What is the history of art?

Question

like can you tell me where it all began and why it is important today?

Answer 1

Well, if you're asking when art began - who knows?  When the first conscious human dipped a stick in some pigment and began to draw on the cave wall, art began.  It's as old as humans, older than history.  (Most art history survey courses start with pre-historic art, so art is older than history.)

If you're asking when the discipline of art history began, that's entirely different.  Pliny the Elder wrote on the development of Greek sculpture and painting in his work  "Natural History" in the first century AD.  More recent approaches to art history can be traced to Vasari in Renaissance Florence, but his work, "The Lives of the Artists" is sometimes of questionable historic integrity, and it's more like "The Soap Opera Version of the Lives of the Artists."  A good read, but not necessarily reliable.

Winckelmann is really the first modern art historian, and the reason it's generally considered a German discipline.  Kant's "Critique of Judgment" and Hegel's "Lectures on Aesthetics" were both highly influential, and are still read by advanced art history students today.  (Hegel, in my opinion, is pretty questionable - he is very Eurocentric and is pretty conservative in critiquing non-Western art.)

Art history is important because it puts the fruits of human creation into a wider perspective.  Humans create art in response to the world around them.  The history of art attempts to examine these creations in relation to the person and world that created them and therefore provide insight into the greater human discourse.

Answer 2

You can sum up the entire history of art like this: materials multiply and evolve along with technology, and art depicts what is important to the culture in which the piece was created.  Cave paintings, Post-modernism, and everything in between fit into this simple phrase.  

There are two books I will recommend: 40,000 Years of Art, which has more examples and less writing, and Art Through the Ages, a classic college art history text.

Answer 3

there really isnt a real date in time where art began, they say that the first signs of art dates back to around 40,000 BC. In forms of fertility sculputures and such. Then it began to evolve to drawings on walls of caves and what kind of earth made different colors. Throughout the centuries, experimentation through different kinds of media gives us what art has become today. It is very important today because by looking at pieces of art, we can tell alot about the time period it came from and alot about what kind of culture existed in that part of the world. It gives us another way to view the history of our world's past