ARTISTIC KNOWLEDGE: CHARACTERISTICS, TYPES AND EXAMPLES - ART - 2025

The artistic knowledge is a type of knowledge based on creativity and innate ability of each person who is deepened by experience, study and observation. Through this man communicates with his peers and can express his emotions, feelings and thoughts.

This type of knowledge allows you to recreate the world and discover its beauty and simplicity from a playful and emotional perspective. Unlike scientific or empirical knowledge, it is not possible to transmit it since it is a basic product of creativity. It is individual in nature; that is, it can only be used or developed by the person himself.

It is a knowledge that individuals develop from an early age in which it is possible to rationalize the world, perceive it and analyze it, when the person can differentiate the beautiful from the unpleasant or the aesthetic from the unsightly.

Likewise, with the passage of time and the acquisition of new knowledge and experiences, this type of knowledge also changes. In this way, each person's own artistic knowledge is produced, reproduced and consolidated.

Knowledge and art

Intellectuals have proposed to merge the sociology of art with a sociology of knowledge to better study their relationship and enrich the social sciences. Art or the artistic is considered to be a particular form of knowledge that differs from the others.

Since ancient times, the relationship between knowledge and art has been the subject of a wide debate between philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle; This debate has lasted until today. It is not clear whether experience, as an element of knowledge in other fields, operates in the same way in art.

The German philosopher E. Durkheim argued that the moments of greatest intellectual and aesthetic creativity are usually those of great social upheaval, because society is forced to create and produce responses, and men to meet and exchange ideas and knowledge.

Can you learn from art?

In other words, does art produce propositional knowledge? Can we learn from art or not? This leads to other questions: how and what can be learned from art? For this discussion there are arguments for and against which, far from clarifying, broaden the debate.

Those who argue that it is possible to learn from art argue that art awakens certain emotions in the individual, or that it helps to produce and facilitate knowledge. In other words, a work of art can help generate a greater understanding of the world.

From this perspective, art is approached as a source of knowledge and consciousness, because it helps us to see the world in a different way.

On the other hand, there are those who deny the usefulness of art as an element of learning. His argument is that all knowledge is based on propositions and that, if not, it is not knowledge.

Art and truth

The rejection of art as a source of knowledge is based on the notion that it does not provide the truth or lead to true beliefs. The fact is that art does not justify, nor does it want or intend to justify the beliefs it transmits through its creations.

However, the two approaches agree that, if art is assumed as a source of knowledge, there is only one way in which this function would be fulfilled: the knowledge generated by artistic creation should necessarily reflect something essential regarding nature and its nature. own value as art.

characteristics

- Artistic knowledge, as a practical ability for creation and a product of experience, cannot be transmitted to another person. What you can do is teach artistic techniques, because artistic knowledge is personal and can only be developed by that person.

- Presents high levels of socialization but a low level of systematization; This is as a consequence of its own nature.

- Artistic knowledge has a high degree of subjectivity, due to the personal nature that the artist imposes on his work. It contains very personal elements of the author, such as feelings, passion, vision, ideology, etc.

- It is not a standardized or unalterable knowledge, since the perception of art varies according to each person, despite the fact that there are parameters of social and cultural order that tend or try to homogenize this type of knowledge.

- Artistic knowledge is a manifestation of aesthetic sensitivity that attends to beauty. It is a type of knowledge of a practical nature; that is, it has a utility.

- For some philosophers like Schopenhauer, art provides the essential knowledge of objects, while scientific knowledge gives the "principle of sufficient reason." In other words, "a pure intuitive vision", which is outside time and space.

Types

To unravel the relationship between knowledge and art, it is necessary to conceptualize what art means.

Art is an expression of human creativity aimed at creating objects or aesthetic manifestations of cultural value.

Through art, visual or auditory works are created and works of art are executed that express the imaginative ability, style and artistic technique of their author. Its intrinsic value is beauty or the ability to generate emotions.

In artistic knowledge, three types or dimensions are distinguished based on the relationship that exists between art and knowledge:

- The first notion of artistic knowledge refers to the learning of artistic techniques, through which certain human abilities are exposed and exercised.

- The second operates in the field of analysis of aesthetic phenomena, relying mainly on the human and social sciences.

- The third notion of artistic knowledge refers to the possible knowledge acquired through art.

Basic types of claims about art

South African philosopher David Novitz (1998) states that there are three basic types of artistic knowledge or claims about the arts. These statements are differentiated by their respective objects.

First statement

It has to do with what we claim to believe or know about the art object itself, as well as about anything else that may be associated with that object.

For example, claiming that we know this or that thing about the way light is reflected in Monet's painting The Water Lilies or the geometric shapes of a Picasso.

This knowledge or interpretation of a work of art will always be subjective, it depends on the perspective of each person. Therefore, it will not have the same value as scientific knowledge, which can be validated.

Second claim

This statement about knowledge of art refers to the appropriate emotional response when evaluating or observing an artistic work. It is often believed that the correct reading of a certain work of art depends on the feelings it generates in us.

The problem arises when trying to unify the answers or establish an emotional pattern for a particular work. Should everyone react the same to the same work of art?

It is common to observe different types of emotional responses about the same artistic work, and this does not necessarily mean that more or less is known about art.

Third statement

It refers to the kind of information that art itself can provide about the world. In other words: through art, can you get real knowledge of world activities and events, whether they are real or fictional?

It is accepted that art conveys a very important perception about the way we see and understand the world. It is also widely recognized that art can give a certain degree of meaning to life, helps generate new beliefs and knowledge of the world.

However, there remains a problem to be solved and that is that the fiction of art does not reflect the real world. This type of knowledge could rather be dangerous if knowledge of the real world is acquired only from fiction.

For example, it might be unhealthy to have a notion of infatuation only from romance novels.

Examples

The following human expressions are examples of the way in which artistic knowledge manifests itself:

Music

It is the art of creating and organizing sounds through musical instruments that are pleasant to the ear for their melody, harmony and rhythm.

Dance

It is a type of art or artistic expression that consists of the movement of the body usually accompanied by music. It is practiced as a form of social interaction and expression of beauty for artistic, religious or entertainment purposes.

Painting

It is the art of capturing or graphically representing human thought and nature through the use of various pigments.

Sculpture

It is the art of modeling in clay and carving in stone, wood or any other material.

Literature

It is the art of expressing yourself and creating through the written or spoken word.

References

1. Art and Epistemology. Consulted from iep.utm.edu
2. Bruno Péquignot. Art et connaissance. Consulted of cairn.info
3. Javier Hernández Ruíz: Artistic knowledge? PDF. Recovered from erialediciones.com
4. Art. Consulted of basicknowledge101.com
5. What is artistic knowledge? Consulted of emaze.com
6. Types of knowledge. Consulted of mindmeister.com
7. Types of knowledge. Consulted of typesde.eu
8. Art and Knowledge. Consulted of oxfordbibliographies.com