The Power of Art Essay

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Updated: Dec 2nd, 2023

Introduction

Art could be referred as an expression of individual experience, the way world is understood, valued, observed and celebrated. The traditional method of classifying art has mostly been based on the products.

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Artworks are identified in terms of inherent features found in them either as phenomena or objects. That approach leads to generic categorizations which are observed in drama centre, conservatorium, and art schools. Whatever is referred as ‘the arts’ currently, sometimes back they were essential part of daily life (Freeland 2002:8).

Freeland has analyzed various philosophers and there contribution to different forms of art through their theories. His work focuses on history of art when it had no value until currently.

His work therefore focuses the value of art and attempts to answer the ambiguous question what art is and its meaning. In different dialects, no word could be used to collectively explain the range of creative activities. As a result of specialization this led to division of labor during industrial revolution, as a result, there was a specified time when one could identify that the arts were professional undertakings.

The art was separated from the other life activities and became significant to some people. There are many critics involved in this field in an attempt to analyze the real value of art.

Plato who was a known philosopher was among the first to explore the field of art. His work criticized poetry particularly focusing poets originating from his city.

Plato viewed poetry and arts negatively as opposed to Aristotle who developed a theory on aesthetic basing his arguments on Plato’s ideas. Aristotle concurs with Plato that art had a deep impact on someone’s emotions.

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Plato argued that the fears and passions which are experienced by audiences during dreadful performances could affect their personality. On the other, hand Aristotle claims that such emotions never corrupt but they cleanse. Therefore, the view of Plato on poetry is a contrast of Aristotle’s concept. Platonic concept has a noticeable influence on Western civilization.

Mainly it has focused on certain era in history, in an attempt to introduce some cultural strategies to transform cultural policy. His work challenges the Puritan attack around 1642 together with theatre prohibition in England.

His work is diversified; Plato also caused a great impact on the understanding of poetry in the Western. This was when Plato invented the theory of poetical inspiration which brought about an outstanding change (Belfiore 2006:231).

Belfiore has been involved in art work for a long time being the head of international cultural policy. Her work discusses on social impact of arts and its position in the cultural policy. In addition, her work challenges the claims which had been made earlier concerning the effect of art on the society and individual.

Therefore, her work remains important until today because it explains the power of art and fights for its success. There are other theorists who also explored the function of art for instance, Carey who was a professor of art and also depicted as a critic.

His work argues that Literature is superior as compared to other arts. His work criticizes some sources of art and challenges their contribution to the modern society.

His work also challenges some literary sources because they appear to be vague and insignificant.Carey claims that literature does not entail just a feeling of pleasure as in painting or music which does not portray the difficult part of art. Further argues that it’s only literature which can instill good morals.

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However Carey to some extent values art and reports that it expresses emotions such as anger, fear and desire (Carey 2005: 36). Hence there are different views on the function of arts as discussed by critics from the past decades until presently. The paper focuses on the power of art by assessing the function of art in the society.

Background

Creative arts (arts and media) consist of various sectors which were initially called cultural industries. These sectors include literature, visual arts and those arts which are performed.

There has been drastic change in the government in terms of their attitude towards culture and creativity. Creative industry is a term which has been commonly used as a form of rebranding culture. Cultural industry was originally used to mean commercial entertainment such as recorded music, film, and publishing (Garnham 2005:19).

Intellectual property enables people to appreciate the products from their own creativity. This ensures that one has some goods or products to sell which enables one to exercise moral and economic rights over those products.

Garnham reports that in United Kingdom, copyright is currently regarded as the major organizing principle in creative industries and it defines the cultural industries.

Various types of creative activities such as engineering, academia and science generate intellectual property. Policy discourse includes copyright industries, knowledge industries and intellectual property industries.

The policy discourse covers the media and the arts which are referred as the creative industries. The policy issues involved in this research were established several centuries in the disciplines of art and media. In the past, there was an obvious demarcation between arts policy and arts and commerce, and policy related to mass media (Garnham 2005:19).

Thus there was provision of popular or mass culture, and the main issues were pluralism and press freedom, security of national film industry, and the management and provision of public service broadcasting.

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In United Kingdom, there was division of responsibility of the policy between Press industry and Department of Trade. Concerning the broadcasting and press policy, the development involved several Royal Commissions for Public Inquiries and press broadcasting. Mobilization of the term cultural industries to creative industries led to redrawing of various boundaries (Selwood 2000: 59).

They included redefinitions of the foundations, instruments and purposes of the policy. Those changes caused economic arguments which are related to dynamics and the structure of the industries, their position and comparative weight within the economy, and so the relationship between industrial and economic policy and cultural policy.

The shift of creative industry from culture industry was motivated by certain political context which remains to be historical. In addition, it led to different focuses concerning the policy issue during early 1980s.

This involved a shift from state to the industry with extensive assortment of public provision. That describes the reinforcement and the shift to managerial and economic patterns and language of thought in media and cultural policy (Garnham 2005:22).

Great art discloses the importance of age in terms of, who produced the art and when. Hence it is essential to consider who initiated the creativity art and when in order to understand how it influenced the form.

For instance, Mona Lisa which portrays the creativity and beauty of art was produced by Leonardo. This depicts the value placed on beauty and grace by Italians during Renaissance. It’s evident that Leonardo was a scientific observer mainly the nature, self-directed thinker, imaginative pioneer and more so brilliant artist.

Most importantly, his work illustrated important concept of Renaissance which yielded to the current perception of individualism. To some extent, the charisma of Leonardo art indicates that it was produced by one of the pioneer who was regarded as creative genius in relation to contemporary sense.

Leonardo sacrificed a lot of time working on the art; it took many decades to finish despite the fact that it was carried everywhere. No wonder it had the same fascination to many viewers and finally was placed in Paris museum. Finally it was recognized as part of French and Italian culture (Lewis 2008:5).

Women’s images were omnipresent in America during the past century, everything was decorated. This was done through sculptures and paintings; they were involved in extensive and diverse activities which showed different identities.

This depicted how they developed from symbolic and mythical nature to contemporary. Around 1870s, they painted nude women and others such as Ariadne who was acting a certain myth. In 1880s there were more poetic materials which predominated for instance, popular evidence is the book called ‘American Figure Painters’ (Hook 1996:1).

Most of those paintings displayed woman as allegorical subjects and the titles used were evocative to show how women occupied an ideal or symbolic realm. The arts represented the feminine gender and how they were viewed by American society during 19th century.

Idealized women paintings acted as sites of several interconnected artistic, historical, societal and cultural discourses. Those images could satisfy the artist’s meaning for art, and none of the other subjects could since their female complement were viewed to occupy a position which was similar to art itself (Hook 1996:7).

Functions of Art in the society

Cultural Industries (Arts and media) and Culture

The idea of culture industry was first observed in academic, later in policy and political discourse around 1960s. That return originated from a resurgence of Western Marxism which concentrated on hegemony and ideology, and the reinstitution of Frankfurt School and generally cultural turn.

Sociologically, that shifted concentration from assessment of class divisions and social structure to cultural analysis. Social cohesion was by then described according to common belief systems, social domination according to cultural supremacy and social struggles were never associated with economic power and material allocation, but was viewed as struggle between identity groups and sub cultures for legitimation and recognition.

Nevertheless, the term cultural industry which was applied by that time did not signify replay of Frankfurt School. This was because it did not reflect the superior, cultural pessimism observed in Frankfurt School or even the unique version of Marxist economics which underpinned it.

Moreover, there was replacement of traditional working class politics which were founded on production with cultural politics. Oppositional political practice also shifted from trade unions, factories and political parties to the rock concert, the home and mainly the classrooms.

To some extent, that position was connected to decisive rejection of cultural pessimism of Frankfurt School and commercial social democratic critique.

That was mostly in American commercial, culture which favored positive revaluation, popular culture and treasonable decoding authority of audience.

In addition, cultural industries led to emergence of a rival school dealing with analysis, it was later called political economy school. Those analysts originated from media studies and individuals who had participated in assessment of social democratic policy of film, the press and broadcasting industries (Galloway and Dunlop 2007:20).

Creative arts have mainly caused a difference on cultural practices. It has eliminated class divisions and social organizations which brought divisions. As a result, social cohesion has been achieved through common cultural beliefs and distribution of resources hence more understanding and growth.

Effects on Political Economy

Concerning political economy, cultural industries emphasized on the unique nature of dynamics and economic structure of the cultural sector. This originated from immaterial or symbolic nature of the products associated with cultural sector.

That assessment has been very significant during 1980s to 1990s when the liberalizing, deregulatory wave affected the British media sector.

This led to some pertinence in a motion about broadcasting regulation and public service broadcasting defense which led to approval of Broadcasting Act in 2003 and instituting of regulatory body Ofcom.

As a result, cultural industries or sector were characterized by increased costs of production which were fixed and minimal to almost zero marginal costs of distribution and reproduction (Myerscough 1988:87). This favored audience maximization, economies of scale, and horizontal and vertical concentration.

In, addition, the demand was unpredictable because the information had to be new to maintain value, hence the consumers and producers could not foretell what they wanted.

The large corporations were favored since they had enough money to operate through economies of scale. Moreover, the cost of marketing increased in proportion to total cost (Howkins 2001:91).

The market strategies which were developed to control the endemic problem focused on; the structure, and regulation of the entire sector and most significant indirect funding through advertisement.

Therefore the debate of state intervention, privatization and regulation of cultural sector, price mechanism strategies could not apply. In addition, the issue of intellectual property and copyright industry (the other alternative of creative industries) also arise concurrently. Therefore, art brought significant difference on the economy which in turn affected the political stability allover.

Creative Industries and Information Society

The term creative has been used rather than cultural to indicate an effort of cultural policy and the cultural sector to share their ideas with the government, and the presentation of policy in the media and its attachment to information society.

One major concept shared between information society and cultural turn school is the stressed issue on significance of cultural or symbolic production, commonly called knowledge or information according to capitalist economies.

The extensive emphasis contains different analyses within it which focuses on the nature of that developing importance and various economic forms associated with it.

Those different analyses lead to various assessments on significance of cultural sector in the area of media and arts, and nature and function of information work and workers.

The concept of knowledge or information has led to industrial revolution which has brought significant cultural and social changes as justified by the term information society (Garnham 2005:27).

Consequently creative art has had noticeable effects on information society through creating awareness and understanding. This is reflected in the media and visual art which have brought self realization.

Function of art as aesthetic and expressing emotions

According to philosophers, art expresses aesthetic concept because it copies nature hence it describes appearance. The discernment world seems to be unreal; however through appearance some reality is expressed.

However, the world of art is described through the appearance itself. Thus the aesthetic experience is expressed through imaginations and the objects portrayed are the images.

Plato acknowledged poetry and the significant identity depicted in painting. Plato uses such arts to describe beauty. On the other hand, Socrates describes art as beauty, and further claims that it’s an exercise of emotions.

The philosophers argue that the emotionality of art is created through imagination. The imaginative idea is expressed as real through a symbol (Collingwood 2011:163).

The emotional art tends to be formed in the mind and then through symbolism it’s what one observes as the image. Therefore art is significant in creating such images which expresses beauty.

Creative art has caused great impact on imagery through use of symbolism which expresses emotions. Also art expresses beauty from the images formed in the mind they become real through art. Hence art helps one to express beauty and emotions in various forms.

Conclusion

Some few centuries back, art was not regarded as important and was not recognized in the society. In fact, art was not even referred as part of the professionals that existed and there were no experts were associated with this field.

As a result of industrial revolution, there was specialization which led to division of labor. This led to awareness of art and more experts started coming up. Art is an important tool in the society because it communicates societal values.

Artists borrow their ideas from their society therefore artworks portray diversity of values and beliefs in different cultures. As portrayed in the paper, creative industry refers to media and arts which were initially called cultural industries.

This department did not exist earlier since there were no approved policies to support it. Creative industry was disregarded and it required powerful critics to stand firm and fight for its approval.

Nevertheless, there were policies which were later approved and the department became recognized. This brought many changes both socially, culturally and economically.

Reference List

Belfiore, E. 2006. The unacknowledged legacy Plato, the republic and cultural policy. International Journal of Cultural Policy, Vol. 12, No. 2, 229-244.

Carey, J. 2005. What Good are the arts? London: Faber

Collingwood, R. 2011.Plato’s Philosophy of Art. Retrieved from mind. oxford journals.org. London: metropolitan University

Freeland, C. 2002. But is it Art? An Introduction to Art Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Galloway, S., & Dunlop, S. 2007.A critique of definitions of cultural and creative industries in public policy. International Journal of Cultural Policy, Vol. 13, No. 1. Web.

Garnham, N. 2005.From Cultural to Creative Industries. International Journal of Cultural Policy, Vol. 11, No. 1. Web.

Hook, B. 1996. Angels of art: women and art in American society, 1876-1914. Pennsylvania: Penn State Press.

Howkins, J. 2001. The Creative Economy. London: Penguin

Lewis, R., & Lewis, S. 2008.The Power of Art. New Mexico: Cengage Learning.

Myerscough, J. 1988. The Economic Importance of the Arts in Great Britain. London: Policy Studies Institute

Selwood, S. 2000. The UK Cultural Sector. London: Policy Studies Institute

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IvyPanda. 2023. "The Power of Art." December 2, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-power-of-art/.

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IvyPanda. "The Power of Art." December 2, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-power-of-art/.

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