Art is one of mankind's oldest inventions. It existed long before a single farm was planted, before the first villages were built. Art was already thousands of years old when writing appeared; in fact, the letters of the first alphabets were pictures. People were probably shaping objects and scratching out images even as they turned their grunts and cries into the first systematic spoken languages. Indeed, man was making art before he knew what are was. He seems to have made art without questioning why, as if making art was simply something that human beings did in the natural course of their lives.
And man is still making art; he has never stopped. Just about every people, every society, from the oldest to the youngest and from the most primitive to the most advanced, has created works of art. No wonder that the sum of all this creation is called "the world of art." Art is a world in itself, a world as round and full and changeable as the world we live in, and like the planet Earth, a whole of many distinct parts. Removing a wedge from the whole and studying it is like touring a country or visiting an era in the past. One wedge describes the ideals of the ancient Greeks. Another defines the interests of the French in the Middle Ages. Still another demonstrates the ideas that shaped the Renaissance in 15th-century Italy. Another reflects the traditions that had meaning in 18th-century Japan, or 10th-century China, or 17th-century India. But seen as a whole, the world of art reveals a broad picture of all of humanity; it summarizes the ideals, interests, and ideas of all people in all areas. The world of art tells us what has been on men's minds in generation after generation, from the dawn of man to the present day.
Definition of Art
Actually, most people do know what art is. The trouble comes when they try to define it. No one definition seems broad enough to cover every object in art museum. And some definitions are too broad, they may apply to everything in the museum, but they also apply to many things that clearly are not art. Despite the difficulty of defining art, we can make certain observatons that help us to understand what are is. Art is a man-made product that expresses the uniqueness of the maker, of the society to which the maker belongs, of all mankind, or of all of these. The product appeals to the intellect and to the senses, especially to the sense of beauty. The product can assume a variety of forms, musical composition, a ballet, a play, or a novel or poem. This article, however, deals only with the "fine" arts: drawing, painting, sculpture, and architecture. It is his intellect that makes man unique. Men have created religion, science, and technology to make their struggle for survival easier. The have created art to measure the worth of these and all human enterprises against the quality of life. European medieval art dealt almost exclusively with religion. Italian Renaissance art refelected the growing interest in the sciences. Much Oriental art conveys the idea of harmonious, wellordered universe. 20th-century art is very much a product of the age of technology.
