The development of art and architecture and how it reflects the social and cultural attitudes underlying social discourse.
Essay - 6 pages - Arts and art history
Research on the development of art and architecture demonstrates that works created during different time periods clearly reflect the social and cultural attitudes underlying social discourse. With this in mind, it is not surprising to find that the middle class interiors of the nineteenth...
History of Ballet
Essay - 4 pages - Arts and art history
Ballet, like many other art forms, has a long and rich history of evolution and development. In fact, researchers examining the history of ballet have noted that the earliest precursors to ballet can be found as far back as the Renaissance in Italy (Wiley, 2006). Since this time, ballet has...
The Circular Nature of the Primavera
Essay - 6 pages - Arts and art history
Botticelli's Primavera begs for meaning. It is a complex, large-scale masterpiece with apparent contradictions in mood, movement, theme and context. The direct gaze of its central figure instructs the viewer to look carefully, as does Botticelli's precise hand. Every deliberate petal, every...
Transparency, Opacity, and the Artistic Response to the Revolution
Essay - 3 pages - Arts and art history
Much of the art produced in Russia during and after the Revolution served as a response to the sudden and widespread changes in society. Andrei Platonov's short story The River Potudan is no exception. Largely allegorical and interpretive, this tale of a soldier's re-entry into the world of his...
The Effects of Politics and Culture on Medieval Christian Art
Essay - 10 pages - Arts and art history
While Christianity could be argued to have started somewhere between the years 1 and 33 AD, it was not the official religion of the Roman Empire until the Edict of Milan in 313 AD, though by then it had extended throughout the empire and its social structure, thus necessitating the official...
The development of modern art
Essay - 3 pages - Arts and art history
Throughout the course of the twentieth century, society, and more specifically, the art community, underwent a rebirth called modernism. Modernism served as the basis for artists and society as a whole to seeks an expansion away from Victorian morals, which placed such marked constraints on...
Magic Realism in Photography
Essay - 4 pages - Arts and art history
Present-day, the meaning of the term magic realism varies depending on the art form being described. Its meaning has altered over the past century and yet maintains aspects of its original use. The term was first in a title role with visual arts critic Franz Roh's book published 1925 Nach...
An Outlet For The Internal: Photographs Reflecting The Desires of Clementina Hawarden and Julia Margaret Cameron
Essay - 2 pages - Arts and art history
Two Victorian women in the isolation of their own homes created portraits and tableaux. From 1857- 1864, Clementina Viscountess Hawarden made so-called “Studies from Life,” which have far more significance than their general title would imply. A more widely recognized contemporary...
The Dance of Death
Essay - 3 pages - Arts and art history
The robed, skeletal figure of Death interacting with the living has become an iconic image in contemporary culture, adorning Tarot cards, album covers and T-shirts; appearing in film, books and artistic prints. Our fascination with and fear of mortality has existed since humans first walked upon...
Michelangelo's Last Judgement
Essay - 3 pages - Arts and art history
Michelangelo Buonarroti was born on March 6, 1475, to the wife of a podesta in the diocese of Arezzo. As podesta, his father held an executive and judicial office of the Republican city-states. When his term in office ended, Michelangelo's father moved the family to their villa right outside of...
San Vitale's Beauty as Seen Through the Eyes of Plotinus
Essay - 3 pages - Arts and art history
Architectural beauty is a concept that is continually changing and entirely subjective. It is dependent upon who is doing the evaluating and the criteria with which they are basing their evaluation. Usually, the structure's ultimate function weighs in heavily in the determination of its...
Gender Inversion and Spectator Identity in Silence of the Lambs
Essay - 5 pages - Arts and art history
Jonathan Demme's 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs centers on a young FBI trainee's attempts to catch a deranged serial killer before he kills again. Clarice Starling is a young woman determined to rise through the ranks of the male FBI. Already at a social disadvantage due to her sex, she...
Egyptian versus Greek Sculpture
Essay - 2 pages - Arts and art history
The Egyptian culture consistently maintained a powerful belief in the afterlife. As a result, tombs were lavished with clothing, furniture, and paintings to nourish the Ka or soul. Most importantly, statues were erected should anything happen to the body in which the soul must inhabit. The...
Acoustic Mythologies of The Natyasastra: Text of Celestial Music
Essay - 5 pages - Arts and art history
Concerning the use of musical rhythm as a sadhana, a path to liberation, one preliminary distinction to make is between the tantric means of rasa and the yogic means of bhakti; The mythological tradition inherited by Hindustani music distinguishes between gana (music for pleasure) and gandharva...
Once More with Talent
Essay - 2 pages - Arts and art history
The room is silent, black, yet complete in its created emptiness. You cannot see the person sitting next to you, the face that looks back in the darkness. Suddenly, from nowhere, a few shaky piano notes fill the air. A melody so simple yet so memorable, it pulls you away from your metal seat and...
Not All is Cold in Iceland
Essay - 5 pages - Arts and art history
Humanity is nostalgic. There is no other way in which to explain the strips of antique malls in the Midwest or the string of collector shows on the shop-at-home networks. Like the sightseers searching for the Grand Canyon pictured on the poster in a local travel agency, humans are such experts...
IS: Music
Essay - 3 pages - Arts and art history
If only Beethoven and Tchaikovsky could have conceived of the technological advantages the musicians of today take for granted. Innovative strides in music technology development have revolutionized the way music is recorded, composed, stored, performed, searched and retrieved by creating easy to...
American Idol
Essay - 4 pages - Arts and art history
In its first season, American Idol garnered the attention of 22.77 million viewers on the finale night. The last season—the show's fifth—36.38 million people tuned in to witness Taylor Hicks take home the ultimate title of American Idol (Wikepedia.com). Hicks, a stocky, gray-haired...
Breakaway (A continuation of "AmericanIdle")
Essay - 4 pages - Arts and art history
To the surprise of fans and American Idol producers alike (in varying degrees of delightful glee and ghastly shock), Clarkson's second album conveyed an entirely different message than the first. Entitled Breakaway, the music simply delves deeper than the playful bubbles at the surface of all...
The Recovery of Music
Essay - 3 pages - Arts and art history
To experience music as it is exactly is a great thing, but a difficult thing. Being an audience to a piece of music does not ensure such experience, and in fact the performers of music themselves can experience music. Bystanders and composers also experience music in unique ways. All of these...
Doctor Faustus and Renaissance Humanism
Essay - 4 pages - Arts and art history
The introduction to Christopher Marlowe's The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus in The Norton Anthology of English Literature describes the play's protagonist as “an overreacher, striving to get beyond the conventional boundaries established to contain the human will” (990). While...
Bach vs Sousa
Essay - 2 pages - Arts and art history
Throughout history there have been an infinite number of composers. These composers range in time period from the 1600s to present day and their styles of music range from classical to rock ‘n' roll. Two of the most influential composers of all time are Johann Sebastian Bach and John...
Schnittke
Essay - 2 pages - Arts and art history
Schnittke was born in the Soviet Union in 1934 into a Russian Jewish family. The father was a German Jew from the Baltic area, and the mother was a Catholic from Germany. Given this, his first language was German. In 1945 for three years, he lived and studied in Vienna where he heard much of the...
Sample Music Review
Essay - 1 pages - Arts and art history
The Legendary Pink Dots, featuring members of Skinny Puppy, played the Howlin' Wolf on Saturday, June 12th. Upon scanning the stage and seeing the medley of performers, I knew it would be an interesting show. The saxophone player, dressed in a purple and orange suit, a rather average-looking...
Alfred Schnittke in Retrospect
Essay - 2 pages - Arts and art history
“For almost thirty years I repeatedly saw one and the same dream: I would arrive in Vienna at long last. I would feel really happy, for I was returning to the most serene time of my life.” In this quote, Alfred Schnittke, in the final years before his death, recaps his pleasant times...
The Rise of Choral Polyphony in Burgundy
Essay - 7 pages - Arts and art history
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, there was a flourishing of culture in the Netherlands with the rise of humanism and the patronage of the Dukes of Burgundy. With the advances in trade and commerce, there was also a general prosperity which contributed to the wealth of artistic...
Critical Theory: theatre and post-structuralism
Essay - 6 pages - Arts and art history
Post-structuralism derives from philosophy , ‘ a discipline which has always tended to emphasise the difficulty of achieving secure knowledge about things' (Barry;1995:63) .Philosophical writing, although following the structure thesis, anti-thesis then a synthesis of both, always comes...
Theater and audience perception in a postmodern perspective
Essay - 9 pages - Arts and art history
« The genuinely postmodern work forces us to recognise that reality is something other than our formulations of it, and that those formulations are therefore constructs » (Jean-François Lyotard). Investigate and interrogate the urge in performance theatre to radically restructure audience...
Live technologies in theatrical performance in a post modern perspective
Essay - 8 pages - Arts and art history
How does the use of live technologies in theatrical performance comment on our own positioning in a post-industrial technologically based society? How does this in turn exemplify some of the concerns of the postmodernists? Postmodern cinema is rich in intertextual references, and is often...
Xu Beihong: pioneer of Chinese Realistic Painting?
Essay - 9 pages - Arts and art history
Xu Beihong (1895-1953) was a native of Yixing in Jiangsu Province. His father, from whom he learned painting in his childhood, was also a painter. At the age of 20, Xu went to Shanghai to sell his paintings. In 1918, at the invitation of Cai Yuanpei, he went to Peking University to work as an...
