What is art? What are the classifications of artworks?

Art can be defined as "technology and its products whose main purpose is to create beauty". Art needs technology, but it is not technology. But the next question is "What kind of technology is art?" The ancient Greeks introduced the concept of "beauty", but the division of technology did not become simple because of the introduction of this concept. On the contrary, it has become more complicated than before. Because explaining "beauty" itself is not easier than explaining art, Modern Chinese Dictionary says that art is "a social ideology that reflects reality with images, but is more typical than objectivity." The original meaning of "art" in western languages is "artificial creation". Epistemology holds that art is a reflection of nature in people's minds and an ideology; According to the theory of practice, art is the processing and transformation of nature by human beings, and it is a kind of labor production, so art is called "the second nature". Human labor is to create material wealth and spiritual wealth. All art must have a creative subject and object. Therefore, both human and material conditions are needed. Humanistic conditions include the artist's natural endowment, life experience and cultural education; The conditions of things include social types, spirit of the times, national characteristics, social realities and problems, and are the objects that need to be continuously processed and transformed; In addition, tools and media for processing and transformation should be added. So art is inseparable from people and things. Like aesthetic feeling, it is also the unity of subjective and objective. 1999 edition of Ci Hai explains the connotation and extension of art as follows: "Human beings regard emotion and imagination as a special way to grasp the world, that is, to reproduce reality and express emotional ideals through aesthetic creation activities, and to realize the mutual objectification of aesthetic subject and aesthetic object in imagination. Specifically, they are the image reflection of people's real life and spiritual world, and also the organic product of the artist's comprehensive psychological activities such as perception, emotion, ideal and concept. As a social ideology, art mainly meets people's various aesthetic needs, thus playing a subtle role in social life, especially in the field of human spirit. According to the different means and ways of expression, it can be divided into performing arts (music and dance), plastic arts (painting, sculpture and architecture), language arts (literature) and comprehensive arts (drama, film and television). According to the temporal and spatial nature of performance, it can be divided into time art (music), space art (painting, sculpture, architecture) and time-space juxtaposition art (literature, drama, film and television). " What are the classifications of artworks? "Art" is a general term for various works of art.. However, all kinds of arts have their own particularities or inherent laws. All kinds of arts depend on each other and penetrate each other, each with its own particularity and difference. To understand the different characteristics of various arts, we must understand the particularity of their differences. The purpose and significance of art classification lies in understanding and mastering this particularity or inherent law, so as to improve our artistic aesthetic comprehension and artistic creativity. The ancients had long focused on the classification of art, and Yue Ji in the Warring States period in China put forward the distinction between "sound" and "sound". Later, in "Preface to Shi Mao", the author also put forward a clear view on the connection and difference between poetry, song and dance, and put forward the division of writing style in the literature of the Six Dynasties. Later, Cao Pi's Dian Lun Paper, Lu Ji's Wen Fu, Liu Xie's Wen and The New Carved Dragon also studied the classification of literary styles. After the Tang Dynasty, the discussion on the relationship and difference between poetry, painting, calligraphy, dance and music is all valuable experience gained by predecessors on the basis of summing up artistic practice. Art is actually the unity of people's aesthetic comprehension of reality and re-examination. However, different kinds of art have different specific objects and means of expression, and people will have different feelings when facing different works of art. The classification of art has long been put forward in the history of western aesthetics, and there are various classification principles. Generally speaking, there are two main types: one is based on the characteristics of the object or form reflected by art, and the other is based on the characteristics and feelings of the subject of artistic creation. Classification from the characteristics of objects or forms reflected by art means that art is divided into different categories and has different characteristics, which is determined by the different objective objects or different means of expression it reflects. Aristotle started from the theory of imitation. In Prayer, he distinguished various arts according to the objects, ways and means of artistic imitation. He pointed out: "Some people (whether through art or experience) use colors and gestures to create images and imitate many things, while others imitate them through sound." "The other art only imitates them through language." He used it to distinguish painters, sculptors, singers and epic writers. He believes that all art is imitation, and the main difference lies in the objects, ways and means of imitation. After Aristotle, Lessing discussed the classification principle of art from the perspective of "the boundary between poetry and painting". Aristotle's and Lessing's artistic classification principles are based on simple materialist epistemology. They affirm that art is a reflection (imitation) of reality, and the characteristic of art lies in the objective characteristics of imitation objects. This classification has its reasonable factors. Later, from the perceptual point of view that art is an "absolute concept", Hegel divided art into three categories: symbolic, classical and romantic. Symbolic type is represented by architecture, classical type by sculpture and romantic type by painting, music and poetry. Although Hegel also determined the classification of art from the object reflected by art, his classification is metaphysical, because this object is an absolute spiritual entity. Nevertheless, he made some unique contributions to the specific research of various arts. Classification from the characteristics of artistic creation and the subject who feels art means that art is divided into different categories and has different characteristics, which is determined by the different sensory characteristics caused by different sensory organs of the subject. For example, Kant, from the viewpoint of subjective idealism, thinks that human nature has the ability of feeling, intuition and imagination, which is the basis of classifying art. Music is suitable for people's sensory ability, plastic arts is suitable for people's intuitive ability, and poetry is suitable for people's imagination. Therefore, he divided art into three categories: language art, plastic art and sensory game art. Modern western aestheticians also put forward many classification methods based on their own classification principles. Some people divide art into spatial art (architecture, sculpture, painting, etc.) based on the principle of spatial coexistence and time series. ) and time art (music; Instrumental music, vocal music), the art of combining time and space (poetry: narrative poetry, lyric poetry, drama), and some people divide scar art into vision, hearing and imagination according to the different characteristics of "the emergence of ideas". Some people even think that all kinds of art are intuitive in nature, and simply put forward the saying that "art is intuitive" ... The differences about art classification in the history of aesthetic development are rooted in. Although these different viewpoints have their own limitations or one-sidedness, on the whole, they discuss all aspects of the content and form of works of art from different angles. It can enlighten us that works of art, like all other complicated things in the world, have various meanings. Therefore, we should also explore the basic principles of art classification from various aspects. 1, the method of art classification From the production process of artistic works, we can see that artistic works are the materialized result of artists' aesthetic consciousness. Therefore, the characteristics of different kinds of art should be determined by the characteristics of artists' aesthetic consciousness, what materials are used as media and what materialized ways are presented to the audience. Art is not only the unity of reproduction and expression, but also the unity of time and space. The essence of art, objectively speaking, is the reflection or reappearance of objective reality; Subjectively speaking, it is people's feelings and understanding of objective reality, that is, the materialized form or expression form of artistic aesthetic activities. Art is the organic unity of these two aspects. First of all, all kinds of works of art are the products of real life reflected in human mind, and their contents are the unity of objectivity and subjectivity, cognition and emotion, reproduction and expression. But in the early days, artists' feelings and understanding of realistic beauty often have their own characteristics, and the aesthetic consciousness obtained from it must have its own characteristics in understanding, emotion and imagination. Coupled with the different social needs, creative purposes and other conditions, different artists, some focus on reflecting the objective face of real life, emphasizing the reproduction of objective things; Some pay attention to expressing subjective feelings from observing real life and emphasize expressing their own subjective feelings. In this way, some arts mainly reproduce the image of objective things, such as painting, sculpture, narrative literature, drama, movies and so on. Some arts are more suitable for expressing the artist's subjective feelings, such as music, dance, architectural art, craft decoration, lyric literature and so on. Secondly, judging from the ways and media used in the materialization of aesthetic consciousness, some artistic achievements can be presented side by side in a static way in a certain space; Some artistic achievements must be continuously presented in a dynamic way within a certain time or space. Here, the materials and media used in various arts have an objective restrictive effect on the presentation of artistic images. For example, the artistic materials used in architecture, painting and craft are different, and their forms of expression are also different, but they all occupy a certain spatial position, so they are suitable for shaping the static image presented in a certain space. The flowing sound used in music, the human body transformation action used in dance, and the actor's performance used in drama and film all move with the passage of time, so it is suitable for shaping the dynamic image presented in time and space. Unifying reproduction and expression, space and time, we can roughly divide art into five categories: practical art that pays attention to spatial static expression; Performance art, paying attention to the dynamic expression of time in architectural art and technology; Paying attention to the plastic arts of spatial static expression in music and dance; Pay attention to the comprehensive art of time dynamic expression in sculpture and painting; Language art that pays attention to the expression of time and dynamic expression in drama and film; The classification of literature and art is relative. Various arts can be distinguished, but they are interrelated and infiltrated. Poetry and painting can be distinguished. However, the ancients said that "there is a painting in poetry and a poem in painting", and some people held the idea that "painting and calligraphy are of the same origin". Some art paintings contain poems and paintings, so it is difficult to completely separate them. In addition, various arts are interrelated and infiltrated, especially movies and plays. This connection and infiltration between various arts and the emergence of new art categories all show that the classification of art is relative. The classification of art types is constantly enriched with the development of human life and art. The purpose of this relative classification study is to discover and discover the characteristics and laws of each art that reflect reality and express aesthetic consciousness. Consciously understanding and mastering these laws will not only help artists to create beauty by exerting their own advantages, but also help the masses to improve their aesthetic ability and appreciate various arts, so it is very necessary.