Like I have mentioned in my previous post, “paleoanthropsychobiological” is a term that created by Ellen Dissanayake who is the author of the book called What Is Art For. She pointed out that art is something complex, which contains human history, societies, and has psychological effects (p. 1). I think she wants to use this way to say art is a really complex thing so she puts lots of words together to explain art. In addition, those things are everywhere in human’s life, and also important, so this makes art even more important and necessary.
“Making special” is another term that Dissanayake mentioned in her book to define art. My personal understanding for her explanation is that art is something could make things special to someone. Firstly, the form and content are not important for art. Secondly, a piece of work is not art until some person feels it is art. What I mean by that is art has to relate to people. If nobody understands that work, that is not art. However, if there is one include that people who makes that work thinks it is meaningful, that one is art.
Again like my pervious post mentioned, I found the art history of western European is really interesting to me because I could always compare it with Chinese history so that I could have deeper understand of human history as a whole. Dissanayake identified many important movements, and periods of art, and I want to discuss some of them. First period I think is very important is medieval times. Dissanayake said that “In the medieval times, the arts were in the service of religion as they have always been and were not regarded ‘aesthetically”(p. 16). Art is not formed very complete at that time (although nowadays our art is also not complete formed), people’s definition towards aesthetical is not uniformed. The second period that I think is interesting is that when people turned their attention to “aesthetics” which is “a concern with elucidating principles such as taste and beauty that govern all the arts and indeed make them not simply painting or statues but examples of art” (p.17). During that period of time, people start to realize that art is another level of thing compare with basic level needs, so people did that on purpose that take art as an independent thing with others. The last period I want to mention would be of course the latest period which is now. I am part of this time so I have deeper understanding of it. After such long time development and changing, art become a complex and mix box for people. Just like Dissanayake said, its like a Pandora’s Box was opened (p. 19). People are not limited on traditional ways to do art so that the form of art becomes multitudinous. Every thing could be called as art basically, and I am still not sure if it is a good thing or bad thing for art to develop. The only concern I have about this is that I think many people who is doing art doesn’t know what art is, or they don’t know why they are doing it. I feel like it is a little bit lost based on art’s history trend. However, everything happen has its own reasons, and I believe this period of time would become history for people hundreds years later. When they analyze this kind of art history, I hope they can also mark this time as an important turning point.
