The arts are testimony to the evolution of the human race

The arts are expressions of the human capacity to imitate nature and to attribute meaning to its existence.

"The arts, in general (including architecture, literature, music, dance, cinema and theater), and the plastic arts (sculpture, painting and drawing), in particular, refer to the development of symbolic forms, something that has been practiced by human beings since the earliest ages. Art and history are closely intertwined. History, that is, our set of social, economic and cultural experiences, is crossed by the arts, which exist due to a demand for the constitution of meaning, out of a need to understand our situation in the world.

Man, being a historical being, and not merely natural (in the biological sense), launches himself into symbolic production, and the arts are the most complex stage of this process. The techniques used in sculpture, for example, reveal our ability to give shape and meaning to raw natural material, whether that material is a piece of wood or a piece of marble. Painting and drawing, in turn, give the dimension of our ability to imitate the colors of nature and the shapes of the most varied beings, real or imaginary.

In each era, the arts bear witness to the evolution and concerns of the human race. This is the case, for example, of rock art among prehistoric people. The paintings found in the caves reveal both rituals and scenes from the daily lives of those individuals and cosmological concerns (which can be observed from the drawings of the Sun, the stars and various astronomical phenomena)."

"With the appearance of the first complex social organizations, such as that of the ancient city-states, the arts became more sophisticated. This is the case of the art of Mesopotamia, Egypt and Persia, in the Middle East, as well as the art of the period classic, in the West, such as Greek and Roman art and early Christian art in its catacomb phase and in its official phase.In addition, there was also artistic development in the Far East, the Americas and Oceania.

Christian art reached its peak in the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance. During this same period, there was also the flourishing of Islamic art and Byzantine art, which enriched the cultural scene and formed the artistic tradition of both Europe and the Middle East and North Africa.

In the Modern Age, the arts assumed great importance in the formation of artistic schools. From the 17th century until the beginning of the 20th century, these schools succeeded and surpassed each other. This was the case of the Baroque school, classicism, romanticism, impressionism and expressionism. To these schools, modernism, in turn, presented extremely radical proposals that served as a model for the entire 20th century and still continue to serve the art practiced in the 21st century. This was the case of Fauvism, Surrealism, Cubism, Dadaism, etc.