What is Art?

What is Art?
Understanding art in the context of expression and creativity is quite diverse that most scholars find it challenging to come up with a singular, unified definition. A simple explanation of "art" from Merriam-Webster dictionary is that art is the conscious usage of creative imagination and skill, mainly when producing aesthetic objects. To give the word an academic outlook, we discover that art is an expansively assorted range of human actions involving the creation of auditory, visual, or performed artworks to communicate the artist's technical and imaginative capabilities. Therefore, attracting appreciation for their emotional and aesthetic appeals from the intended audience. It also expresses our desires, thoughts, intuitions, and emotions on a physical level to communicate the intended message regardless of the passage of time, starting from the renaissance period to modern times. Hence, this essay will discuss the meaning of art through an evolutionary process and how the fundamental values of art have changed as time passes.
Numerous philosophers have tried to understand art through divergent perspectives. Most often, its meaning is fashioned by the artist's intentions and the ideas and feelings the artwork prompts from the viewer. Each artwork is usually meant for a particular cultural context to address individuals from a specific society who share values, ethics, and ethos. Targeting a particular community with artwork achieves its meaning by educating society on desired social behaviors. Art's purpose is often to address spiritual, economic, social, philosophical, or political ideas with aestheticism to explore nature, divergent opinions, bestow pleasure, and invoke emotions. However, its universal meaning is often elusive since art in one society might be an ordinary object in another culture.
Consequently, most philosophers have opined in different ways to reach a common understanding. For instance, renowned philosopher Richard Wollheim considers art as one of the most elusive human culture traditional problems. From such viewpoints, we come up with different definitions like equating it to a means of communicating or expressing ideas and emotions, or just a way of appreciating and exploring formal elements independently and not considering any historical context.
Through a simple understanding that art is an amalgamation of human activities, we discover that it has historically existed in different forms and on varying media. Its earliest recorded forms include sculpture, visual media, photography, visual arts, print art, et cetera. Although architecture is usually considered a form of visual arts, it entails objects creation where its practicality is most crucial compared to other visual art forms like painting. Hence, art is primarily classified in terms of its qualities like its reality representation, emotional appeal, or expression. As highlighted above, even though there has never been a consensus on art's definition, its general illustrations peg on human's technical or imaginative creative skills.
Art's history and evolution raise complex questions in equal measures like the term itself. The word originated from the Latin ars, which initially meant craft or skill. These meanings still do...