including music, literature, film, photography, sculpture, printmaking, painting, etc.
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Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy that explores the meaning of art, while other disciplines such as art history and psychology analyze its relationship with humans and culture.
“Why do you try to understand art?
Do you try to understand the song of a bird?”
- Pablo Picasso
Purpose of Art.
Art has had many different functions throughout its history, making its purpose difficult to abstract or quantify to any single concept. This does not imply that the purpose of Art is "vague", but that it has had many unique and different reasons for being created. Some of these functions of Art are provided in the following outline. In this model the different purposes of art are outlined as motivated and non-motivated.
Non-motivated (non-functional) purposes of art are integral to being human, transcend the individual, or do not fulfill a specific external purpose.
Motivated (functional) purposes of art refer to intentional, conscious actions on the part of the artists or creator.
The many functions of art are not mutually exclusive, as many of them may overlap.