- What are the visual arts?
- History of the visual arts
- What are the visual arts for?
- Visual arts classification
- Characteristics of visual art
We explain what Visual Art is, its history and what this artistic discipline is for. Also, how it is classified and its characteristics.
What are the visual arts?
The visual arts refer to a set of artistic techniques and disciplines that range from the plastic arts traditional, to the newest and unconventional trends that take advantage of the new available technologies, such as digital art, urban art and others that emerged during the 20th century and what is going on in the 21st.
These terms are used to insist on the common dimension that encompasses so many different techniques and resources, and what isvisual, understood as that which requires the attention of the viewer to perceive through the gaze the details that make up the work.
However, this term can become a bit arbitrary, if we consider that in cases like video art other senses are also involved.
The list of visual arts is large, and includes traditional and other new techniques, even incorporating certain performing arts such as performance, in which the visual perception of artistic events is deprived.
In this sense, it has served as an object of study for disciplines of interpretation such as psychology (Gestalt), interested in the way we perceive the reality and we organize it mentally.
In this sense, Visual Art pays close attention to the dynamics that exist in its works between the background and the represented figure, between the contour, the tendencies towards the grouping of the elements and the way in which emotional, aesthetic and emotional effects are generated. even ethical around what is perceived.
It can serve you: Artwork.
History of the visual arts
The traditional plastic arts have their own history, since they come from the most ancient times of humanity, especially the painting Y sculpture. However, after the technological paradigm shift that the Industrial Revolution and the subsequent technological revolutions of the twentieth century, today there are modern aspects such as Photography or the movie theater, and others even more recent such as video art, net.art (art on the Internet), Land Art orhappening orperformance. The history of visual art is that of a innovation more and more daring.
What are the visual arts for?
Let us agree that the art, as Oscar Wilde said, it is useless. In other words, it has no practical utility, it is not economically interchangeable, nor does it serve to repair the stove when it is damaged in winter.
However, visual art often has decorative applications in homes, buildings or simply in the town, As the urban art (street art) that can provide the viewer with a certain sense of harmony or, on the contrary, open their eyes to certain meanings that, normally, they do not even consider.
Visual arts classification
The visual arts are numerous and that includes at least the following categories:
- Traditional plastic arts: painting, sculpture, architecture, He drew, Recorded.
- Visual arts of the 20th century: photography, cinema, kinetic art, abstract art, Land art (art with the land or the soil itself), urban art, graffiti, performance.
- Digital or New Age Arts: video art (multimedia art), net.art, digital art, fanart and installations (conjunction of sculpture, painting and various elements plastics around a certain space).
Characteristics of visual art
Visual art, understood as a global category, has the following characteristics:
- Transdisciplinarity. This term means that the visual arts move between different disciplines, instead of staying stuck in just one or respecting the “borders” between them. In principle you can use any technique, shape or tradition and combine it with any other that is convenient.
- Tends to appropriation. The visual arts tend to recycle previous or traditional trends and explorations, and re-signify them with new layers of meaning through interventions and ironic twists.
- It is a global art. It handles very well in the heterogeneous and contaminated imaginary of the globalization, where few things are considered "pure" or "immovable" and mixing and daring are valued.
- Manage exposure strategies. He is not content with museums and controlled spaces, but instead invades the urban, goes in search of the viewer and often demands a certain collaboration or complicity from him to form the work.