Art history Literature & Language Essay Research Paper (Essay Sample)

NAME
INSTITUTION
TITLE
INTRODUCTION
Art is an evaluative term which derives from specific cultural histories, conventions and linguistic usages. Both the Western concept of fine art and the academic discipline of art history which arose from it, have their origins in the assumptions, values and aspirations of the European Enlightenment. Wallach, Alan (1998)
A broader definition of art encompasses those activities which produce works with aesthetic value, including film making, performance and architecture. For example, architecture has always had a close connection to painting, drawing and sculpture, two instances being the classical revival in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and the Bauhaus aesthetic of the 1930s which frequently integrated fine art with design, craft and architecture
Theories of aesthetics – what art was generally considered to be and what it should set out to do – whether understood as mimetic representation, expression, significant form, aesthetic response or situated as a pragmatic institutional category – are closely and necessarily interwoven with the history, institutionalization, and avant-garde practices of art itself. This symbiotic relationship stretches from the eighteenth century to the postmodern, and its legacy is still very much with us. Hegemonic within America and Europe, these ideas and their related institutions typically marginalized the aesthetic practices of non-Western countries and peoples, whilst frequently appropriating the art of the colonized to a pre-existing template of the primitive. A largely formalist and connoisseurial pursuit throughout much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the academic discipline of art history was radicalized in the 1970s, registering the impact of various continental theories, including gender, psychoanalytic, Marxist and poststructuralist critiques which systematically interrogated and challenged extant assumptions and biases. Williams, Raymond (1988) In some cases, these ideas reconnected, albeit in new contexts, with earlier social and political art histories which had been all but erased by formalism, or marginalized by intervening Cold War priorities.