Living With Art Essay

According to the text Living with Art by Mark Getlein, there are six primary roles that artists fulfill in society: artists “create places for some human purpose” (i.e. monolithic art as Stonehenge, Gobeki Tepe, churches, etc..), artist “create extra-ordinary versions of ordinary objects” (for instance the World’s largest ball of yarn, or Tintoretto’s Last Supper), artists have been used to “record and commemorate” historical events (such as a wedding photographer or Pablo Picasso’s Guernica depicting the carnage of the civil war of Spain), artists give “tangible form to the unknown” (for instance the abstract and cubist movements of the 20th century, or the design of man-made objects), artists “give tangible form to feelings and ideas” ( works …show more content…
The religion of Islam for example has many restrictions concerning illustrations and overall art, such as prohibiting the portrayal of living animals, or beings in their art related to the Koran (and other spiritual writings), as did the Christian, and Jewish religions with the bible. However, Islam has taken this restriction to the extreme and expand the restrictions outside the realm of religious writings, whereas the Christians and Catholics later embraced and progressed the artistic process to further project their message and proclaimed glory. This is not to say that Islamic culture has not left an impact in the art world. Islam has made beautiful and striking revisions in areas of design, such as the intricate bordering patterns and designs that accompany parts of the Koran and the Hadith (2nd most important religious book in majority of Islam, the written accounts of Islamic prophet Muhamad). As well as contributing advancements in landscape paintings that generally represented the sacred gardens written about in the …show more content…
This premise is also reinforced by another remark again found in Islamic Art &Architecture which states “Islam was revealed to the prophet Muhamad in western Arabia in the early 7th Century. Later historiography defined this period as a “time of ignorance” (the Jahiliya), in the primary sense a spiritually unenlightened period, but also as a time of relatively limited cultural achievement.” (35). Some would say that this point set in stone for the next several thousand years the inability to further study and develop the Muslim artistic lineage, thus stunting their societal growth and progression of modern ideas and technologies that would later generate in Western and Asiatic civilization. The European, Mediterranean, and Asiatic world continued to move forward with the artistic process which would lead to the industrial revolution, which would lay the foundation for the western world and Asia