Portal:The arts

T H E A R T S P O R T A L

The arts are a wide range of human practices of creative expression, storytelling, and cultural participation. They encompass multiple diverse and plural modes of thinking, doing, and being, in an extremely broad range of media. Both dynamic and a characteristically constant feature of human life, they have developed into innovative, stylized, and sometimes intricate forms. This is often achieved through sustained and deliberate study, training, and/or theorizing within a particular tradition, across generations, and even between civilizations. The arts are a vehicle through which human beings cultivate distinct social, cultural, and individual identities while transmitting values, impressions, judgements, ideas, visions, spiritual meanings, patterns of life, and experiences across time and space.

Prominent examples of the arts include:

visual arts (including architecture, ceramics, drawing, filmmaking, painting, photography, and sculpting)
literary arts (including fiction, drama, poetry, and prose)
performing arts (including dance, music, and theatre)

They can employ skill and imagination to produce objects and performances, convey insights and experiences, and construct new environments and spaces.

The arts can refer to common, popular, or everyday practices as well as more sophisticated, systematic, or institutionalized ones. They can be discrete and self-contained or combine and interweave with other art forms, such as the combination of artwork with the written word in comics. They can also develop or contribute to some particular aspect of a more complex art form, as in cinematography. By definition, the arts themselves are open to being continually redefined. The practice of modern art, for example, is a testament to the shifting boundaries, improvisation and experimentation, reflexive nature, and self-criticism or questioning that art and its conditions of production, reception, and possibility can undergo.

As both a means of developing capacities of attention and sensitivity and as ends in themselves, the arts can simultaneously be a form of response to the world and a way that our responses and what we deem worthwhile goals or pursuits are transformed. From prehistoric cave paintings to ancient and contemporary forms of ritual to modern-day films, art has served to register, embody, and preserve our ever-shifting relationships to each other and to the world. (Full article...)

Featured articles -

Featured articles are displayed here, which represent some of the best content on English Wikipedia.

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Branded to Kill (Japanese: 殺しの烙印, Hepburn: Koroshi no Rakuin) is a 1967 Japanese yakuza film directed by Seijun Suzuki and starring Joe Shishido, Koji Nanbara, Annu Mari and Mariko Ogawa. The story follows contract killer Goro Hanada as he is recruited by a mysterious woman named Misako for a seemingly impossible mission. When the mission fails, he is hunted by the phantom Number One Killer, whose methods threaten his life and sanity.

Branded to Kill was designated by its production company and distributor, Nikkatsu, as a low-budget B movie. Dissatisfied with the original script, the studio called in Suzuki to rewrite and direct the film shortly prior to the start of production. Suzuki came up with many of his ideas for the project the night before or on the set while filming, and welcomed ideas from his colleagues; the screenplay is credited to Hachiro Guryu, a writing collective that consisted of Suzuki and seven other writers, including his frequent collaborators Takeo Kimura and Atsushi Yamatoya. Suzuki gave the film a satirical, anarchic and visually eclectic bent, which the studio had previously warned him away from. The brief turnaround Suzuki was given to make Branded to Kill meant that post-production on the film was completed only a day before its pre-scheduled release on June 15, 1967. (Full article...)
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Aquino at the 2016 Berlin International Film Festival

Angelita Grace Velasquez Aquino (born February 7, 1973) is a Filipino actress, fashion model, and television personality. Prominent in independent films, she has also worked on television shows of varying genres, and is known for her versatility and adaptability in portraying protagonists and villains. She has received various accolades, including six Star Awards, two Golden Screen Awards, and a Gawad Urian.

A journalism graduate of the University of the Philippines Baguio, Aquino began her career as a model, before making her film debut with a minor role in the action drama Mumbaki (1996). She made her first television appearance as a presenter of the lifestyle show F! (1999). Her breakthrough came in the erotic drama Laro sa Baga (2000), which earned her a Star Award for Best Supporting Actress. She gained wider recognition for starring in Crying Ladies (2003) and Donsol (2006), which were the Philippine submissions for Best International Feature Film at the Academy Awards. Aquino established herself as a leading actress playing villainous parts in the drama series Magkaribal (2010), Maria la del Barrio (2011), Apoy sa Dagat (2013), And I Love You So (2015), Till I Met You (2016), and Dirty Linen (2023). (Full article...)
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Here Is Mariah Carey, also known as Mariah Carey or This Is Mariah Carey, is the third video album by American singer Mariah Carey. It presents Carey performing live at Proctor's Theatre in Schenectady, New York, in July 1993, and also includes non-concert footage. Carey performs ten songs during the video; four are from her third studio album Music Box (1993), which Columbia Records commissioned Here Is Mariah Carey to promote. She is sporadically accompanied by a band, choir, dancers, and string musicians. In creating the stage for the performance, production designers sought inspiration from works by Boris Aronson and Josep Maria Jujol. Lawrence Jordan, who collaborated with Carey on previous occasions, directed the hour-long video.

Approximately 4,500 people attended tapings at Proctor's Theater, and 19 million watched it on television network NBC during its original broadcast on November 25, 1993. Columbia Music Video released it on VHS five days later to generally positive reviews from critics. Although they complimented Carey's voice, many felt the non-concert scenes were redundant. Here Is Mariah Carey peaked at number four on the United States video album chart published by Billboard. Earning a Platinum certification from the Recording Industry Association of America, it was one of the best-selling video albums of 1994 and 1995 in that country. The video also spent six weeks at number one on the Official Charts Company's music videos chart in the United Kingdom. (Full article...)
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"A Death in the Family" is a 1988 storyline in the American comic book Batman, published by DC Comics. It was written by Jim Starlin and penciled by Jim Aparo, with cover art by Mike Mignola. Serialized in Batman #426–429 from August to November 1988, "A Death in the Family" is considered one of the most important Batman stories for featuring the death of his sidekick Robin at the hands of his archenemy, the Joker.

Jason Todd, the second character to assume the Robin persona, was introduced in 1983 to replace Dick Grayson, who was unavailable for use at the time. Jason became unpopular among readers after 1986, as writers began to characterize him as rebellious and impulsive. Editor Dennis O'Neil was considering having Jason revamped or written out of Batman when he recalled a 1982 Saturday Night Live sketch in which Eddie Murphy encouraged viewers to call the show if they wanted him to boil a lobster on air. Inspired to orchestrate a similar stunt, DC set up a 900 number voting system to allow fans to decide Jason's fate. (Full article...)
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St Donat’s Castle from the Tudor Garden
"An exceptionally fine medieval castle"

St Donat's Castle (Welsh: Castell Sain Dunwyd), St Donats, Wales, is a medieval castle in the Vale of Glamorgan, about 16 miles (26 km) to the west of Cardiff, and about 1+1⁄2 miles (2.4 km) to the west of Llantwit Major. Positioned on cliffs overlooking the Bristol Channel, the site has been occupied since the Iron Age, and was by tradition the home of the Celtic chieftain Caradog. The present castle's origins date from the 12th century when the de Haweys and later Peter de Stradling began its development. The Stradlings held the castle for four hundred years, until the death of Sir Thomas Stradling in a duel in 1738.

During the 18th century, the castle's status and condition declined and by the early 19th century it was only partly habitable. The later 19th and early 20th centuries saw several restorations. In 1852, it was purchased by John Whitlock Nicholl Carne, who claimed descent from the Stradlings but whose efforts at reconstruction were not well regarded. More enlightened improvements were made by its subsequent owner, the coal magnate Morgan Stuart Williams. (Full article...)
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The Shakespeare authorship question is the argument that someone other than William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon wrote the works attributed to him. Anti-Stratfordians—a collective term for adherents of the various alternative-authorship theories—believe that Shakespeare of Stratford was a front to shield the identity of the real author or authors, who for some reason—usually social rank, state security, or gender—did not want or could not accept public credit. Although the idea has attracted much public interest, all but a few Shakespeare scholars and literary historians consider it a fringe theory, and for the most part acknowledge it only to rebut or disparage the claims. (Full article...)
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Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution is a book written by Stephen Knight first published in 1976. It proposed a solution to five murders in Victorian London that were blamed on an unidentified serial killer known as "Jack the Ripper".

Knight presented an elaborate conspiracy theory involving the British royal family, freemasonry and the painter Walter Sickert. He concluded that the victims were murdered to cover up a secret marriage between the second-in-line to the throne, Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale, and Annie Elizabeth Crook, a working class girl. There are many facts that contradict Knight's theory, and his main source, Joseph Gorman (also known as Joseph Sickert), later retracted the story and admitted to the press that it was a hoax. (Full article...)
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Portrait of Mariana of Austria is a 1652–1653 oil-on-canvas painting by Diego Velázquez, the leading artist of the Spanish Golden Age, existing in a number of versions. Its subject, Doña Mariana (known as Maria Anna), was the daughter of Emperor Ferdinand III and Maria Anna of Spain. She was nineteen years old when the painting was completed. Although described as vivacious and fun-loving in life, she is given an unhappy expression in Velázquez's portrait. The portrait is painted in shades of black and red, and her face is heavily made up. Her right hand rests on the back of a chair, and she holds a lace handkerchief in her left hand. Her bodice is decorated with jewellery, including a gold necklace, bracelets and a large gold brooch. A clock rests on scarlet drapery behind her, signifying her status and discernment.

Mariana had been betrothed to her first cousin, Prince Baltasar Carlos. He died in 1646 aged sixteen, and in 1649 she married her uncle, Baltasar Carlos's father, Philip IV, who sought her hand so as to preserve the hegemony of the Habsburg dynasty. She became queen consort on their marriage, and after her husband's death in September 1665, regent during the minority of her son, Charles II, until he came of age in 1675. Owing to Charles' inhibiting physical weaknesses, she dominated the political life in Spain until her death in 1696. (Full article...)
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A Weekend in the City is the second studio album by British indie rock band Bloc Party. It was recorded at Grouse Lodge Studios in Westmeath, Ireland, in mid-2006 and was produced by Jacknife Lee. The album was refined and mixed at several locations in London at the end of 2006. It was released on 24 January 2007 in Japan and in the first week of February in the rest of the world, with Wichita Recordings as the primary label. The album peaked at number two on the UK Albums Chart and on the Irish Albums Chart. In the United States, it entered the Billboard 200 at number 12.

Bloc Party worked to craft an album that distanced them from the conventional guitar band set-up by incorporating more electronically processed beats and additional instrumentation. Computer programs were extensively used to enrich and amend recorded takes, while a string sextet was hired to perform on some of the tracks. The subject matter of frontman and chief lyricist Kele Okereke's lyrics for A Weekend in the City covers issues such as drug use, sexuality, and the media's use of moral panic surrounding issues such as terrorism. The album's three original singles, "The Prayer", "I Still Remember", and "Hunting for Witches", address these themes respectively. (Full article...)
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The wordless novel is a narrative genre that uses sequences of captionless pictures to tell a story. As artists have often made such books using woodcut and other relief printing techniques, the terms woodcut novel or novel in woodcuts are also used. The genre flourished primarily in the 1920s and 1930s and was most popular in Germany.

The wordless novel has its origin in the German Expressionist movement of the early 20th century. The typically socialist work drew inspiration from medieval woodcuts and used the awkward look of that medium to express angst and frustration at social injustice. The first such book was the Belgian Frans Masereel's 25 Images of a Man's Passion, published in 1918. The German Otto Nückel and other artists followed Masereel's example. Lynd Ward brought the genre to the United States in 1929 when he produced Gods' Man, which inspired other American wordless novels and a parody in 1930 by cartoonist Milt Gross with He Done Her Wrong. Following an early-1930s peak in production and popularity, the genre waned in the face of competition from sound films and anti-socialist censorship in Nazi Germany and the US. (Full article...)
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"The Other Woman" is the 78th episode of the serial drama television series Lost and the sixth episode of the show's fourth season. It aired on March 6, 2008 on the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) in the United States and on CTV in Canada. The episode was written by co-executive producer Drew Goddard and executive story editor Christina M. Kim, and was directed by Eric Laneuville.

The narrative begins on December 24, 2004, 94 days after the crash of Oceanic Airlines Flight 815. Recent island arrivals Daniel Faraday (played by Jeremy Davies) and Charlotte Lewis (Rebecca Mader) leave the survivors' camp without notice for the Dharma Initiative electrical station called the Tempest. In flashbacks that depict events on the island, Juliet Burke (Elizabeth Mitchell) discovers that her boss Ben Linus (Michael Emerson), the leader of the island's original inhabitants referred to as the Others, is in love with her. (Full article...)
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"The Joy of Sect" is the thirteenth episode of the ninth season of the American animated television series The Simpsons. It originally aired on the Fox network in the United States on February 8, 1998. In the episode, a cult takes over Springfield, and the Simpson family become members.

David Mirkin conceived the initial idea for the episode, Steve O'Donnell was the lead writer, and Steven Dean Moore directed. The writers drew on many groups to develop the Movementarians, but were principally influenced by Scientology, Heaven's Gate, the Unification Church ("Moonies"), the Rajneesh movement, and Peoples Temple. The show contains many references to popular culture, including the title reference to The Joy of Sex and a gag involving Rover from the television program The Prisoner. (Full article...)
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Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims is the first collection by British designer Alexander McQueen, produced as the thesis collection for his master's degree in fashion at Central Saint Martins (CSM) art school. The collection's narrative was inspired by the victims of 19th-century London serial killer Jack the Ripper, with aesthetic inspiration from the fashion, erotica, and prostitution practices of the Victorian era. The collection was presented on the runway at London Fashion Week on 16 March 1992, as the second-to-last of the CSM graduate collections. Editor Isabella Blow was fascinated by the runway show and insisted on purchasing the entire collection, later becoming McQueen's friend and muse.

Jack the Ripper remains an object of critical analysis for its violent concept and styling. McQueen held on to the narrative and aesthetic tendencies he established in Jack the Ripper throughout his career, earning a reputation for producing narratively-driven collections inspired by macabre aspects of history, art, and his own life. Items from Jack the Ripper, most notably a pink frock coat with a thorn print, have appeared in the retrospectives Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty (2011 and 2015) and Isabella Blow: Fashion Galore! (2013) (Full article...)
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The Low Memorial Library (nicknamed Low) is a building at the center of Columbia University's Morningside Heights campus in Upper Manhattan, New York City, United States. The building, located near 116th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue, was designed by Charles Follen McKim of the firm McKim, Mead & White. The building was constructed between 1895 and 1897 as the university's central library, although it has contained the university's central administrative offices since 1934. Columbia University president Seth Low funded the building with $1 million (equivalent to $35 million in 2022) and named the edifice in memory of his father, Abiel Abbot Low. Low's facade and interior are New York City designated landmarks, and the building is also designated as a National Historic Landmark.

Low is arranged in the shape of a Greek cross. Three sets of stairs on the library's south side lead to a colonnade with a frieze describing its founding. The steps contain Daniel Chester French's sculpture Alma Mater, a university symbol. The library is four stories tall, excluding a ground-level basement. The building's raised first floor has an entrance vestibule, as well as an ambulatory around an octagonal rotunda, which leads to offices on the outer walls. The rotunda contains a sky-blue plaster dome and four Vermont granite columns on each of its four sides. The library's stacks could store one-and-a-half million volumes; the east wing hosted the Avery Architectural Library and the north wing hosted Columbia's law library. (Full article...)
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Sicilian Baroque is the distinctive form of Baroque architecture which evolved on the island of Sicily, off the southern coast of Italy, in the 17th and 18th centuries, when it was part of the Spanish Empire. The style is recognisable not only by its typical Baroque curves and flourishes, but also by distinctive grinning masks and putti and a particular flamboyance that has given Sicily a unique architectural identity.

The Sicilian Baroque style came to fruition during a major surge of rebuilding following the massive earthquake in 1693. Previously, the Baroque style had been used on the island in a naïve and parochial manner, having evolved from hybrid native architecture rather than being derived from the great Baroque architects of Rome. After the earthquake, local architects, many of them trained in Rome, were given plentiful opportunities to recreate the more sophisticated Baroque architecture that had become popular in mainland Italy; the work of these local architects – and the new genre of architectural engravings that they pioneered – inspired more local architects to follow their lead. Around 1730, Sicilian architects had developed a confidence in their use of the Baroque style. Their particular interpretation led to further evolution to a personalised and highly localised art form on the island. From the 1780s onwards, the style was gradually replaced by the newly fashionable neoclassicism. (Full article...)

Featured picture

Mesoamerican calendars

Credit: Artist: A. de Leon y Gama; Restoration: Garrondo/Lise Broer

An illustration depicting an ancient Mexican calendar. The Maya and Aztec calendars are the most common of the Mexican calendars, but similar ones were used by other cultures. Common to all Mesoamerican cultures was the 260-day ritual calendar that had no confirmed correlation to astronomical or agricultural cycles. These were used in combination with a separate 365-day calendar to create a 52-year cycle known as a calendar round.

Did you know...

... that the lobby of the Suffern, New York post office (pictured), features a relief depicting a semi-naked woman shooting a flaming arrow?
... that Mary Shelley's verse drama Midas is a commentary on both Ovid's Metamorphoses and Chaucer's The Wife of Bath's Tale?
... that deforestation in Staffordshire inspired contributions from Erasmus Darwin and Anna Seward to a book of poetry about Needwood Forest by Francis Mundy?

In this month

5 February 1972 – The American Modernist poet Marianne Moore dies in New York City at the age of 84
6 February 1918 – The Austrian Symbolist painter Gustav Klimt, one of the most prominent members of the Vienna Secession movement, dies in Vienna
19 February 1704 – Ichikawa Danjūrō I (pictured), an early and influential kabuki actor, is stabbed and killed onstage by fellow actor Ikushima Hanroku
24 February 1607 – Claudio Monteverdi's L'Orfeo, the earliest opera that is still performed today, premieres in Mantua
27 February 1877 – Tchaikovsky's ballet Swan Lake premieres to poor reviews

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Featured biography

Abbas Kiarostami (born 1940) was an internationally acclaimed Iranian film director, screenwriter, photographer and film producer. An active filmmaker since 1970, Kiarostami has been involved in over forty films, including shorts and documentaries. Kiarostami attained critical acclaim for directing the Koker Trilogy (1987–94), Taste of Cherry (1997), and The Wind Will Carry Us (1999). Kiarostami has worked extensively as a screenwriter, film editor, art director and producer and has designed credit titles and publicity material. He is also a poet, photographer, painter, illustrator, and graphic designer. Kiarostami is part of a generation of filmmakers in the Iranian New Wave, a Persian cinema movement that started in the late 1960s and includes pioneering directors such as Forough Farrokhzad, Sohrab Shahid Saless, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Bahram Beizai, and Parviz Kimiavi. These filmmakers share many common techniques including the use of poetic dialogue and allegorical storytelling dealing with political and philosophical issues. Kiarostami has a reputation for using child protagonists, for documentary style narrative films, for stories that take place in rural villages, and for conversations that unfold inside cars, using stationary mounted cameras. (Full article...)

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“

That there is a social problem presented by obscenity is attested by the expression of the legislatures of the forty-eight States, as well as the Congress. To recognize the existence of a problem, however, does not require that we sustain any and all measures adopted to meet that problem. The history of the application of laws designed to suppress the obscene demonstrates convincingly that the power of government can be invoked under them against great art or literature, scientific treatises, or works exciting social controversy. Mistakes of the past prove that there is a strong countervailing interest to be considered in the freedoms guaranteed by the First and Fourteenth Amendments.

”

— Earl Warren, Chief Justice of the United States (Roth v. United States, 1957)

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