Nowadays, in order to see inspiring works art You don't have to go to the museum. The Internet has made it possible for people to appreciate and enjoy art, providing an endless stream of masterpieces. However, finding what excites you is another matter entirely. We need to reconsider different types of art, such as artwork, sculpture, photography and installations. And it is not easy at all and takes a lot of time. Therefore, today we will bring to your attention some of the most popular trends in art in recent years. From book sculptures to breathtaking installations, these are exactly the trends that people can't stop admiring.
1. Sculptures and installations from books
From the incredible book sculptures by From Brian Dettmer and Guy Laramee to the crumbling wall sculpture by Anouk Kruithof and the intricate igloo by Miller Lagos. Never before have books been so popular in art. With more and more people switching to e-books, these works of art are doubly valued. They are a welcome reminder that, despite the fact that we live in the age of the Internet, books will always have a special place.
2. Beautiful umbrella installations
Umbrellas often lie in the closet until it rains, but lately they have been increasingly appearing in various installations around the world. Portuguese umbrellas of all colors of the rainbow, a pink installation in Bulgaria - this is not to keep people from getting wet, but to show how art can be created from ordinary objects.
3. Interactive street art
Street art is created not only for social or political purposes, but simply to please passers-by. From children riding Ernest Zacharevic's bikes to Panya Clark's subway stairs, these installations are built for interactivity. On purpose or even without knowing it, passers-by become part of the art, bringing a new dimension to an already interesting work.
4. Creativity made from thousands of things
Creativity, created from a thousand things, is always interesting. A flowing river from Luzinterruptus' books, a bright red bird created from Ran Hwang's buttons and pins, these installations show us what thousands of things can look like in the hands of patient creators. Who knew that a pixelated portrait could be done with pointillist pencils if it wasn't for Christian Faur? This is a good example of ingenuity in art.
5. Epic sculptures from Lego
While plastic bricks for kids are a classic Lego product, some designers are using them to create epic sculptures. These amazing sculptures were built very carefully, brick by brick - the Victorian Scary House, Batman's underground cave, the Roman Colosseum, the Star Wars house - they are all amazing.
6. Creativity in all colors of the rainbow
One- or two-color creations are boring - how about creations that combine all the colors of the rainbow! The creators of these installations know how to make you smile. Christopher Janney's rainbow-windowed aisle or Olaf Breuning's multicolored smoke bombs are not just beautiful to look at, they have to be experienced. Even origami and toy cars look more entertaining when arranged in a rainbow of colors.
7. Sets of little people
These photos show us how little people live. From food scenes by Christopher Boffoli to mini-kits on the streets by designer Slinkachu, these cute creations tell funny Lilliputian stories that even ordinary people can understand. This is real art, making us feel what we have never felt.
8. Thousands of LED bulbs
These installations and sculptures are best viewed at night or in a dark room. With the help of smoke and a laser, Li Hu created a creepy bed that causes mixed feelings. Makoto Tojiki hangs light bulbs on ropes, creating magnificent light sculptures of people, horses and birds. Panasonic floated 100,000 LED bulbs down the river to recreate the glow of fireflies.
9. Thread installations
Not only grandmothers use threads. Recently, more and more often they are used over vintage photographs or sculptures. Designer Perspicere pulled the threads so that they mimic paint splatters in the shape of Batman's signal. Gabriel Dawe created a stunning installation in all the colors of the rainbow by attaching a huge number of skeins of thread to the ceiling. Apparently, the threads in the design are relevant now.
10. Exciting interactive installations
Although street installations can be very good, when a designer works within four walls, this allows him to spread out wider. French designer Serge Salat invites visitors to walk through the many layers of Beyond, a multimedia experience that combines Oriental art with Western Renaissance art. Yayoi Kusama shows what happens when children are given an unlimited supply of colorful stickers. The barbican in London has recently created a rainy room where visitors won't get wet. Who wouldn't want to visit one of these installations?
Having defined art as a single phenomenon, it should be borne in mind that such “art in general” is an abstraction, an abstraction. In practice, there are various types of art, each of which has its own specifics, sets itself special tasks and has its own means to solve them. The distribution of the arts according to these general characteristics is called the classification of the arts. Classification allows a deeper understanding of the nature of an individual work related to a particular type.
First of all, arts are traditionally divided according to the way they “exist” and are perceived into temporary And spatial . Temporal arts are distinguished by the fact that works unfold and are perceived in time. A work of art in this case often turns out to be inseparable from the person: the author or performer. The temporary arts include the art of the word or poetry, dance, music, cinema. Spatial - painting, graphics, sculpture, architecture, applied arts, design. The theater occupies an intermediate place - the performance is located in a certain space, but the action unfolds in time. Most often, the theater is called a synthetic art, since it (just like cinema) combines, synthesizes the achievements of various arts - poetry, music, painting.
It should be noted that due to the diversity and complexity of the art forms, it is practically impossible to distinguish them strictly according to certain characteristics, we can only talk about the predominance of certain means of expression, forms, methods. So, dance, pantomime, theater, cinema do not fully fit into the spatio-temporal classification. An element of conventionality is also inherent in another principle of the division of arts, based on the predominance of figurativeness or expressiveness in the arsenal of artistic means.
The fine arts unconditionally include painting, graphics, sculpture. One of the key principles of creating images is the principle of imitation here - mimesis. Images are built as similarities of real objects or phenomena, they are recognizable and designed for visual perception. The image created by the artist, as it were, sends the viewer to its source - prototype or prototype . At the same time, the mental correlation of the image and prototype, art and reality often affects the aesthetic assessment of a work of fine art - looking at the picture, we involuntarily “compare” it with our own ideas about the depicted phenomena. This moment of recognition, of combining our experience with the artistic image, makes contact between the artist and the viewer possible. At the same time, the habit of seeing in art only what is familiar and recognizable sometimes creates a barrier between the viewer and a work that belongs to a bygone era or belongs to a culture with a value system different from ours. Modern fine arts (starting from the end of the 19th century) are characterized by a bias towards expressiveness. The extreme manifestation of this trend is non-objective art, which flourished in the twenties of the last century. The works of the avant-garde artists of this era, according to the method of creation and the technique used, belonged to the fine arts, and according to the nature of the images and expressive means - to the expressive ones. We can say that expressiveness has always been present in painting, sculpture, graphics, but in the twentieth century it was "brought to the surface."
The expressive arts are music, dance, and architecture. The images created by these arts do not have direct prototypes among the surrounding objects or phenomena, they can only evoke some associations. Works of music, architecture are created not on the basis of observation of specific phenomena, but on the basis of "total" impressions of reality, which the artist draws from his inner world. We can say that these arts also create images, but abstract ones. Works expressing, first of all, the inner state of the author, for all their “obscurity”, sometimes have a deep psychological impact. First of all, this applies to music - no other art is capable of acting with such force on a person’s mood, on his feelings. It is no coincidence that in many cultures, music lessons were considered as a way to arrange, harmonize the soul. The dance is also able to capture the audience, to infect with a certain mood, although the range of influence here is somewhat narrower. Therefore, he, as a rule, needs musical accompaniment. Architecture has a different effect. Architectural images are static and they are more in need of a long examination, empathy. However, the impression of architecture sometimes turns out to be deeper - a long stay of a person in a certain architectural environment can influence his internal state, creating a psychological mood.
Poetry, theater, cinema occupy an intermediate position - expressiveness and figurativeness are equally inherent in them. Such a connection is facilitated by the connection on the stage or on the screen of the achievements of other arts. However, the synthesis of theater and cinema is not only in this. The specific means of influence here is the acting of the actor, which also combines figurativeness (the actor portrays, “shows” the character) and expressiveness (various feelings are expressed by facial expressions, voice, movements). Acting is the "necessary minimum" of theatrical action, without which it cannot take place.
The situation is somewhat more complicated with poetry or verbal art. The main feature of poetry lies in its special material - the word. The word has a multifaceted impact: it carries an ideological content - a thought, creates visible pictures - images, has an expressive "corporeality" - a phoneme. Ideally, each word of a poetic text (and poetry is, as it were, an “ideal model” of literature) harmoniously combines meaning, image, and melody.
A brief review of the types of art allows us to appreciate the diversity of the sphere of artistic creativity - music and dance, theater and architecture in their own way reveal the inner world of a person, characterize the time of their creation, the culture of a particular era. However, with a historical approach to the study of artistic culture, as a rule, priority is given to fine, applied arts, and architecture. The reason for this preference lies, first of all, in the fact that spatial works are able to outlive the time of their appearance for a long time. Theatrical performances of Antiquity, the music of Ancient China are known only from descriptions. We can guess how the dances of the people of the Paleolithic era looked like, based on ethnographic data, and monuments of fine art that keep the warmth of the hands of our distant ancestors directly appear before our eyes. Thanks to the preserved works of architecture, painting, sculpture, we can see the remains of ancient cities, the faces of the great people of the past, we can imagine what the representatives of bygone cultures admired and what they aspired to.
It is also significant that the perception of spatial arts does not require a significant investment of time, acquaintance with the monuments of fine art allows you to quickly get an idea of the cultural image of the era. Modern technology of printing and digital processing of visual information allows you to see the famous masterpieces of painting with minimal color distortion. The situation is somewhat more complicated with three-dimensional spatial arts - sculpture and architecture. Their full perception requires a change of point of view. However, here, too, the use of several photographs allows one to get an idea of the artist's intention and its embodiment in the material.
The complexity of the perception of works of fine art and architecture, in comparison with poetry, lies in the fact that they use their own conditional language - the language of line, color, volume, the understanding of which requires some preparation. However, this "shortcoming" of the visual arts also has its positive side - works of architecture, monuments of applied art, painting, unlike works of literature, do not need translation, their conditional language is international, it, to a certain extent, steps over barriers, bringing epochs closer , countries and civilizations. The prehistoric era or ancient cultures, whose writing cannot be read, are known to us thanks to the preserved artifacts, of which the fine art monuments are the most informative for a culturologist.
When studying world art, we will also mainly rely on monuments of architecture, sculpture, painting, if possible and to the extent necessary, supplementing their consideration with examples from the history of music, theater, and literature.
However, before turning to the historical consideration of artistic culture, it is necessary to familiarize yourself with the specific language of fine art, as well as with the division into types and genres adopted in it. This information is summarized in Table 1 below.
Table 1
Types and genres of fine art.
The primary form of art was a special syncretic(undivided) complex of creative activity. Everything was merged together in a single ritual action. Later, separate types of art began to stand out from this syncretic action.
Kinds of art- these are historically established forms of artistic reflection of the world, using special means to build an image - sound, color, body movement, word, etc. Each type of art has its own special varieties - genera and genres, which together provide a variety of artistic attitudes to reality. Let us briefly consider the main types of art and some of their varieties.
Literature uses verbal and written means to build images. There are three main types of literature - drama, epic and lyrics, and numerous genres - tragedy, comedy, novel, story, poem, elegy, short story, essay, feuilleton, etc.
Music uses audio. Music is divided into vocal (intended for singing) and instrumental. Genres of music - opera, symphony, overture, suite, romance, sonata, etc.
Dance uses means of plastic movements to build images. Allocate ritual, folk, ballroom,
modern dances, ballet. Directions and styles of dance - waltz, tango, foxtrot, samba, polonaise, etc.
Painting displays reality on a plane by means of color. Genres of painting - portrait, still life, landscape, as well as everyday, animalistic (image of animals), historical genres.
Architecture forms a spatial environment in the form of structures and buildings for human life. It is divided into residential, public, landscape gardening, industrial, etc. There are also architectural styles - Gothic, Baroque, Rococo, Art Nouveau, Classicism, etc.
Sculpture creates works of art that have volume and three-dimensional shape. Sculpture is round (bust, statue) and relief (convex image). The size is divided into easel, decorative and monumental.
Arts and Crafts related to application needs. This includes art objects that can be used in everyday life - dishes, fabrics, tools, furniture, clothes, jewelry, etc.
Theater organizes a special stage action through the play of actors. The theater can be dramatic, opera, puppet, etc.
Circus presents a spectacular and entertaining action with unusual, risky and funny numbers in a special arena. These are acrobatics, balancing act, gymnastics, horse riding, juggling, magic tricks, pantomime, clowning, animal training and so on.
Movie is the development of theatrical action based on modern technical audiovisual means. The types of cinematography include fiction, documentary films, animation. By genre, comedies, dramas, melodramas, adventure films, detectives, thrillers, etc. are distinguished.
Photo fixes documentary visual images with the help of technical means - optical and chemical or digital. The genres of photography correspond to the genres of painting.
Stage includes small forms of performing arts - dramaturgy, music, choreography, illusions, circus performances, original performances, etc.
Design is a design activity aimed at improving the life of each person by creating a constructive ergonomic image of a holistic, aesthetic environment and objects that make up this environment. Design is the design of objects in which the form corresponds to their purpose.
Graphics, radio art, etc. can be added to the listed types of art.
Each type, genus or genre reflects a particular side or facet of human life, but taken together, these components of art give a comprehensive artistic picture of the world.
The need for artistic creation or enjoyment of works of art increases along with the growth of a person's cultural level. Art becomes the more necessary, the further a person is separated from the animal state.
In modern art, more than 400 types are distinguished. Its main types are fiction, music, fine and declarative and applied arts, architecture, theater and cinema. Each of the types included in the system of art has its own specifics, allowing the most complete and emotional reflection of certain aspects of life. It is with this that their various relationships with each other, their place and role in the spiritual culture and life of society are connected.
Literature occupies a special place in the system of art. Literature got its name from the word "litera" - "letter". Of course, not everything written is literature. Literature as art will be treated only as works that essentially contain artistic images and have an aesthetic impact on readers. There are also special names for them - fiction, fiction (from the French belles-lettres - "fine literature").
The history of literature dates back to ancient times, to folklore. With the advent of writing and printing, literature turned into a phenomenon of written and printed creativity, and the very term "literature", starting from the 18th century. displaced the previously existing concepts of "poetry" and "poetic art".
Literature is a written form of the art of the word. The word is its main expressive and pictorial means. In the pictorial and expressive possibilities of the word, its emotionality and persuasiveness, in the fullness of the coverage of life lies the power of literature and its meaning.
Fiction is usually divided into three types - epic, drama, lyrics.
Epic literature includes the genres of the novel, short story, short story, and essay. Their specific feature is the narration combined with the monologues and dialogues of the characters.
Lyrical works include poetic genres - an elegy, a sonnet, an ode, a madrigal, a poem, in which the main subject of reflection is the internal state, feelings and mood of a person.
Drama is meant to be staged. Dramatic genres include drama proper, tragedy, comedy, farce, tragicomedy, etc. In dramatic works, the plot and characters are revealed through dialogues and monologues.
At the dawn of its appearance, music was organically connected with the word.
Music (from Greek music, literally - the art of the muses) is an art form that uses sound images as a means of embodying reality and human feelings. The musical image is based on intonation, which goes back to the intonation of human speech, but is incomparably wider and richer than it. Important components of musical expressiveness, in addition to intonation, are melody, mode, harmony, rhythm, meter, tempo, dynamic shades, and instrumentation.
Music is able to express all shades of emotions, moods, experiences, their movement and changes. It has an unusually strong and direct effect on the emotional sphere of a person, unites his feelings and thoughts in a single impulse. Music with amazing fullness can reveal the inner world of a person. Tension, the strength of feelings, their dynamics in music are often conveyed better, fuller and more subtle than in a verbal description. A remarkable feature of music is that, while determining the general direction of experiences, it at the same time evokes an individual image in the soul of each listener, corresponding to his mood and feelings.
Music allows you to express not only the development of human feelings and experiences, but also the deepest thoughts of the composer. In this regard, the possibilities of symphonic and instrumental music, which are not always easy to perceive, are especially great.
The main genres of music, in addition to symphonic and instrumental, also include chamber and vocal-instrumental music. A large place in people's lives is occupied by light music, which is relatively easy to perceive and understandable to the general public.
Among the most important types of art is the fine arts, which combines painting, graphics and sculpture. Artistic images in them are created on a plane or in space and are distinguished by visual concreteness and invariability in time. The specific artistic means of fine art are drawing, color, plastic, shadow, which allow creating visible images of objects. They manifest themselves in a peculiar way in each of the types of fine arts.
In painting, an artistic and expressive image is transmitted through paints. No verbal description can fully convey all the richness of colors. The human eye distinguishes a colossal number of colors and shades, there are many, many times fewer words for their designation.
The main genres of painting are portrait and landscape, associated with the image of man and nature, still life depicting natural objects - flowers, fruits, game, fish, household items, plot-thematic picture of historical, battle, genre-domestic or animalistic content. A special place in painting is occupied by a miniature, which is a work of small format executed on paper, metal, bone, porcelain or wood.
The closest relative of painting is graphics. A graphic image is usually made on paper or cardboard with a pencil, ink or special paints and is a one-color drawing. Depending on the purpose, graphics are divided into easel, representing the original work, and applied, including print engraving, lithography, etching and caricature.
An important type of fine art is sculpture, which reproduces reality in a three-dimensional form. Sculpture differs from other visual arts in that its works are by nature voluminous and can be viewed from different angles.
The main materials used in sculpture are stone, bronze, marble and wood.
According to the shape of the image, a three-dimensional sculpture is distinguished, which allows measurements in height, thickness, width, bypassing from all sides, and various relief-convex images on a plane. In turn, the relief is divided into bas-relief, used on coins and medals, and high relief, used on seals and various forms.
Often, architecture and works of decorative and applied arts are also referred to the types of fine arts, since they are characterized by the predominance of the visual form of perception. But they are independent art forms.
One of the oldest types of creative activity in the creation of household items designed to meet both the practical and artistic and aesthetic needs of people is arts and crafts.
Decorative and applied art is associated with the artistic processing of various items intended mainly for everyday life. These include chasing and artistic processing of metal, casting of precious dishes, the manufacture of patterned fabrics and jewelry, cows and facing ceramics, and woodcarving. Common to all of them is the use of ornament, i.e. a pattern that features a symmetrical arrangement of specific elements.
In arts and crafts, great importance is attached to the material, manufacturing technology, decor, color, symbolism, ornament, which often become a sign of a certain national identity.
An important part of arts and crafts are arts and crafts.
Decorative and applied art plays an important role in the modern culture of society, contributing to the improvement of the organization of the subject environment of people's life.
The oldest arts include architecture associated with the construction of buildings and structures. It is rightly called the "stone chronicle" of the world, which speaks even when legends and songs are already silent, nothing reminds of an irrevocably gone culture.
The specificity of architecture as an art form is that its images are emphatically expressive and emotional in nature and convey not individual phenomena of life, but general ideas of the beauty of the world and man, are images of time and era. Such works of architecture as towers, palaces, arches, theater buildings become the centers of large cities, or, as it were, the symbolic center of the country.
In the transformation of the subject environment of a person, the architecture of monumental forms associated with the construction of roads, bridges, triumphal arches, television masts, distinguished by the scale and complexity of the technical design, green architecture and landscape gardening culture, which includes a transformed architectural and vegetative landscape, connecting people with nature.
Theater belongs to the most ancient types of art (from the Greek theatron - a place for spectacles, a spectacle), the specific means of expression of which is a stage action that occurs in the process of playing an actor in front of an audience. The origins of theatrical art go back to mass folk rituals and games. The first European theaters appeared in Ancient Greece. As a professional art, it took shape during the European Renaissance.
A work of modern theatrical art - a performance - is created on the basis of a dramatic or musical stage work in accordance with the plan and under the direction of the director by the joint efforts of the actors. Theatrical synthesis of the arts includes the author's content, director's reading, acting performance with the participation of music, choreography, and artistic design.
The modern theater, preserving the traditional types and genres of performing arts - drama theater, musical theater, including ballet, opera and operetta, plastic theater and drama theater for children, has replenished with a musical, rock opera, and various types of experimental theater.
The theater was repeatedly predicted to die in connection with the advent of cinema and television. In fact, a film and television film can bring together the best artists in the world, can show the broadest pictures of life that are inaccessible to the technical possibilities of the theater.
Cinema arose at the end of the 19th century, when a device was invented that made it possible to shoot motion on a special light-sensitive film. But “moving photography”, as cinema was originally called, became art in the full sense of the word only when its own means of cinematic expression appeared.
Works of cinema art - movies - are created by filming real events, specially staged or recreated by means of animation. In cinematography, the aesthetic properties of literature, theatrical, fine arts and music are synthesized, but on the basis of only the expressive means inherent in cinema, of which the main ones are the photographic nature of the image, which allows to recreate any pictures of reality with the utmost certainty, and film montage. The connection of film frames in the montage creates a continuity in the development of the action, organizes a visual narrative, and allows, by comparing individual plans, to metaphorically interpret the actions in the film.
The creation of a work of cinema art is a complex creative and production process, which combines the work of artists of various specialties - a screenwriter (scriptwriter); the director, who determines the interpretation and implementation of the idea and directs the work of the other participants in the production; actors embodying the images of characters; an operator characterizing the action by means of compositional, light-tonal and color interpretation of frames; an artist who finds the pictorial characteristics of the environment, the actions and costumes of the characters (and in animation, the external characteristics of the characters); composer, etc.
During the development of cinematography, three main types of it have been formed: fiction or fiction, non-fiction, including documentary and scientific, and animated films. With the help of specific means in a feature film, the reproduction of life material forms the illusion of the reality of the screen action. Non-fiction cinema expresses reality directly, directly. In an animated film, the image of reality is graphically or volumetrically mediated.
Television stands out among the contemporary art forms. Being the most important means of information about various phenomena of social life, it is also an independent type of artistic creativity. The artistic features of television are related to the fact that it is able to create a type of performance that combines the merits of theater, cinema and variety.
Art is in constant motion. It either becomes more complex, overcoming the established border zones within itself, or it is localized within strictly defined limits of its specific forms. This is the dialectic of the development of types and genres of contemporary art. Currently, there is an intensive process of searching for new artistic forms and means of expression in art, and new types of it are emerging. Thus, art today is greatly influenced by the technical process. This gives rise to the emergence of technical and is reflected in the development of traditional arts.
Art will always occupy an important place in the life and culture of society, because, as the ancients said, life is short, but art is eternal.
As diverse as the real world is, so are the forms of art. Each type of activity has an artistic form of reflection and various ways of transforming life into it: in literature it is a word, in music - sound, color and plasticity in visual forms, movement in choreography, etc.
Three groups for a complete picture of the world
There is no single classification of the arts, there are many of them, and they are all relative. The most common is the division scheme into three groups. The first is space and plasticity. Fine and decorative arts, architecture and photography. It can be said for centuries. The second includes dynamic, that is, temporary art forms, in which the main thing is a composition deployed in time: music, literature. The third group is synthetic, spectacular types, also spatio-temporal: choreography, theater, cinema. Only the main types of art are listed here. Why does humanity have so many different types? None of them on their own will be able to convey a comprehensive picture of the world, the entire artistic culture as a whole. Only all together.
Main Arts: Characteristics
Architecture (from Greek - "builder") is a type of monumental art. These are structures and buildings for human life, for utilitarian and spiritual needs. Fine arts represent a whole group of subspecies of artistic creativity: painting, graphics, sculpture. Decorative and applied art most often has a national character of creativity, it can include products made of metal, clay, wood, stone, bone, fabric. That is, embroidery, painting, chasing, carving, etc. Literature materializes through the word and is divided into artistic, historical, educational, reference, scientific. The main genres are lyrics, drama, epic, novel, story, etc. Music makes up its vast part of the universe from sound images. It is also divided into many genera, species and genres. These are just the most important types of art.
The main directions of modernity
Contemporary art forms do not require a new classification scheme. Within the same species, genera and genres, other directions, currents and schools appear. For example, sand animation or body art, graffiti or art installations - they, for all their novelty and distinctive features, do not go beyond, and certain types of art continue to exist for them for a long time. Who knows, maybe someday these applied hobbies will rise to a separate stage. It is still difficult to judge what drives modernity: the search for alternative worlds, outrageousness, or simply an expression of the discomfort of the surrounding life. Morally risky food is probably necessary. The main formula of creativity has been preserved: imagination - the illusions of life, equal to itself. The greatest sin of an artist is mediocrity, and it is not scary that a breakthrough into the unknown has not happened yet. Let's wait.
