Art
lastmod 2020-08-31created 2013-12-316 edits
Art is a branch of culture, like scholarship, religion, and morality, and is the collective term for artistic activity (creation, appreciation) and its results (works of art).
Art brings people together and serves as a means of conveying feelings and ideas to people. Science plays a similar role, but science explains mainly through concepts, while art explains through aesthetic forms. The central concept of art is ‘beauty’; if beauty is lacking or lost, it cannot be called art. Yet beauty alone does not make art; it must be expressed through some ‘form’. Views of art can be broadly divided into idealism or romanticism on one side and realism on the other. The representative of the former is Hegel, who sees ‘beauty’ as the artist's subjective fancy, while the proponent of the latter is Aristotle, who sees beauty as the imitation, or representation, of nature. This opposition continues to this day.
The study of art is the scholarly discipline concerned with art, and the term is also used, as distinct from the philosophy of art, to mean the scientific study of art. The sociology of art is the sociological study of art and developed along with positivism, which arose in the mid-19th century.