UNIT 10: ARTS

Ex.1. Study the text:

The arts

In earlier times the word art referred to any useful skill. Shoemaking, metalworking, medicine, painting, sculpture, music, agriculture, and even warfare were all once classified as arts. In that broader sense art has been defined as a skill in making or doing.

The earlier understanding of art can be seen in the Latin and Greek words that were used to describe it. The Latin word ars (plural, artes) was applied to any skill or knowledge that was needed to produce something.

The separation of arts originated in ancient Greek and Roman attitudes toward different types of skill. They distinguished between the liberal arts and the servile arts. The liberal arts referred to the seven courses: grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. The servile arts involved such skills as metalworking, painting, sculpture, or shoemaking. The products of these arts provided material comforts and conveniences, but such arts were not considered beautiful or noble.

Aesthetics and Beauty

The concept of beaux-arts, a term that was coined in France during the 18th century, is expressed in English as fine or "beautiful" arts. This usage is the decisive clue to the separation of the fine arts from the useful arts and technology in the 1700s. The arts of the beautiful were separated from the arts of the useful because of the belief that the fine arts had a special quality: they served to give pleasure to an audience.

Aesthetics

Aesthetics is the study, or science, of the beautiful. The word is derived from the Greek aisthetikos, meaning "of sense perception." The term aesthetics was coined by a German philosopher, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten in a two-volume work on the subject 'Aesthetica Acroamatica' (1750 to 1758). This unfinished work established aesthetics as a branch of philosophy. Immanuel Kant retained Baumgarten's use of the term to apply to the entire field of sensory knowledge. Kant's 'Critique of Aesthetic Judgment' proved to be the fundamental work on the subject.

For Baumgarten, aesthetics had two emphases. First, it was a study of the theory of beauty; second, it was a theory of art. These two emphases served to distinguish the fine arts from the other activities of humankind.

Since the late 18th century aesthetics has become a large field of study and a discipline of its own. It attempts to classify the arts--to understand, for example, what such diverse things as ballet and sculpture have in common that allows them to be categorized together as fine arts. The study of aesthetics also tries to describe the forms and styles of the various arts.

Beauty

Unlike aesthetics beauty has been a matter of thoughtful discussion and disagreement for many centuries. For Greek philosopher Plato, true beauty was an ideal beyond human perception; like truth and goodness, it was eternal. Beauty that was visible could not be absolutely beautiful, he believed, because it was subject to change, growth, and decay.

During the late Middle Ages, St. Thomas Aquinas tried to define beauty as "something pleasant to behold." In imitation of the Greeks, he noted that "beauty consists in due proportion, for the senses delight in things duly proportioned."

As a definition the words of Aquinas are unsuccessful. That is one of the two chief problems with beauty--the inability to give a clear definition that everyone can understand and agree upon. The second problem is equally vexing: are there real standards of beauty, or is it only a matter of what the audience thinks? The familiar statement, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder," is the most common way of saying that what is beautiful depends on the viewer.

apply liberal servile decisive clue audience derived from sense perception volume

Применять Свободный Рабский Решающий Ключ Аудитория Полученный Восприятие смысла Объем(издание)

sensory Judgment Emphasis (pl. –es) Attempts Eternal Proportion delight vexing beholder

Сенсорный Суждение Ударение, акцент Попытки Вечный Пропорция Восхищение Досаждающий Наблюдатель

Ex.2. Answer the questions:

1. How did ancient Romans and Greeks define arts?

2. What is the difference between the liberal and servile arts?

3. How could the liberal and servile arts be defined in modern terms?

4. What is aesthetics? What are the two emphases of aesthetics?

5. What are the problems of beauty?

6. How do you understand beauty?

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