Art History in 3 Minutes By Max Lance You can roughly pinpoint art’s origins to cave paintings in France, or as Nascar fans call it Homoland, where ancient humans painted the stuff they ate and hunted and men didn’t have to say the girls’ artwork was good to get laid because he could club her over the head and that was called romance even though the Romantic Age wouldn’t happen for another thirty-five thousand years. Then we get to the Egyptians, whose belief in their Gods made Scientologists look like Atheists and we got the Pyramids, Sphinx and hieroglyphics which are the common ancestor to emoticons. Then we have the Phoencians and the Greeks who are responsible for the small pieces of chipped pottery that you ignore in museums before the Romans perfected Greek techniques of marble and bronze. You can see remnants of Roman art lying in ruins around modern Italian cities, which are also lying in ruin. Since people only study Eastern art to sleep with the Japanese exchange student because they learned Japanese culture through Hentai porn, we’ll stick to the west of Constantinople – modern day Istanbul – even though that ignores the influence of the Byzantine Empire on Christianity, still with me? When the Christians took over, we entered a thousand year period that was exactly like a night out at Medieval Times. It was known as the Dark Ages because like a Joel Osteen infomercial or Creed, when Christians take over, nothing entertaining comes of it. This is when we got Gothic Cathedrals, stained glass, frescoes, an endless supply of one-dimensional Jesuses with golden haloes around his head and those cool first letters that start chapters in Beowolf and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It wasn’t until the Renaissance began around the year 1350 in Italy that humanity on a whole decided to learn how to paint. Artists learned perspective, depth of field, lighting and shadowing in an understanding of realism lead by the four artists better as Ninja Turtles along with Botticelli, Caravaggio and Titian whose name looks like it should be much more fun to pronounce than it is. When the Protestant Reformation became a worthy challenge to Catholicism, the Pope decided to step up their marketing, kinda like how when Quizno’s came along, Subway got much nicer, and we got the Sistine Chapel and Raphael Rooms which feel like a religious version of Clue. Mannerism is more of a stepping stone between Renaissance Art and Boroque, but it signaled more emotion, like a painting of the Virgin Mary would now be a painting of a smiling Virgin Mary. Baroque Art began around 1600 with the goal of striking emotional resonance, the genuineness of course debateable as evidenced by morons who think that the movie Crash is deep. “Oh wow, the white guy helped the black girl.” Baroque Art is characterized by depicting high drama at an almost exaggerated state with strong colors and deep shadows and it’s where we find Caravaggio’s influence on Vermeer and Rembrandt who is known for his work with chiaroscuro, which is a fancy word for shadows. The flair was taken further in the 1700s with Rococo in France, which is more known for its frilly interior design and architecture rather than paintings, which mostly consist of portraits showing how rich and successful people were in the decades predating their slaughter and beheading in the French Revolution. As a reaction to Baroque and Rococo, neo-classicism set in during the 1800s in order to reconnect with Ancient Greece and Rome, sorta like a toga party with architecture. Art was
streamlined and simplified with the artist's voice nonexistent in order to channel the purity of classic virtues, which is why all of our houses of Government and National Museums look like they’re trying to fit in with Ancient Rome but with that awkward minute of trying to fish every penny from your pocket so you can pass through the metal detector. In response to the Industrial Revolution, the ancestors to dirty hippies got obsessed with nature and raw emotion, which ushered in Romanticism in the 1800s and gave us dramatic landscape paintings and those enormous murals of battle scenes like Liberty Leading the People, Raft of the Medusa and Washington Crossing the Delaware, a painting much more dramatic than the sequel: Lonely Planet, Trenton. The artists' interpretation took art from realism to impressionism, which refers to artists like Monet and Manet, different people in a similar genre with frustratingly similar names, to imprint their perspective, and not a comedian at open mic night who thinks his version of Christopher Walken is original. Impressionism went against all traditional views of the time, like being a hockey fan today, and is marked by visible brush strokes and blurry water lillies. Impressionism also sparked Modernism which stretches through World War Two and made an effort to do something new, which you can tell ended when you think about what movie you want to see and realize that everything is a remake of something that used to be original. Art was deconstructed like Picasso and Matisse with Cubism, which must have really pissed off the models if they didn't know what they were getting into. Van Gogh was ahead of his time with surrealism and cutting his ear off, which didn't catch on, and this lead to expressionism like Edvard Munch's Scream painting. Contemporary Art are works since World War Two which carry a self-awareness whether it glorifies soup cans and Marilyn Monroe, makes a mess for the sake of it like Jackson Pollack, or takes catchphrases from TV shows you watched as a child and puts them on T-shirts that you wear once before you realize that people who wear funny t-shirts aren't funny. Art's future lies in technology, such as video game art and digital art, like the background of your Twitter page when you retweet this to your friends.