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What Is Art? Art

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What is art? Art is a difficult word to describe, because it means something a tad bit different to everyone you encounter. The official definition of art according to the Oxford Dictionary is “the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.” The only problem with this definition is that it is very open ended, creativity and imagination are vastly different in everyone’s mind. For the Egyptians they would have interpreted this definition in a more literal way saying art was when something was hand-made with the purpose of being used. The first ever ceramic pieces were made and used out of necessity; they would use the clay from the Nile River to make containers to hold and store items, make bricks, and tableware. Eventually they would move closer to our definition in the sense that they started using it for personal reasons like statues, funerary offerings, jewelry, toys and games. “The oldest pottery technique consisted in hollowing out a lump of clay by hand and pinching it to give it the final form. Later a flat tool was used to press the clay against the other hand. This simple procedure brought forth the elegant and astonishingly thin-walled vessels of the Naqada II period (2nd half of the 4th millennium BCE).” This technique is very simple, but it is effective and lead to all the new techniques we use

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