What is Art? "For Plato, visual art was mimesis- Greek for 'imitation' -and techne, or 'skill'. And beauty was an essential ideal that expressed the truth of things. But beauty and truth, in Plato's view, were of a higher order than art. In fact, he had little interest in works of art because they were neither useful imitations of essential ideas nor the ideas themselves." imitation and skill (key) destructive passions the power of art to repair the deficits of nature art must have character art derives from an ideal route to knowledge we can learn from it makes us delighted in learning itself contain truth and beauty, form and structure "depends partly on our perception of what the notion of 'art' represented to a particular time. Since the identities of artists from certain societies and time periods are unknown, one function of art history is to determine attribution--that is, to match the names of artists with the works of art from a specific time and place." "From the 19th century, various methodological approaches to works of art have developed, and these provide us with different ways of thinking about mages, artists, and even critics." art derives from an inborn human impulse to create depicted mythologies BAD structures do not express religious or political ideas does not satisfy the wishes of patrons who commission the work do not have style Decorations-GOOD Works of art does not necessarily narrate and may not represent recognizable figures and objects nonobjective, nonfigurative, and nonrepresentational The ability to observe nature and turn into art requires a kind of imaginative metaphorical thinking--a way of describing one thing in terms of another creating a creative process
comparable process illusion culture is a prerequisite for artistic activity Greek mythology requires arts and crafts which is credited with having civilized the human race modern and mythological views evident relationship of the creative arts to human evolution resonates with the myth of Arachne's challenge; acknowledging talent that is inspired in divine. there is a story