Art: Evolution Around The World

By: B. Macedo

Many things and experiences can connect us all. But is there something rawer and more natural than art? It is quite literally everywhere: the TV show you’ll watch tonight, what you put in your earphones on your way home, advertisements you skip, the text you study in English. And it just serves as a natural response; it has become part of the human experience to try to assimilate what we feel and maybe even transform it into something. While it’s impossible to know precisely where and when these early forms of art began, we can trace them to multiple eras.

Visual art is perhaps the most complicated one. The evidence is very varied, with abstract paintings being found in Indonesia, South Africa, and various locations in Europe. Much like and unlike today, these drawings described their daily lives, almost like a diary. With the rise of early civilizations in Greece, Egypt, and China, these paintings encompassed broader concepts, such as religious beliefs, government projects, and daily depictions, also beginning to be included as sculptures and vases. With many rises and many falls of civilizations later, visual art became entwined with monarchies and churches, but also began to include deeper introspections and diverged into more abstract concepts. From the 1600’s onwards, art expanded immensely, going through various phases. Today, there is more representation and accessibility to different art forms than ever.

Music is quite hard to trace. There is evidence of flute-like ivory and bone pieces from Germany dating back 40,000 years, but chants and percussion have always been a part of human tradition and rituals. Harps and lyres surged not much later, and it wasn’t until the Renaissance era that orchestral instruments as we know today fully began to take shape. The versions of pianos we see today only became a reality in the 1700s, with earlier models having very distinct sounds. The oldest piece of music dates back 3400 years, with the earliest attempt to try to transcribe sounds being found in Syria. Sheet music as we know it today only began to take shape in the 11th Century, as the math of it all was slowly discovered. By the 21st century, it is safe to say we saw perhaps some of the biggest changes, but it is still, at the end of the day, trying to achieve the same goal.

Theatre, or drama, also has mysterious origins. It is especially hard to pinpoint how it originated. After all, storytelling is something essential for our day-to-day lives. To tell something, and more importantly, how you tell it, can change everything. Ancient theatre evolved simultaneously with dance and rituals. These pieces later grew into Greek tragedies, which later set the ground for some of the most relevant and influential pieces of today’s times. Japanese and British cultures evolved differently, for example, but still found middle ground on what they were trying to express.
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It is quite obvious that many of these act together. They each complement each other in countless forms. And is not only about entertainment (though that is great as well). It serves a bigger purpose. It is about transforming everything you already know into something yet undiscovered; putting what you feel into something for other people to connect to as well. And art has possibly one of the most powerful impacts. In a world such as the one we live in today, we must pay attention to it and appreciate it a bit more. Who knows? We might discover something about ourselves that we did not expect.