What Are the Focus of Arts?

Art is a broad spectrum of human activities relating to visual sense, physical sensation, personal aesthetic sense, creative imagination, or creative thinking to express personal aesthetic sense, beauty, emotion, or power. It includes the creative arts such as music, sculpture, dance, and literature, visual arts such as painting, drawing, architecture, photography, and motion graphics, and the practical arts such as nursing, teaching, healthcare, physical education, and social work. Today the term ‘arts’ refers to a more generalized array of human activity that spans a wide variety of disciplines.

This broader usage of the term ‘arts’ as applied to today’s society tends to classify different types of creativity into separate categories (such as Visual Arts, Performance Art, Writing, and Critical Thinking). In theory, the discipline of arts should be seen as having three dimensions: aesthetics, critical thinking, and social justice. However, these three dimensions are often viewed in a single framework, with the social dimension being the most important one in any particular case. For instance, when studying the impact of environmental degradation on human health and the quality of life, the artists involved can be considered as artists who create art that impacts human beings and society in general, while environmental degradation is taken as the dominant feature of aesthetic appreciation in visual art.

While aesthetic appreciation and scientific endeavour have long been seen as separate concepts, both aspects of the discipline have had important influences on the shaping of modern human thought and culture. Theoretical science has been deeply influenced by the works of artists, as has the history of aesthetics, art history, and visual culture. In fact, many of the results of scientific research can be found in the form of artworks themselves. As such, artists in the scientific community can benefit greatly from studying artists through scientific means, such as research papers in the field of art history.