The Unification of the Arts

Author(s):  
Steven Brown

The Unification of the Arts presents the first integrated cognitive account of the arts that attempts to unite all of the arts into a single framework, covering visual art, theatre, literature, dance, and music, with supporting discussions about creativity and aesthetics that span all of the arts. The book’s comparative approach identifies both what is unique to each artform and what artforms share with one another. An understanding of shared mechanisms sheds light on how the arts are able to combine with one another to form syntheses, such as choreographing dance movements to music, or setting lyrics to music to create a song. While most psychological analyses of the arts focus on perceptual mechanisms alone—most commonly aesthetic responses—the book offers a holistic sensorimotor account of the arts that examines the full gamut of processes from creation to perception for each artform. This allows for a broad discussion of the evolution of the arts, including the origins of rhythm, the co-evolution of music and language, the evolution of drawing, and cultural evolution of the arts. Finally, the book aims to unify a number of topics that have not been adequately related to one another in previous discussions, including theatre and literature, music and language, creativity and aesthetics, dancing and acting, and visual art and music. The Unification of the Arts provides a bold new approach to the integration of the arts, one that covers cognition, evolution, and neuroscience.

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iain Mackinnon

This article employs a new approach to studying internal colonialism in northern Scotland during the 18th and 19th centuries. A common approach to examining internal colonial situations within modern state territories is to compare characteristics of the internal colonial situation with attested attributes of external colonial relations. Although this article does not reject the comparative approach, it seeks to avoid criticisms that this approach can be misleading by demonstrating that promoters and managers of projects involving land use change, territorial dispossession and industrial development in the late modern Gàidhealtachd consistently conceived of their work as projects of colonization. It further argues that the new social, cultural and political structures these projects imposed on the area's indigenous population correspond to those found in other colonial situations, and that racist and racialist attitudes towards Gaels of the time are typical of those in colonial situations during the period. The article concludes that the late modern Gàidhealtachd has been a site of internal colonization where the relationship of domination between colonizer and colonized is complex, longstanding and occurring within the imperial state. In doing so it demonstrates that the history and present of the Gaels of Scotland belongs within the ambit of an emerging indigenous research paradigm.


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 49-59
Author(s):  
Ma Cecilia Alimen ◽  
Pinky Jasmin Poral ◽  
Rhounella Rhane Magpantay ◽  
Rosella Quiros ◽  
Ma Elena Azarcon

This descriptive-correlational study determined the level of creative engagement as part of humanities teaching in the outcome-based education. This focuses on the dimension of student engagement and creativity in the context of a new approach to teaching and learning primarily through the arts. This study captures student creative engagement supported by their personal reflection after the course term. There were eight (8) classes utilized with 134 students. Results showed that the level of students’ creativity in art appreciation was “high” and it was also “high” when they were grouped as to sex. Creative engagement in art appreciation was considered “highly influential” and it was “highly influential” when they were grouped as to sex. No significant difference was noted in the level of the students’ creative engagement and development of creativity. There was a moderate and positive correlation between the level of the students’ creative engagement and influence of creative engagement in art appreciation classes to their development of creativity. The most highly valued creative engagement practices of students in art appreciation are: “I have developed an appreciation for the local arts;” “I have deepened my sensitivity of myself, my community and the society,” and “Inclusion of art activities demonstrated my understanding of art appreciation.


2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alberto Alberti

The long reign of Ivan Aleksandăr (1331-1371), the penultimate emperor of Bulgaria prior to the Turkish conquest, was marked by a series of successful military campaigns against Serbia and Byzantium and above all by an intensive cultural production, largely fostered and funded by the sovereign himself. The central decades of the fourteenth century were of crucial importance for the later cultural evolution of Bulgaria and the whole of Orthodox Slovenia, despite which to date ample and exhaustive studies on the figure of Ivan Aleksandăr are lacking. There is, in effect, a considerable amount of information at disposal, although it is scattered over the literary sources, the colophons of the manuscripts, the epigraphic documentation and also, obviously, the official deeds promulgated by the Emperor. Through the analysis of this varied documentation, this book attempts to reconstruct the figure of the sovereign, the context in which he lived and worked, his greatness and his mistakes and his parallel activities as a strategist and an illuminated patron of the arts. For the first time, the Italian reader can find collected and translated all the manuscript sources relating to the Bulgarian sovereign. The book is completed by an appendix with the original texts of the Slavonic-ecclesiastical tradition.


1997 ◽  
Vol 50 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 387-420 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Evan Bonds

The growing aesthetic prestige of instrumental music in the last decades of the eighteenth century was driven not so much by changes in the musical repertory as by the resurgence of idealism as an aesthetic principle applicable to all the arts. This new outlook, as articulated by such writers as Winckelmann, Moritz, Kant, Schiller, Herder, Fichte, and Schelling, posited the work of art as a reflection of an abstract ideal, rather than as a means by which a beholder could be moved. Through idealism, the work of art became a vehicle by which to sense the realm of the spiritual and the infinite, and the inherently abstract nature of instrumental music allowed this art to offer a particularly powerful glimpse of that realm. Idealism thus provided the essential framework for the revaluation of instrumental music in the writings of Wackenroder, Tieck, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and others around the turn of the century. While this new approach to instrumental music has certain points of similarity with the later concept of "absolute" music, it is significant that Eduard Hanslick expunged several key passages advocating idealist thought when he revised both the first and second editions of his treatise Vom Musikalisch-Schönen. The concept of "absolute" music, although real enough in the mid-nineteenth century, is fundamentally anachronistic when applied to the musical thought and works of the decades around 1800.


2021 ◽  
Vol 44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thom Scott-Phillips ◽  
Atsuko Tominaga ◽  
Helena Miton

Abstract The two target articles agree that processes of cultural evolution generate richness and diversity in music, but neither address this question in a focused way. We sketch one way to proceed – and hence suggest how the target articles differ not only in empirical claims, but also in their tacit, prior assumptions about the relationship between cognition and culture.


Author(s):  
Lihua Xu ◽  
Read Diket ◽  
Thomas Brewer

Professional audiences, scholars, and researchers bring varied experiences and expertise to the acquisition of new understandings and to problem solving in visual art and literary contexts. The same breadth of experience and learning capability was found for students at eighth grade, sampled from the national population of students in the United States who were queried in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) about formal knowledge, technical skills, and abstract reasoning in visual art and in language arts. This chapter explores statistical data relating to the presence of art specialists in the sampled eighth grade classrooms. In particular, schools with specialists in place varied in density across the country as is demonstrated through geographic mapping. Secondary analysis of NAEP restricted data showed that students in schools with art specialists performed significantly better than students in schools with other types of teachers, or no teacher. The authors surmise that art specialists conveyed something fundamental to NAEP 2008 Response scores. An aspirational model of assessment assumes broad audience clarity through knowledge visualization technology, via thematic mapping. The authors explore through analog Deleuze and Guattari's double articulation of signs in natural and programming languages and demonstrate through knowledge representation the means by which complex primary and secondary statistical data can be understood in a discipline and articulated across disciplines. This chapter considers NAEP data that might substantiate a general model of aspirational learning and associates patterns in perception discussed by researchers and philosophers.


Author(s):  
Murray Pittock

The growing circulation of visual art and its widening appearance in domestic collections and public display is an important moniker of the advance of consumerism, cosmopolitanism and innovation. What once had been (and for much of the eighteenth century still remained) an international aristocratic pastime suffused itself steadily into the houses and purchases of the professional well-to-do, bringing with it variety of origin, variety of subject, and whole new genres which could inflect the manner in which indoor and outdoor environments were represented and understood as they came under the control of society’s elites. Such new images could, in their turn, embed the centrality of questions of landscape, geographical conditions and human societies in the ideas of Enlightenment thinkers who moved in intellectual spheres much removed from the visual arts.


2021 ◽  
pp. 45-72
Author(s):  
Steven Brown

This chapter examines both the biological and cultural evolution of the arts. Biological evolution of the arts deals with how humans evolved the species-specific capacities to create and appreciate artworks, while cultural evolution is about how artworks themselves, as cultural products, undergo changes in persistence over historical time and geographic location. The study of biological evolution includes both phylogenetic (or historical) and adaptationist (or Darwinian) approaches. The study of cultural evolution of the arts reveals the importance of a ‘creativity/aesthetics cycle’ in which the products of human creativity get appraised for their level of appeal by the aesthetic system, allowing them to either be transmitted to future generations or die out. This unification of creativity and aesthetics has far-reaching implications for both fields of study.


Arts ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 33
Author(s):  
Seymour Simmons

This paper looks at recent examples of how drawing is advancing into the digital age: in London: the annual symposium on Thinking Through Drawing; in Paris: an exhibition at the Grand Palais, Artistes et Robots; a conference at the Institut d’études avancées on Space-Time Geometries and Movement in the Brain and in the Arts; and, at the Drawing Lab, Cinéma d’Été. These events are contrasted to a recent decline in drawing instruction in pre-professional programs of art, architecture, and design as well as in pre-K12 art education due largely to the digital revolution. In response, I argue for the ongoing importance of learning to draw both in visual art and in general education at all levels in the digital age.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document