Portal:The arts

T H E   A R T S   P O R T A L

The Parthenon

The arts or creative arts are a vast range of human practices of creative expression, storytelling, and cultural participation. The arts encompasses 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.

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.

---

• 
  
  

  

  Minogue in 2020

  
  Kylie Ann Minogue AO OBE (/mɪˈnoʊɡ/; born 28 May 1968) is an Australian singer and actress. She is the highest-selling female recording artist from Australia, having sold over 80 million records worldwide. She has been recognised for reinventing herself in music as well as fashion, and is referred to by the European press as the "Princess of Pop" and a style icon. Her accolades include two Grammy Awards, four Brit Awards and eighteen ARIA Music Awards. In 2024, Time named her one of the most influential people in the world.
  
  Born and raised in Melbourne, Minogue first achieved recognition starring as Charlene Robinson in the Australian soap opera Neighbours (1986–1988). She began her music career in the late 1980s, releasing four bubblegum and dance-pop-influenced studio albums under PWL. By the early 1990s, Minogue had amassed several top ten singles in Australia and the UK, including "The Loco-Motion", "I Should Be So Lucky", "Especially for You", "Hand on Your Heart" and "Better the Devil You Know". Taking more creative control over her music, she signed with Deconstruction Records in 1993 and released the albums Kylie Minogue (1994) and Impossible Princess (1997). (Full article...)
• 
  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...)
• 
  Heaven Upside Down is the tenth studio album by American rock band Marilyn Manson. It was released on October 6, 2017, by Loma Vista Recordings and Caroline International. The record had the working title Say10 and was initially due to be issued on Valentine's Day. However, the release was delayed by numerous events, most notably the death of Marilyn Manson's father, Hugh Warner, who died during production and to whom the album was later dedicated. The record has many of the musicians who performed on the band's previous album, The Pale Emperor (2015), including the producer Tyler Bates and the drummer Gil Sharone. Despite Manson's early implications, long-time bass guitarist Twiggy Ramirez did not participate on the album. He left the group following a sexual assault allegation by a former girlfriend.
  
  "We Know Where You Fucking Live" was released as a single in September, shortly followed by "Kill4Me", which became the band's highest-peaking entry on Billboard's Mainstream Rock Chart. The music videos for the album had celebrities including Johnny Depp, Courtney Love and Lisa Marie Presley. The single "Tattooed in Reverse" also entered the mainstream rock chart, making Heaven Upside Down the band's first album since Mechanical Animals in 1998 to chart more than one song there. (Full article...)
• 
  "Once More, with Feeling" is the seventh episode of the sixth season of the supernatural drama television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) and the only one in the series performed as a musical. It was written and directed by series creator Joss Whedon and originally aired on UPN in the United States on November 6, 2001.
  
  "Once More, with Feeling" explores changes in the relationships of the main characters, using the plot device that a demon—credited as "Sweet" but unnamed in the episode—compels the people of Sunnydale to break into song at random moments to express hidden truths. The title of the episode comes from a line sung by Sweet; once the characters have revealed their truths and face the consequences of hearing each other's secrets, he challenges them to "say you're happy now, once more, with feeling". (Full article...)
• 
  Doolittle is the second studio album by the American alternative rock band Pixies, released on April 17, 1989, on 4AD records. It was an instant critical success and became their break-through album. It was especially well received in Europe, where the British music weeklies Melody Maker and Sounds named it as their album of the year. Its idiosyncratic lyrics were written by the Pixies' main songwriter and lead vocalist Black Francis, and allude to surrealist imagery, biblical violence and descriptions of torture and death.
  
  The album is praised for its "quiet/loud" dynamic, achieved through subdued verses founded on Kim Deal's bass patterns and David Lovering's drums. It reaches peaks in tone and volume through the addition of distorted guitars by Francis and Joey Santiago. This technique was influential on the development of early 1990s grunge music; Kurt Cobain said that it was one of his favorite records, and that its songs heavily influenced "Smells Like Teen Spirit". (Full article...)
• 

  

  Candaules, King of Lydia, Shews his Wife by Stealth to Gyges, One of his Ministers, as She Goes to Bed

  
  
  Candaules, King of Lydia, Shews his Wife by Stealth to Gyges, One of his Ministers, as She Goes to Bed, rarely known as The Imprudence of Candaules, is a 45.1 by 55.9 cm (17.8 by 22.0 in) oil painting on canvas by English artist William Etty, first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1830. It shows a scene from the Histories by Herodotus, in which Candaules, king of Lydia, invites his bodyguard Gyges to hide in the couple's bedroom and watch his wife Nyssia undress, to prove to him her beauty. Nyssia notices Gyges spying and challenges him to either accept his own execution or to kill Candaules as a punishment. Gyges chooses to kill Candaules and take his place as king. The painting shows the moment at which Nyssia, still unaware that she is being watched by anyone other than her husband, removes the last of her clothes.
  
  Etty hoped that his audience would take from the painting the moral lesson that women are not chattels and that men infringing on their rights should justly be punished, but he made little effort to explain this to audiences. The painting was immediately controversial and perceived as a cynical combination of a pornographic image and a violent and unpleasant narrative, and it was condemned as an immoral piece of the type one would expect from a foreign, not a British, artist. It was bought by Robert Vernon on its exhibition, and in 1847 was one of a number of paintings given by Vernon to the nation. The work retained its controversial reputation in later years, and when The Art Journal bought the reproduction rights to Vernon's former collection in 1849 they did not distribute reproductions of Candaules. In 1929 it was among several paintings transferred to the newly expanded Tate Gallery, where as of 2018 it remains. (Full article...)
• 
  Diorama is the fourth studio album by Australian alternative rock band Silverchair, released on 31 March 2002 by Atlantic/Eleven. It won the 2002 ARIA Music Award for Best Group and Best Rock Album. The album was co-produced by Daniel Johns and David Bottrill. While Bottrill had worked on albums for a variety of other bands, Diorama marked the first production credit for lead singer Johns.
  
  Johns wrote most of the album at the piano instead of his usual guitar, while the band took a 12-month break following their previous studio album, Neon Ballroom. Silverchair worked with composer Van Dyke Parks on Diorama; the album contains numerous orchestral arrangements and power ballads, a change from the grunge music typical of their earlier work, but consistent with the band's previous orchestrations on Neon Ballroom. The album's title refers to "a world within a world". Four singles were released: "The Greatest View", "Without You", "Luv Your Life", "Across the Night". All appeared on the Australian singles chart. (Full article...)
• 

  

  
  Freedom from Want, also known as The Thanksgiving Picture or I'll Be Home for Christmas, is the third of the Four Freedoms series of four oil paintings by American artist Norman Rockwell. The works were inspired by United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1941 State of the Union Address, known as Four Freedoms.
  
  The painting was created in November 1942 and published in the March 6, 1943, issue of The Saturday Evening Post. All of the people in the picture were friends and family of Rockwell in Arlington, Vermont, who were photographed individually and painted into the scene. The work depicts a group of people gathered around a dinner table for a holiday meal. Having been partially created on Thanksgiving Day to depict the celebration, it has become an iconic representation for Americans of the Thanksgiving holiday and family holiday gatherings in general. The Post published Freedom from Want with a corresponding essay by Carlos Bulosan as part of the Four Freedoms series. Despite many who endured sociopolitical hardships abroad, Bulosan's essay spoke on behalf of those enduring the socioeconomic hardships domestically, and it thrust him into prominence. (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Shaw in 1911, by Alvin Langdon Coburn

  
  George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950), known at his insistence as Bernard Shaw, was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist. His influence on Western theatre, culture and politics extended from the 1880s to his death and beyond. He wrote more than sixty plays, including major works such as Man and Superman (1902), Pygmalion (1913) and Saint Joan (1923). With a range incorporating both contemporary satire and historical allegory, Shaw became the leading dramatist of his generation, and in 1925 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
  
  Born in Dublin, Shaw moved to London in 1876, where he struggled to establish himself as a writer and novelist, and embarked on a rigorous process of self-education. By the mid-1880s he had become a respected theatre and music critic. Following a political awakening, he joined the gradualist Fabian Society and became its most prominent pamphleteer. Shaw had been writing plays for years before his first public success, Arms and the Man in 1894. Influenced by Henrik Ibsen, he sought to introduce a new realism into English-language drama, using his plays as vehicles to disseminate his political, social and religious ideas. By the early twentieth century his reputation as a dramatist was secured with a series of critical and popular successes that included Major Barbara, The Doctor's Dilemma, and Caesar and Cleopatra. (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Theatrical release poster

  
  The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (German: Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari) is a 1920 German silent horror film directed by Robert Wiene and written by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer. Considered the quintessential work of German Expressionist cinema, it tells the story of an insane hypnotist (Werner Krauss) who uses a brainwashed somnambulist (Conrad Veidt) to commit murders. The film features a dark, twisted visual style, with sharp-pointed forms, oblique, curving lines, structures and landscapes that lean and twist in unusual angles, and shadows and streaks of light painted directly onto the sets.
  
  The script was inspired by various experiences from the lives of Janowitz and Mayer, both pacifists who were left distrustful of authority after their experiences with the military during World War I. The film makes use of a frame story, with a prologue and epilogue combined with a twist ending. Janowitz said this device was forced upon the writers against their will. The film's design was handled by Hermann Warm, Walter Reimann and Walter Röhrig, who recommended a fantastic, graphic style over a naturalistic one. (Full article...)
• 

  

  Witches' Sabbath, 1821–1823. Oil on plaster wall, transferred to canvas; 140.5 × 435.7 cm (56 × 172 in). Museo del Prado, Madrid

  
  
  Witches' Sabbath or The Great He-Goat (Spanish: Aquelarre or El gran cabrón) are names given to an oil mural by the Spanish artist Francisco Goya, completed sometime between 1821 and 1823. It explores themes of violence, intimidation, aging and death. Satan hulks, in the form of a goat, in moonlit silhouette over a coven of terrified witches. Goya was then around 75 years old, living alone and suffering from acute mental and physical distress.
  
  It is one of the fourteen Black Paintings that Goya applied in oil on the plaster walls of his house, the Quinta del Sordo. The paintings were completed in secret: he did not title any of the works or leave a record of his intentions in creating them. Absent of fact, Witches' Sabbath is generally seen by some art historians as a satire on the credulity of the age, a condemnation of superstition and the witch trials of the Spanish Inquisition. As with the other works in the group, Witches' Sabbath reflects its painter's disillusionment and can be linked thematically to his earlier etching The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters as well as the Disasters of War print series, another bold political statement published only posthumously. (Full article...)
• 

  

  Bizet photographed by Étienne Carjat (1875)

  
  
  
  Georges Bizet (né Alexandre César Léopold Bizet; 25 October 1838 – 3 June 1875) was a French composer of the Romantic era. Best known for his operas in a career cut short by his early death, Bizet achieved few successes before his final work, Carmen, which has become one of the most popular and frequently performed works in the entire opera repertoire.
  
  During a brilliant student career at the Conservatoire de Paris, Bizet won many prizes, including the prestigious Prix de Rome in 1857. He was recognised as an outstanding pianist, though he chose not to capitalise on this skill and rarely performed in public. Returning to Paris after almost three years in Italy, he found that the main Parisian opera theatres preferred the established classical repertoire to the works of newcomers. His keyboard and orchestral compositions were likewise largely ignored; as a result, his career stalled, and he earned his living mainly by arranging and transcribing the music of others. Restless for success, he began many theatrical projects during the 1860s, most of which were abandoned. Neither of his two operas that reached the stage in this time—Les pêcheurs de perles and La jolie fille de Perth—were immediately successful. (Full article...)
• 
  Southern Cross is the sole wordless novel by Canadian artist Laurence Hyde (1914–1987). Published in 1951, its 118 wood-engraved images narrate the impact of atomic testing on Pacific islanders. Hyde made the book to express his anger at the US military's nuclear tests in the Bikini Atoll.
  
  The wordless novel genre had flourished primarily during the 1920s and 1930s, but by the 1940s even the most prolific practitioners had abandoned it. Hyde was familiar with some such works by Lynd Ward, Otto Nückel, and the form's pioneer Frans Masereel. The high-contrast artwork of Southern Cross features dynamic curving lines uncommon in wood engraving and combines abstract imagery with realistic detail. It has gained appreciation in comics circles as a precursor to the Canadian graphic novel, though it had no direct influence. (Full article...)
• 

  

  Smetana, c. 1878

  
  
  Bedřich Smetana (/ˌbɛdərʒɪx ˈsmɛtənə/ BED-ər-zhikh SMET-ə-nə, Czech: [ˈbɛdr̝ɪx ˈsmɛtana] ; 2 March 1824 – 12 May 1884) was a Czech composer who pioneered the development of a musical style that became closely identified with his people's aspirations to a cultural and political "revival". He has been regarded in his homeland as the father of Czech music. Internationally he is best known for his 1866 opera The Bartered Bride and for the symphonic cycle Má vlast ("My Fatherland"), which portrays the history, legends and landscape of the composer's native Bohemia. It contains the famous symphonic poem "Vltava", also popularly known by its German name "Die Moldau" (in English, "The Moldau").
  
  Smetana was naturally gifted as a composer, and gave his first public performance at the age of six. After conventional schooling, he studied music under Josef Proksch in Prague. His first nationalistic music was written during the 1848 Prague uprising, in which he briefly participated. After failing to establish his career in Prague, he left for Sweden, where he set up as a teacher and choirmaster in Gothenburg, and began to write large-scale orchestral works. (Full article...)
• 
  In 1969, the children's television show Sesame Street premiered on the National Educational Television network (later succeeded by PBS) in the United States. Unlike earlier children's programming, the show's producers used research and over 1,000 studies and experiments to create the show and test its impact on its young viewers' learning. By the end of the program's first season, Children's Television Workshop (CTW), the organization founded to oversee Sesame Street production, had developed what came to be called "the CTW model": a system of planning, production, and evaluation that combined the expertise of researchers and early childhood educators with that of the program's writers, producers, and directors.
  
  CTW conducted research in two ways: in-house formative research that informed and improved production, and independent summative evaluations conducted by the Educational Testing Service (ETS) during the show's first two seasons to measure the program's educational effectiveness. CTW researchers invented tools to measure young viewers' attention to the program. Based on these findings, the researchers compiled a body of data and the producers changed the show accordingly. (Full article...)

Featured picture

Qianlong Emperor

Qianlong Emperor

Credit: Giuseppe Castiglione

The Qianlong Emperor was the sixth emperor of the Manchu-led Qing dynasty, and the fourth Qing emperor to rule over China. The fourth son of the Yongzheng Emperor, his reign officially began 11 October 1735, lasting for 60 years. Named Hongli, he chose the era name Qianlong, meaning "heavenly prosperity". Although his early years saw the continuation of an era of prosperity and great military success in China, his final years saw troubles at home and abroad converge on the Qing Empire. Qianlong abdicated the throne at the age of 85, to his son, the Jiaqing Emperor, fulfilling his promise not to reign longer than his grandfather, the Kangxi Emperor.

Did you know...

• ... that one novelty of Hans Gieng's 1543 statue on the Fountain of Justice (pictured) in Berne was the portrayal of Lady Justice as blindfolded or blind?
• ... that in 1656, German violinist Thomas Baltzar helped premiere The Siege of Rhodes, thought to have been the first all-sung English opera?
• ... that the Franklin County Courthouse incorporates the walls and columns left after Confederate forces burned the previous courthouse during the American Civil War?

In this month

• 9 June 1904 – The London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Hans Richter, plays its first concert
• 18 June 1964 – Italian painter Giorgio Morandi, whose still lifes and landscapes were noted for their tonal subtlety, dies in Bologna at the age of 73
• 20 June 1703 – The Love Suicides at Sonezaki by Chikamatsu Monzaemon, often considered the greatest Japanese dramatist, receives its first performance
• 24 June 1924 – Efua Sutherland, a foundational figure in modern Ghanaian drama, is born in the Cape Coast region of Ghana
• 29 June 1861 – Elizabeth Barrett Browning (pictured), one of the most prominent poets of the Victorian era, dies in Florence at the age of 55

News

• August 5: DaBaby Levitating remix losing US radio audiences after the rapper's comments on HIV/AIDS
• June 11: Taylor Swift's Evermore records biggest sales week of the year as it returns to No 1 on album chart
• May 27: Olivia Rodrigo's song good 4 u debuts at No 1 on US Billboard Hot 100 chart
• May 25: 'Rock and roll never dies': Italy wins Eurovision after 30 years
• February 10: Disney to shut down Blue Sky Studios, animation studio behind 'Ice Age'

Featured biography

I. M. Pei (born 1917) is a Chinese American architect, often called a master of modern architecture. Born in Guangzhou, in 1935 he moved to the United States. While enrolled at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he became unhappy with the school's focus on Beaux-Arts architecture, and spent his free time researching the emerging architects, especially Le Corbusier. After graduating, he joined the Harvard Graduate School of Design and formed a friendship with the Bauhaus architects Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer. Pei spent ten years working with New York real estate magnate William Zeckendorf before establishing his own independent design firm that eventually became Pei Cobb Freed & Partners. Among the early projects on which Pei took the lead were the L'Enfant Plaza Hotel in Washington, DC, and the Green Building at MIT. His first major recognition came with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado; his new stature led to his selection as chief architect for the John F. Kennedy Library in Massachusetts. He went on to design Dallas City Hall and the East Building of the National Gallery of Art. In the early 1980s, Pei was the focus of controversy when he designed a glass-and-steel pyramid for the Louvre museum in Paris. Pei has won a wide variety of prizes and awards in the field of architecture, including the 1983 Pritzker Prize, sometimes called the Nobel Prize of architecture. (Full article...)

Featured audio

Selected quote

“ Observe the accommodation of the most common artificer or daylabourer in a civilized and thriving country, and you will perceive that the number of people, of whose industry a part, though but a small part, has been employed in procuring him this accommodation, exceeds all computation. The woollen coat, for example, which covers the day-labourer, as coarse and rough as it may appear, is the produce of the joint labour of a great multitude of workmen. The shepherd, the sorter of the wool, the wool-comber or carder, the dyer, the scribbler, the spinner, the weaver, the fuller, the dresser, with many others, must all join their different arts in order to complete even this homely production. How many merchants and carriers, besides, must have been employed in transporting the materials from some of those workmen to others who often live in a very distant part of the country? How much commerce and navigation in particular, how many ship-builders, sailors, sail-makers, rope-makers, must have been employed in order to bring together the different drugs made use of by the dyer, which often come from the remotest corners of the world? What a variety of labour, too, is necessary in order to produce the tools of the meanest of those workmen! To say nothing of such complicated machines as the ship of the sailor, the mill of the fuller, or even the loom of the weaver, let us consider only what a variety of labour is requisite in order to form that very simple machine, the shears with which the shepherd clips the wool. The miner, the builder of the furnace for smelting the ore the feller of the timber, the burner of the charcoal to be made use of in the smelting-house, the brickmaker, the bricklayer, the workmen who attend the furnace, the millwright, the forger, the smith, must all of them join their different arts in order to produce them. ”

— Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

Categories

Arts categories

Arts

---

Arts portal

Arts by culture

Arts by place

Arts-related lists

Aesthetics

Arts genres by country or nationality

Arts awards

Censorship in the arts

Crafts

Creative works

Arts districts

Arts events

Literature

Arts occupations

Arts organizations

Performing arts

Religion and the arts

Arts venues

Visual arts

Women and the arts

Works about the arts

Visual arts stubs

WikiProjects

Parent project

• Arts

Descendant projects

• Aesthetics
• Architecture
• Books
  • Novels
• Collections care
• Dance
• Films
• Horror
• Literature
• Magic
• Music
  • Albums
  • Classical music
  • Composers
  • Guitar
  • Musicians
  • Music Venues
• Opera
  • Gilbert and Sullivan
  • Richard Wagner
• Poetry
• Television
• Theatre
  • Musical theatre
• Visual arts
  • Animation
  • Anime and manga
  • Comics
  • Graffiti
  • Graphic design
  • Fashion
  • Photography
  • Public art

Related portals

Things you can do

• Check the recent changes page for improvements, other changes, and vandalism to these articles
• Article requests: Requests articles (arts and entertainment)
• Deletion discussions: Listed at Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Arts
• Expand: check Visual arts stubs to expand
• Notability: Articles with notability concerns, listed at WikiProject Notability
• Requested pictures: Arts topics, requested pictures

Discover Wikipedia using portals

• 

  List of all portals

• 

  The arts portal

• 

  Biography portal

• 

  Current events portal

• 

  Geography portal

• 

  History portal

• 

  Mathematics portal

• 

  Science portal

• 

  Society portal

• 

  Technology portal

• 

  Random portal

• 

  WikiProject Portals