The Connection Between Art

& Reality Essay, Research Paper

What is the connection between art and reality?

Art is self-expression of the artist’s reality. Geographical environment, the origin of social circumstances, and particular period and style, influence the artists perception of reality.

Ever since men and women saw their reflections in still pools, the desire to represent nature and human nature suggested itself to early people. Early people dealt with hunting and being hunted, with life and death, with existence and extinction. Life for them was very primitive; cave artists represented what they actually saw in their daily life with pictures on the cave wall. Their life (reality) was simple and writings and drawings expressed it on the wall.

Roughly by the end of the 1970s, philosophers of art had abandoned their armchairs for a much closer scrutiny of the problems and practices of the arts themselves, taking up a broad range of topics in painting, photography, film, music, literature and dance. Like contemporary philosophers of science, who are expected to know a fair amount of science, aestheticians nowadays need to know something about the arts. One result is that now, more than ever in the past, aesthetics involves the practice of art criticism and enjoys close ties with fields such as art history, literature and film study.

The twentieth century has had many changes of the old traditional aesthetics. In the twentieth century it has been argued that art has taken a path to distance itself from reality. The world is so overpopulated that every person is struggling for their individuality (trying to make sense of where they belong in their sense of reality) that they insist on extreme radical independence between aesthetics and the rest of their lives. This has changes aesthetics in a way that the artist is struggling to deviate from the norm of society’s reality.

The eternal struggle is to obtain a purity of vision and belief while still engaging oneself with reality. Creative works ought to stand as an eternal symbol of this persistence. Artists try to capture what they perceive as reality in their work, they try to portray a message that is meaningful and significant to their own reality. The experience of reality is something that defies most efforts to fully comprehend and capture it. In its most simple form, perception involves the boundaries between consciousness and existence. How existence enters consciousness depends entirely on one’s senses, attitudes, and environment.

Our minds work without fully grasping the full nature of our surroundings. Instead, we need only relate to the extent that seems comfortable to participate in whatever activity we are currently engaged. We unconsciously filter & simplify the complexity of reality in order to begin relating to it. An artist can only begin to approach the limits of conveying even a moment of reality to a future onlooker. Many artists seek to do this as accurately as possible, attempting to reflect their senses upon the viewer’s through a given piece. All creative activity begins in the mind’s eye and ear of the artist, but a work of art that does not communicate meaning is stillborn.

Symbolic notation is a very primal means of capturing reality into seemingly grasped forms, but to go beyond this in technique presents a challenge. To speak with color is an art unto itself whose challenges and variety are enough to overflow any artist’s lifetime of practice. The recognition of perception’s role in Art is one that will never fully be absorbed. The boundaries between thought and expression will be crossed many times, and in many ways, but can never fully be removed.

The idea that aesthetic issues have little or no bearing on the central concerns of philosophy is relatively recent, largely an artifact of the rise of analytic philosophy itself. As is evident from the works of Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche and Hegel, questions of art and beauty were once regarded as essential concerns of philosophy.

Despite changes in philosophical method concerning art, understanding human experience remains a fundamental aspiration of philosophy. It is as part of this larger humanistic project that aesthetics can be seen as an important branch of philosophy

Most philosophers today, including those whose philosophical interests lie in scientific and technical areas, recognize the importance of value theory. Aesthetics is part of value theory, and if the theory of value is philosophically important, aesthetics is philosophical important, too.

In aesthetics, philosophers have increasingly rejected the formalist separation of aesthetic and moral value to pursue substantive questions concerning, for example, the moral function of art, authorial responsibility, the moral limits of aesthetic appreciation. A central concern of aesthetics today is the relation of aesthetic and moral value. Moral philosophers, in turn, are looking to art.

Artists tend to be repelled by aesthetics, for a number of reasons. Many are suspicious that too much analyzing of their art will harm their creativity; it will encourage them to develop their rational ego at the expense of their creative unconscious. Or they suspect that aesthetic analysis will have no effect on them, that thinking about art in this way is simply useless.

Through the study of the arts in relation to the life and time out of which they originate, a richer, broader, deeper humanistic understanding can be achieved. The past as reflected in the arts exists as a continuous process, and the past is thus constantly alive and ever present.