Art and Culture
    

Arts can touch all of our senses. They are generally categorized into visual, performance, and decorative arts. They are not always a thing of beauty but their ability to hold the attention separates art from a simple tool or an object made for practical usage.

Arts are considered to be the highest form of culture and are also often dismissed as the exclusive domain of the rich. Practical skills such as crafts are often valued lower than art which has no use other than to delight the senses. Decorative design can lift a practical item into the rarefied air of the arts, if its of a quality and sufficiently high standard. Both cooking and perfume can also be arts when they transcend mere practical usage to create a feast for two of our less attended to senses; taste and smell.

Practical use items such as a chair, do not need beauty to support a person and be somewhere to sit. It is human beings who need beauty. Good design is not limited to increasing the comfort, efficiency and ease of use of an object. It enhances the pleasure one has when using it.

To experience art one need only see the artisans skill revealed in a handcrafted table, which tells a story of hours of work - those spent learning a craft, those spent experiencing life, those spent creating the piece and those spent enjoying its possession or use.

Our eyes feast on the artistic design combinations of colour, texture and shape, our ears stop us in our tracks in order to listen to music from a simple beat to the complex crescendos of orchestras, our noses follow the scent of exotic flowers to the source and our memories are evoked by all.

Visual and auditory arts touch us in a non verbal, non intellectual way, appealing to eye and ear, according to our nature. Those arts which ask a commitment of time to enjoy, such as books and movies, tell us a story which digs even deeper into our psyche by combining voice, music, visual scenes, facial expression, history, threat and action.

And all arts touch us emotionally. They send us.

We are human beings, we have primal needs. Very simple things will satisfy them. Often where the divisive line is drawn between a barbarian and someone of culture is in the appreciation of art and the understanding of the cultural difference between an artistic creation and something that is simply contrived - and their human choice to embrace one or the other.

What brings one person to their knees in wonder and delight, in horror or grief, in awe or irony, fascination or obsession will leave hundreds more - totally unimpressed, cold, untouched and bored.

Culture is itself a creation of it's decade, place and people. Once entrenched it may become history or tradition, but culture and it's art is constantly being re-invented. Each new generation take their turn in innovation and passing on that which they feel is important in a form that they create and adopt and make their own. While the generation before it, steps up to the establishment and attempts to preserve and hold onto the remnants of their past and make of it a heritage for all time.

Many eras of new generations have belittled culture as decadent, as it's art forms are not available to everyone due to the cost of their creation and their maintenance and preservation. Even these words are already biased with the connotations of concepts contained in each person's perception of a word.