Reading Comprehension and Discussion Tasks

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SECTION 3 
SUPPLEMENTARY READING 
Text 1
 
The beginnings of art are shrouded in prehistoric mists and revealed meta-
phorically in ancient myths and legends. Human progressive inventiveness 
separates us, for better and for worse, from the animals. It rests on a complex 
system of communication and is activated by a hunger for knowing life and 
for meeting the forces that shape it. Art is likely to have had its origin in pub-
lic and social roles: worship, travel, and territorial signs, hunting and agricul-
ture. We can only speculate on how and why precisely men and women found 
it was not only possible but significant to give form to two- and three-
dimensional matter beyond the demands of immediate utility, and why they 
found value in such activity. The very action ascribed to the Gods in creating 
our world and ourselves is an enlargement to superhuman scale of a power 
sensed by man in man. 
It is likely that abstract “decoration” appeared before representational 
“art”, the former being a natural extension of the making process of some ob-
jects. Both processes seem to be innate to humanity: the characterizing of an 
object by stressing its structure or also by counteracting its structure, affording 
it an individuality that was probably associated with special functions, and 
also that of re-presenting, re-enacting. In children this important activity is 
called echopraxis; it is thought to play an essential role in determining the 
child’s awareness of self and other and more especially of its sense of its body 
by analogy with others, and its earlier stages are thought to be independent of 
mental images. It may be that in adult humans too such an activity was per-
formed instinctually before being recognized as being associated with special 
skills and functions. The quality and degree of imitation that warrants speak-
ing of “likeness” can have been achieved and recognized only gradually as 
differentiation proceeded; there have been cultures in which likeness never 
played a part and others where a high degree of verisimilitude in some prod-
ucts was matched by a high degree of stylization or abstraction in others, ac-
cording to their purposes. 
In Western culture the concept of likeness, at times pushed to the extreme 
of illusionism, has long been dominant, so that it still seems central to most 
people's expectations from art whilst abstract forms are associated with pattern 
and thus with decoration and afforded a secondary rank. It is asserted that easy 
access to art, and of course the multiplication of works of art through repro-
ductions, has finally deprived it of all reverence and awe, but this would seem 

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to be a partial truth at best. What is more remarkable is art’s power to survive 
these abrogations. New works of art as well as old can exercise a strange 
power to this day and the devoted labor of many an artist testifies to a com-
mitment well beyond the calls of reason. One of the special characteristics of 
modern art has indeed been a shift of emphasis away from art as a well man-
aged and sophisticated performance to art as an archetypal act of creation, de-
pendent not on trusted models but on a search for the roots of artistic action. 
The Classical emphasis on imitation had left little room, for long periods, 
for another concept valued by the ancients, that of inspiration. This appeared 
to be the prerogative of the poet, possessed by supernatural powers in his mo-
ments of invention; the artist, charged with the imitation of visible nature, 
could seek to elevate his work by using nature selectively in pursuit of his vi-
sion of ideal beauty and by ordering his forms according to systems of meas-
urement that related them directly to cosmic laws. Any individual artist who 
aspired to more exalted processes of invention akin to those of the poet –
which Plato described as close to madness – had to prove himself of it through 
work that unambiguously distinguished him from his fellows: Michelangelo is 
the prime instance of a Renaissance artist with this ambition, and because of 
him the academies usually warned their students against following the exam-
ple of a powerful artist to excess. That is, until the end of the i8th century: 
then Michelangelo could be accepted as the outstanding example of a genius-
artist whose activity transcends rules and decorum, and soon also Rembrandt. 
These high models were held up for everyone, every artist being implicitly 
challenged to prove himself likewise a genius. And at this point the concept of 
inspiration makes way for another concept for the source of creative action: 
the unconscious. 
Lynton N. The origins and sources of Art // The Encyclopedia of Visual Art. Vol. 10: 
Encyclopedia Britannica International. London, 1994. P. 2–3. 

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