Class

So far I have really enjoyed humanities. I love history and art, so I think that the subject matter is fasinating. I especially liked the the discussion the class had about high and low end art. It was really thought provoking for me, and the comments other students made were really ensightful and helped me to look at art in a different way. I have to confess that I am among the group of people that thinks because something is an antique it is inherently better than anything new. If it has been kept by the human race for so long it must be fantastic. It may be due to the fact that I've been indocterinated into prefering the older art, but the paintings I've seen that were produced in earlier history are much more appealing to me than many of the "new" ones. I guess I just have a more classical than contempory taste.
We talked about how the most important art can come from pop-culture. I really have to wonder what has caused the changes from what people created then and what they create now. I mean, what caused the change in the public's acceptance of certain styles of art as good. Are the tastes of modern people really so different than the tastes of the those that lived so many years ago; is there some sort of difference in our make-up that allows us to embrace a more, in my opion, flamboyant style than they did? Maybe the advances in science and social liberation have allowed for this. Science has exposed us to colorful new worlds and ideas and it seems that as society has become less stuffy, the art, dancing, architecture and music have also become more casual.
Though I have a definite preference between old and new at this point in the semester, I'm excited to learn more about different types of humanity's creations. I agree that the words high and low are maybe not the best to words that can be used to catagorize art and I'm interested in learning how to decipher what is trully good.