Art History Is Life

Several years ago during my undergraduate I took an additional course to assist in my thought processes and concise writing for the art history courses I was taking at the time. I ran across one of my answers to a prompt we were given and even today I am proud of how clearly I stated how art history encompassed all life and history of the human realm. It’s fascinating to see how much passion and zest I had back then and how I still carry it now, just with more knowledge and years behind this conviction.

Take a peek at what I really feel about art history:

How does Art History relate to your life or to society?

The development of my life and society today has gotten to where it is because of art history. When studying art history, you study the culture and its all-encompassing aspects. This includes the beliefs and the philosophies of the time, the agricultural habits, the militaries influence, their forms of trade and exploration, their process of creative thought, the influence of their geographical placement, and the overall security of their culture. The way I view it, is that art history and art in itself is a broad subject that can envelop the study on human life, the extent of their creativity of the time, and the development of comprehensive cognitive thinking and its advancement due to historical changes influenced by many side factors. All of this comes to the culmination that is art history. Art history is what influences my views in my life today and the way I view society.
Before art history, I would view the world and its history and how we got to this point today by just simple causes and effects that were only significant when they needed to be for important purposes. After art history, the connection of the flow of events with the causes and effects from the smaller details that made the society we live in today make so much more sense as to how we got here, and what made it all really happen. Everything I do as an artist, what I learn, how we got to that point, can be learnt through art history in groundbreaking techniques of the time and new tools being developed to advance their artistic process to new heights. Art in itself is documentary evidence of our existence here and our observations of the world around us.

I am interested to hear your views on this topic so feel free to contribute your own thoughts to this prompt in the comments below.