Rodin and Otterness: Revealing Form through closed sculpture
Essay - 3 pages - Arts and art history
If one were to elongate the neck, legs and arms of August Rodin's “Thinker,” the result would look something like Tom Otterness's “The Crying Giant.” But it is precisely this aspect of the sculpture that makes the “Crying Giant” a less effective closed sculpture....
Critics' response to three artists: Elizabeth Murray, Richard Tuttle and Oscar Bluemner
Essay - 6 pages - Arts and art history
Although an artist's work represents the culmination of an intensive effort to communicate a message, how the message is interpreted by others is often how the artist's work is remembered. Thus, even though a particular artist may believe that he or she has reached the apex of artistic...
Through Black and White Eyes
Essay - 5 pages - Arts and art history
Photography becomes more than art, more than paintings, or sculptures. It exposes the truth to life that a brush can barely compare to. If there is a passion, a real love for the art, photography becomes consuming, sinking into the skin forever. Every aspect of the soul becomes sucked into every...
The development of art and architecture and how it reflects the social and cultural attitudes underlying social discourse.
Essay - 6 pages - Arts and art history
Research on the development of art and architecture demonstrates that works created during different time periods clearly reflect the social and cultural attitudes underlying social discourse. With this in mind, it is not surprising to find that the middle class interiors of the nineteenth...
History of Ballet
Essay - 4 pages - Arts and art history
Ballet, like many other art forms, has a long and rich history of evolution and development. In fact, researchers examining the history of ballet have noted that the earliest precursors to ballet can be found as far back as the Renaissance in Italy (Wiley, 2006). Since this time, ballet has...
The Circular Nature of the Primavera
Essay - 6 pages - Arts and art history
Botticelli's Primavera begs for meaning. It is a complex, large-scale masterpiece with apparent contradictions in mood, movement, theme and context. The direct gaze of its central figure instructs the viewer to look carefully, as does Botticelli's precise hand. Every deliberate petal, every...
Transparency, Opacity, and the Artistic Response to the Revolution
Essay - 3 pages - Arts and art history
Much of the art produced in Russia during and after the Revolution served as a response to the sudden and widespread changes in society. Andrei Platonov's short story The River Potudan is no exception. Largely allegorical and interpretive, this tale of a soldier's re-entry into the world of his...
The Effects of Politics and Culture on Medieval Christian Art
Essay - 10 pages - Arts and art history
While Christianity could be argued to have started somewhere between the years 1 and 33 AD, it was not the official religion of the Roman Empire until the Edict of Milan in 313 AD, though by then it had extended throughout the empire and its social structure, thus necessitating the official...
The development of modern art
Essay - 3 pages - Arts and art history
Throughout the course of the twentieth century, society, and more specifically, the art community, underwent a rebirth called modernism. Modernism served as the basis for artists and society as a whole to seeks an expansion away from Victorian morals, which placed such marked constraints on...
Magic Realism in Photography
Essay - 4 pages - Arts and art history
Present-day, the meaning of the term magic realism varies depending on the art form being described. Its meaning has altered over the past century and yet maintains aspects of its original use. The term was first in a title role with visual arts critic Franz Roh's book published 1925 Nach...
An Outlet For The Internal: Photographs Reflecting The Desires of Clementina Hawarden and Julia Margaret Cameron
Essay - 2 pages - Arts and art history
Two Victorian women in the isolation of their own homes created portraits and tableaux. From 1857- 1864, Clementina Viscountess Hawarden made so-called “Studies from Life,” which have far more significance than their general title would imply. A more widely recognized contemporary...
The Dance of Death
Essay - 3 pages - Arts and art history
The robed, skeletal figure of Death interacting with the living has become an iconic image in contemporary culture, adorning Tarot cards, album covers and T-shirts; appearing in film, books and artistic prints. Our fascination with and fear of mortality has existed since humans first walked upon...
Michelangelo's Last Judgement
Essay - 3 pages - Arts and art history
Michelangelo Buonarroti was born on March 6, 1475, to the wife of a podesta in the diocese of Arezzo. As podesta, his father held an executive and judicial office of the Republican city-states. When his term in office ended, Michelangelo's father moved the family to their villa right outside of...
San Vitale's Beauty as Seen Through the Eyes of Plotinus
Essay - 3 pages - Arts and art history
Architectural beauty is a concept that is continually changing and entirely subjective. It is dependent upon who is doing the evaluating and the criteria with which they are basing their evaluation. Usually, the structure's ultimate function weighs in heavily in the determination of its...
The Beatles and the Creative Process
Book review - 3 pages - Arts and art history
From the moment the news of their overnight stardom dawned on John and Paul, both boys were acutely intent on broadening and sharpening their already clever writing styles. Rising from this foundation the two erected a model of working, formed by the seat of their pants as they held on for dear...
The story of how Greek Nationalism followed the Greek Immigrants to the United States
Tutorials/exercises - 14 pages - Arts and art history
By the eve of the Greco-Turkish War of 1922, every Greek in the world understood and felt what the ‘Megali Idea' meant. Under the leadership of Eleftherios Venizelos, Greece was on the verge of fulfilling Megali Idea in recreating a modern Byzantine Empire. But what exactly does Megali Idea...
Scientific, Political, Artistic, and Controversial Aspects of the Statue of Liberty
Tutorials/exercises - 6 pages - Arts and art history
The Statue of Liberty holds great significance in the United States because of its symbolic and patriotic nature. It also represents hope; the statue bears the words “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” (Cable 3). Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi...
Study of the Appalachian music
Thesis - 10 pages - Arts and art history
Appalachian music. Usually paired with the image of hicks on a dilapidated porch in West Virginia. To some Americans, Appalachian music could seem to be a genre of simple minded folk songs from a poor town in the southern mountains of North America. Some people may simply think of the...
Gender Inversion and Spectator Identity in Silence of the Lambs
Essay - 5 pages - Arts and art history
Jonathan Demme's 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs centers on a young FBI trainee's attempts to catch a deranged serial killer before he kills again. Clarice Starling is a young woman determined to rise through the ranks of the male FBI. Already at a social disadvantage due to her sex, she...
The Art of Graffiti
Tutorials/exercises - 4 pages - Arts and art history
A young boy is standing in a dark, subway tunnel with a can of spray paint in his hand. His intentions are clear. Instead of being traditional and painting at home, he is using the world as his canvas. Vandal or not, he is still an artist. Even though he may just paint his name on the wall, it is...
Making music with music: Kool Herc and the evolution of sampling
Tutorials/exercises - 3 pages - Arts and art history
Kool DJ Herc is a Jamaican American musician and producer, who is credited as a pioneer of hip-hop during the 1970s as a result of his trendsetting musical technique and influence on hip-hop culture as a whole. He was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1955 as Clive Campbell and he immigrated to the...
Christ in Majesty
Tutorials/exercises - 2 pages - Arts and art history
While monumental figure erecting was hindered during the Middle Ages, illuminated manuscripts and mural paintings were given momentum as a result. Both media allowed for mass productions, many of which have lasted to this day. A fine example of a mural fresco from the Romanesque Period,...
The Taste of Peace and Practice of Love in North Indian Drumming
Tutorials/exercises - 3 pages - Arts and art history
The knowledge gained by practicing the North Indian tabla drums situates the musician within two spiritual modes of the Hindu tradition: the tantric, via rasa, and the yogic, via bhakti. Is there a limit to the spiritual efficacy of such musical practice? Citing the lack of “common measure...
Egyptian versus Greek Sculpture
Essay - 2 pages - Arts and art history
The Egyptian culture consistently maintained a powerful belief in the afterlife. As a result, tombs were lavished with clothing, furniture, and paintings to nourish the Ka or soul. Most importantly, statues were erected should anything happen to the body in which the soul must inhabit. The...
Acoustic Mythologies of The Natyasastra: Text of Celestial Music
Essay - 5 pages - Arts and art history
Concerning the use of musical rhythm as a sadhana, a path to liberation, one preliminary distinction to make is between the tantric means of rasa and the yogic means of bhakti; The mythological tradition inherited by Hindustani music distinguishes between gana (music for pleasure) and gandharva...
Once More with Talent
Essay - 2 pages - Arts and art history
The room is silent, black, yet complete in its created emptiness. You cannot see the person sitting next to you, the face that looks back in the darkness. Suddenly, from nowhere, a few shaky piano notes fill the air. A melody so simple yet so memorable, it pulls you away from your metal seat and...
Not All is Cold in Iceland
Essay - 5 pages - Arts and art history
Humanity is nostalgic. There is no other way in which to explain the strips of antique malls in the Midwest or the string of collector shows on the shop-at-home networks. Like the sightseers searching for the Grand Canyon pictured on the poster in a local travel agency, humans are such experts...
IS: Music
Essay - 3 pages - Arts and art history
If only Beethoven and Tchaikovsky could have conceived of the technological advantages the musicians of today take for granted. Innovative strides in music technology development have revolutionized the way music is recorded, composed, stored, performed, searched and retrieved by creating easy to...
New Deal Art: The WPA Murals of Norwalk, CT
Tutorials/exercises - 3 pages - Arts and art history
The Great Depression that struck the United States in the late 1920s came as a shock to millions of Americans. Almost overnight people saw their entire life savings vanish before their eyes and many were laid off by their employers. By the time Franklin Roosevelt took office in March 1933, the...
The Influence of Popular World Music on Modern Western Music
Tutorials/exercises - 3 pages - Arts and art history
The nebulous category of World Music has been defined as "simply not our music, it is their music (Rahkonen, 1)." World Music is thus a distinction based on otherness and not any singularly defining characteristic. It is a term that developed from the classification of popular music "to include...
