Can Art Change the Way We View the World

Can Art transmute the Way We View the World? Susan Agee Classics in Philosophy of Art P346 Gregory stain F tout ensemble 2012 For centuries, fraud has been interwoven d 1out the history of mankind. From primary carvings on cave walls and ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, to the Sistine Chapel and the Mona Lisa, artistryistic creations have delighted the man race. Art may be a window to the manufacturers world it has potential to instill desire in the beauty to do something they have neer d ane, be somewhere they have never been and inspire to fulfill a dream or goal.Additionally, Art may possibly allow the artist to illustrate their own perception of a trust or even attempt to deceive the glanceer. However, to truly record how we intoxicate the world we moldiness delve a little deeper than the obvious, which is d angiotensin-converting enzyme our senses, particularly sight. In order to comprehend the world around us, we must first realize that thoughts atomic number 1 8 based on perception initiatory and that those ideas then stool a reduceive model of the world, constructed from jazz, memory, logical inference, and our learning moguls efficiency to map out its own internal representation of our individual surrounds.Therefore, whether it is through visual art, literature, poems, sculpture, photography or cinema, art may very salutary be able to change the direction we see the world, by changing our perception. The first recognizable art dates from at least 38. 000BC in Europe, Africa, and Australia. They atomic number 18 the products of minds as in furcateectually capable and sophisticated as our modern ones and they were exclusively like us, despite the fact that their society was slightly more primitive than ours. Works of this early period are not simple, as if created by a child, but in fact they are quite involved pieces depicting animals, humans and symbols.Additionally, drawings similar to maps, as well as carvings, movable a rt and elaborately decorated animal skulls have been found in caves all over the world. In the book The Mind in the hollow out Consciousness and the Origins of Art by David Lewis-Williams, the author describes these items stating m any(prenominal) of these pieces bear images of animal, fish, birds and, little comm yet, what appear to be human conformations as well as complex arrangements of parallel lines, chevrons and notches. These objects dart as people tend to judge of them, were made from bone, mammoth ivory, amber and antler (Lewis-Williams 2004).Were these ancient artists creating images to simply communicate with others or were they expressing their emotions in the only way they knew how? Although there is no way to tell for certain the artists intentions, it is evident that this art played a role in prehistoric society. Still, art has not always had the same meaning as it does today. In fact, in the time of the philosophers Plato, Socrates and Aristotle the idea of art was related to the Latin word ars, which means cunning or extraized form.These individuals based their views of art on the notion that the artist must be trained for his craft and apiece had differing, yet very similar ideas about art and its place in society. For instance, Socrates believed that paintings and poems stand triply removed from the real that is, there are devil realms of existence more real than art objects, the Forms themselves and the things of daily life. The basis for this view is the assumption that the goal of art is the imitation of mundane reality (Wartenberg, 13). Our brain has developed a way of viewing the world over millions of days of evolution that enables us to succeed and survive.Natural selection has tuned our brains so that we may navigate, manipulate, and meaningfully differentiate our environment and the objects contained in it. So what we see in our minds is a functional model of the physical world, which closely approximates it but is not eq ual to it certainly not in the way we are in the tog of assuming. But still this traditional skepticism about perceptual welcome has much created questions as to whether we can know that things are as we experience them as being, or if the visual world is a grand psychotic belief.To illustrate this idea that perceptual experience may be different than what is real, claim the optical deceit. Artists such as Charles Allan Gilbert and M. C. Escher were know of the craft of illusion in art. For example, in 1892 Charles Allan Gilbert drew a stick out that he called All is self-love. This piece of artwork is an ambiguous optical illusion using a skull, which has been the object of many pieces of this type, where we see more than one thing in the enactment. If we view the overall image, we see a human skull. When we focus on the details of the picture, we see a woman ooking in her vanity reflect. If we look at a close-up, cropped image of All is Vanity, we dont see the skull we just see details of a woman sit at her dressing table. However, if we expand our view, even without seeing the entire image, at one time we know were going to see a skull, we cant help but see it. Also, when we look at the picture from a distance, because of all the black surrounding it, once the details of the woman abbreviate distorted we still only see a skull. Additionally, M. C. Escher used his expertise in mathematics to create his optical illusions in art.He was fascinated with tessellations, which are arrangements of closed shapes that completely queer the plane without overlapping and without leaving gaps. Typically, the shapes making up a tessellation are polygons or similar fifty-fifty shapes, such as the square tiles often used on floors. Escher, however, was fascinated by every kind of tessellation regular and irregular and took special delight in what he called metamorphoses, in which the shapes changed and interacted with each other, and sometimes even broke f ree of the plane itself.The regular solids, cognise as polyhedra, held a special fascination for Escher. He made them the subject of many of his works and included them as secondary elements in a great many more. In the woodcut Four Regular Solids Escher has intersected all but one of the Platonic solids in such a way that their symmetries are aligned, and he has made them translucent so that each is conspicuous through the others. Additionally, among the most important of Eschers works from a mathematical vertex of view are those dealing with the nature of space. In the book The john of M.C. Escher J. I. Locher states this unique interplay between insight and limitation, between possible and impossible worlds has endown up Eschers body of work a wholly personal battlefront in the panorama of visual arts (J. I. Locher 2000). His woodcut Circle make III is a good place to review these works, for it exemplifies the artists concern with the dimensionality of space, and with th e minds ability to discern three-dimensionality in a two-dimensional representation and Escher often exploited this latter feature to achieve astonishing visual effects.To get a sense of what this space is like, one can imagine that he or she is actually in the picture itself. Walking from the center of the picture towards its edge, he/she would shrink just as the fishes in the picture do, so that to actually reach the edge one would have to walk a distance that, to the individual, seems inexhaustible. Indeed, being inside this hyperbolic space, it would not be instanter obvious that anything was unusual about it after all, one has to walk an infinite distance to get to the edge of ordinary Euclidean space too.However, if one is observant enough, he/she might begin to notice some uneven things, such as that all similar triangles were the same size, and that no straight-sided figure we could draw would have four right angles that is, this space doesnt have any squares or rectangl es. In addition to ambiguous and mathematical illusions, there is a process known as anamorphism. There are two types of anamorphosis perspective or oblique and Mirror, or catoptric. It requires the viewer to use special devices or occupy a specific vantage point to chirk up the image.While some of these works of art are more advanced than others, one thing remains constant the perception of depth in a two-dimensional illustration. With mirror anamorphosis, a conical or cylindrical mirror is placed on the drawing or painting to transform a flat distorted image into a three dimensional picture that can be viewed from many angles. The deformed image is painted on a plane surface surrounding the mirror. By looking uniquely into the mirror, the image appears as it should in natural form.Just as Escher and Gilbert were masters in creating works of illusion with their drawings, so too are the artists that give life to their renditions of this type. Salvador Dali was among many other ar tists of his time to have been intrigued with this form of art and utilized this technique in many of his paintings. Modern day artists of this physical body use sidewalks, underpasses, buildings and pavement as their canvases. This type of art is referred to as 3D art and it has been seen everywhere from London to New York.