Arts with Human Beings in History

When human beings started to know that smoothing a stone to a sharp structure could use it to cut things like meats, kill animals, cut trees and etc, I think they also at the same time wanted to make the stone beautiful, that is to make the shape to fit their own tastes and feelings. The first part belongs to the practical usage in consideration and the second part belongs to the field of arts. I think human beings use quite a lot of energy or cost in spending on the second part, perhaps at least half of our energy used on it. When we look our surroundings, there is no surprise to find that the different types of clothes, different colors, different figures or pictures in making clothes to suit each person's tastes. The primary purpose to wear clothes is to protect our body and keep our body warm. However, making clothes for our wearing has a lot of different purposes. We can generally classify other purposes to arts except those that are for practical usage purposes.

In some caves, cliffs or mountains, archaeologists or historians found that our very old ancestors had their drawings or marking symbols on them, their predicted reasons of making such things were for memorial purpose or for religious. These purposes are classified to the first practical usage part. In fact I think they could did things for the second part. That is they drew the animals because they found that the animals were running in a beautiful pattern or having beautiful shapes and then they just drew them down. They perhaps had no other purposes. I believe that ancestors lived in a natural environment generally had higher appreciation power at natural things than those people living in the today's modern man-made things world. However people have their own innate ability to appreciate natural things I also believe.

Here I try to look back to see the change of arts in the development and then the deterioration in the both western and eastern world societies. This topic is very long and in fact I have very limited knowledge on them but I try to explain it from my own experience and knowledge to see whether there are some ideas involved and then they could be accepted by other people.

When we look at an animal, we know its shape but not complete (see Limitation in the recognition of the things around us). However each animal has its own attitude, it may be in a happy state or in a sad state. When it is running or sitting down, it has its own style or pattern. How we can describe the situation in our own words and can have a complete pattern in our mind or could our mind possible have the same structure or pattern as the real situation facing in front of us? When I look at the drawings from the ancestors in caves from a book or TV program, to me it seems that they should know more than us today's modern man,

 More: Later explanation

C.F. Lau 10 Aug 2007

From the symbols such as from the drawings or paintings on the cliff, stone, or bones done by the ancestors, we can know what their living, their thinking, their taste, their idea related to the arts at that time. At the beginning I believed it should be the original source. However, recently another important source I found is the sound. Human beings have very powerful communication talent related to arts in producing sound and recognition of the meaning of sound through listening. Before producing written words, human being knew drawing paintings and symbolic patterns. But before that, recently I found human beings should know very well in communication with their voices. That was speaking their own different languages in different places. Even in very small district areas they had their own speaking languages. The sound style with tones and voice styles made the sound highly varied and highly related to arts. However, since there was no recorder at that time and so it was impossible to keep the sound record, the resources of such sound related to arts could not be found. It was only possible when human beings discovered that using symbols recognized by their eyes, they could record the patterns or characteristics of sound - music notes or symbols. Original music such as the one generated by African living in an original style may help us know more about the arts related to human beings. As the whole society and the advance the technology through globalization I think human beings will gradually or rapidly lose some arts in history - losing their innate power in arts. People will more aim at functional rather than sensational objects. However this will cause some loss of the power in the recognition of the things around us and less appreciation power in arts - becoming more materialized world?

More: Later explanation

C.F. Lau 10 Oct 2007

Recently, when I listened to a traditional Chinese musical concert, one performer of the team in the introduction told that some musical instrument which dated 9000 years ago could perform well with complete five notes  was found in China. This means that at least 9000 years ago people have already known how to produce musical instrument to perform music. For a vocal music, it should be much more earlier than this time recorded because human voice is much easier to produce a piece of music.

From science, what we can know is that the history of modern humans is about 200000 years developed from Africa. Later some of them migrated to other places around the world. About 10000 years ago, some people located at certain places started to change their living style from hunting of moving around in different places to agriculture where they stayed at a place with a long time. We can see that their tools were made and developed from stones, potteries, animal bones, bronzes and etc. In making those tools, they considered not only the functions but also the art which related to beauty, from which I believe that they had put much more effort on the art than the people at present.

More: Later explanation

C.F. Lau 10 Dec 2007

From here I shall try to show how art has been developed and deteriorated in our history.  

Recently I got a photo related to early Chinese bone flue dated 7000-9000 years ago. It has seven holes to perform 7 notes.

It shows that voice or music performs a very important part in arts in a much early period of human beings, may be much early than the symbols such as paintings in this human history.

In this period, we can also see how those people could produce beautiful structures. One of them is stone spade:

The other is an early symbol (or we can call painting or carving since they are much related) found at this period:

It looks like an eye and it is so beautiful.

More: Later explanation

C.F. Lau 17 Nov 2008

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