Historia del arte

Give the answers on A4. Write on the first page: your name, department and class. Hand in the questions before the 12th of january at five o’clock in my postbox or in the box with my name (Michael van Hoogenhuyze) on top of it.
- Can you say there is a fundamental difference between popular culture, (mass media or commercial culture) and art? Can you give examples?
- Which changes in our imageof the world did contribute to the development of abstrct art?
- What is the meaning of “The Sublime” in art? Is the concept of The Sublime still important? Give examples.
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1- Can we say beauty is the most important goal or principle in art? Explain it with examples
Beauty is a word that can have so many different connotations; or perhaps, more than connotations orofficial definitions, beauty is something that can change so radically according to perspective and experience. Beauty, art, taste and apreciation are all part of the nature of aesthetics, and aesthetics are all about what comes in our minds through our eyes. Beauty has been and will always be the most important or valuable part in all ways and kinds of artistic disciplines we could think ofnowadays.
Industrial arts are a good example in this case; beauty and utility in this discipline are extraneous to each other, two separable aspects, which have no intimate connection. In everyone's definition of art, many struggle while trying to understand the huge contrast there is in between the freedom of beauty and the practical attitudes. You cannot reduce the beauty of a bridge or a cathedralto such factors as common size and fine proportions, without a relation to function. No disaproving idea of the purity of beauty can disable our intuition of the beauty of utility. Bridges spread and stretch over rivers, churches are places of worship; both of them have an element belonging to beauty.
Medicine on the other hand, is a study in which every single practice becomes a sensory feast.Touching the skin of their patients is such a rare delight. Skin of babies in that sense, is the soft kind of skin that bears none of the scars that time, sickness, injury, and heartache will leave. It is a canvas waiting to be filled with care and embrace. And then we have the elderly, whose skin is textured with time and stories, like imprints on a vinyl record. Wrinkles simply represent longlife, stored in the many hills and valleys of a body that has seen much and endured much. General doctors, nurses, physicians, surgeons, orthopedists, etc, all of them need to find wonder in what they do time after time, day by day in their working routines. If they find no beauty, no wonder, no delight in the humans stretched out before them every day, then medicine can become a weight aroundtheir necks, and it will drown them in a sea of misery caused and brought to them by all those requesting them.

2 - Do you think that the public today has a bad taste? Can it be a problem for you as an artist or designer? Can you give examples?
Bad taste is generally a title given to any object or idea that does not fall within the normal social standards of the time or area. Varying from societyto society and from time to time, bad taste is generally thought of as a negative thing, but also changes with each individual. In order for me to provide a possible answer to this question, I would first have to ask myself: Why do people have a bad taste? and, Why are they said to have "Bad taste"?. I think people in general nowadays just have too many kinds of media around them, at all times;there are too many options, too many choices to make and too many things to pay attention to. Everything in a way has become disposable. Down the street, in restaurants, in stores, on the internet, while travelling, while trying to communicate to others. There will always be "a better but cheaper version" of something. I feel like people, as in the common crowd, have given up. Their senses have...