Can art change the way we view the world

Were these ancient artists creating images to simply communicate with others or were they expressing their emotions in the only way they knew how? Although there is no way to tell for certain the artists’ intentions, it is evident that this “ art” played a role in prehistoric society. Still, art has not always had the same meaning as it does today. In fact, in the time of the philosophers Plato, Socrates and Aristotle the idea of art was related to the Latin word ars, which means craft or specialized form.

These individuals based their views of art on the notion that the artist must be trained for his craft and each had differing, yet very similar ideas about art and its place in society. For instance, Socrates believed that paintings and poems “ stand triply removed from the real; that is, there are two realms of existence more real than art objects, the Forms themselves and the things of daily life. The basis for this view is the assumption that the goal of art is the imitation of mundane reality” (Wartenberg, 13). Our brain has developed a way of viewing the world over millions of years of evolution that enables us to succeed and survive.

C. Escher” J. I. Locher states “ this unique interplay between insight and limitation, between possible and impossible worlds has given Escher’s body of work a wholly personal presence in the panorama of visual arts” (J. I. Locher 2000). His woodcut “ Circle Limit III” is a good place to review these works, for it exemplifies the artist’s concern with the dimensionality of space, and with the mind’s ability to discern three-dimensionality in a two-dimensional representation and Escher often exploited this latter feature to achieve astonishing visual effects.

To get a sense of what this space is like, one can imagine that he or she is actually in the picture itself. Walking from the center of the picture towards its edge, he/she would shrink just as the fishes in the picture do, so that to actually reach the edge one would have to walk a distance that, to the individual, seems infinite. Indeed, being inside this hyperbolic space, it would not be immediately obvious that anything was unusual about it – after all, one has to walk an infinite distance to get to the edge of ordinary Euclidean space too.