Effectiveness of Art Therapy for Multiple Sclerosis Patients

Viability of Art Therapy for Multiple Sclerosis Patients Presentation Different sclerosis basically known as â€Å"MS† is infection, an immune system one; it has its effect on the focal sensory system of human brain. Influenced by various sclerosis, the mind faces various challenges in getting messages to different pieces of the body. However, we know genuinely little on the issue of numerous sclerosis, investigation into its underlying drivers and potential medicines is quickly creating. The analyst guarantee MS causes the human bodys resistant framework to target assault myelin, a protecting covering around nerve cells. At the point when myelin is influenced, the correspondence among nerve cells situated in the focal sensory system is interfered. At the point when it happens, not many of the pieces of the human body don't get or acknowledge guidelines from the focal sensory system, the wellspring of controlling everything human body does. The malady can cause dynamic scope of side effects that develop with a scope of seriousness, from mellow p ain to outright incapacity. Proclamation of the Problem Numerous Sclerosis (MS) is a hopeless, incessant, and handicapping illness in which the safe framework is accepted to assault the focal sensory system. Would Art treatment be demonstrated compelling for the patients of Multiple Sclerosis? So as to examine the advantages that can be drawn out of the treatment, the specialist must be very much aware of the sickness, its causes and types. With respect to the treatment, there are different ways that can help in the period of the mending procedure of the various sclerosis patients. It is anyway critical to make connections among the vulnerabilities of the ailment and the mitigating advantages of the workmanship treatment that will be analyzed in this paper. In addition, this paper gives a near report which to look at the viability of workmanship treatment on the patients of various sclerosis in two unique pieces of the world. U.S. what's more, Middle East being the fundamental spotlight on the examination to the extent the land setting of this paper is concerned. The researcher’s objective is to distinguish the losses and the reasons for the ailment known as various sclerosis and furthermore secure a superior comprehension of its sorts and the vulnerabilities that comes in the stuff. It is primarily significant in light of the fact that to search for mending, the issue must be clear and compact. Among different techniques that has been demonstrated valuable throughout recuperating for the numerous sclerosis patients, this paper has picked the entryway of craftsmanship treatment. Workmanship treatment has been in the discussion for some time when numerous disputable diseases are risen as an issue to discuss. Workmanship treatment has given a portal to a large number of the calming procedure that can be valuable and accommodating in numerous ailments. The quantity of ways craftsmanship treatment has given especially to inspect the variety it acquainted all together with mitigate the assortment of powerless side effects have been viewed as dependable and significant. Reason This examination is intended to investigate the adequacy of Art Therapy for Multiple Sclerosis patients. The analyst speculates that Art Therapy will significantly improve the general angles required to satisfy a quality life. The paper additionally involves a relative report between United States of America and Middle East Research Question Does Art treatment help in any capacity to various sclerosis patients? That it is so helpful to the patients living across U.S. what's more, Middle East. Sorts OF MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS Numerous sclerosis may show up in different structures. Numerous sclerosis is an unusual sickness. A few people have starting assaults and don't advance. Sometimes, in old, movement will stop inside and out. As indicated by Multiple Sclerosis Association of USA, it isn't clear why this sickness influences individuals in such an assorted variety of ways. The kinds of Multiple Sclerosis include: Backsliding dispatching: Backsliding dispatching different sclerosis short as â€Å"RRMS† is commonly portrayed by obviously unmistakable assaults of exasperating neurologic capacities. These assaults are medicinally alluded to as â€Å"relapses†, break outs or intensifications which are sought after by incomplete or all out recuperation periods, for example, reductions, during it the side effects show signs of improvement in part or totally, and there is no clear movement of ailment. RRMS is the basic illness at the hour of analysis. This type of MS goes back and forth with time. It generally develops in the age from 20s to 30s. Side effects could be serious at one purpose of time and afterward vanish. Around 85 % of MS patients create beginning of the malady in this example. Backsliding transmitting MS is characterized as the provocative assaults on myelin just as of the nerve strands. During every one of those provocative assaults, initiated resistant cells cause not many, confined regions o f misfortune which focus on the indications of Multiple Sclerosis. Because of the explanation that the area of the harm is so alterable, no two patients have the very same sort of manifestations. Side effects are truly alterable in RRMS. Annihilating weariness is a typical horrendous side effect. One of the underlying indications of MS may incorporate twofold vision or visual deficiency that is halfway visual deficiency. Different manifestations contain balance issues, spasticity, and deadness. This could make strolling extremely troublesome. A few people experience bladder or inside brokenness, dazedness, or torment. In not many cases, passionate awkward nature or intellectual brokenness may happen. Side effects of Multiple Sclerosis will in general exacerbate when patients become worked up. Lhermitte’s sign is an impression corresponding to an electrical stun torching from neck. Another strange sensation, known as MS Hug, feels like a withdrawal around chest. Optional dynamic: The title for optional dynamic different sclerosis (SPMS) comes significant of the way that it rises after (RRMS). Of the 85 % of the individuals who were at first determined to have RRMS, most would sometime change to SPMS, implying that after a course of time inside which they encountered backslides and reductions, ailment would start to grow all the more step by step (not really rapidly), with or with no assaults or backslides so far as that is concerned. After the main assault, the illness may start to create in an increasingly purposeful manner. In this sort, indications don't fall. Before new treatments were structured, around 50 percent of patients with MS entered a dynamic stage. In SPMS, individuals may or probably won't keep on confronting backslides brought about by irritation; the infection consistently transforms from the provocative procedure seen in RRMS to a substantially more consistently dynamic stage portrayed by nerve harm or misfortune. Individuals with PPMS don't generally encounter any assaults or backslides. With SPMS, backslides will in general be less extraordinary. They may happen less regularly or never happen. At the point when backslides happen, recuperation isn't as last and complete. Handicaps wait. The reasonable explanation individuals progress from backslide transmitting to the auxiliary dynamic MS isn't in any case compact and clear. It doesn’t appear to be identified with a developing or expanded insusceptible response. One clarification is that the infection movement may be an eventual outcome of nerve harm that happened right off the bat in illness developing stage. In any case, more examination is required to comprehend the lopsided ailment process. Essential dynamic: Essential dynamic numerous sclerosis (PPMS) is recognized by moderate exacerbating of neurologic working, with no sort of unmistakable backslides or event of reduction. A person’s pace of movement may contrast after some time with rare levels or flashing improvement †however the movement is unremitting and nonstop. Individuals who develop this type of sickness by and large do so thereafter throughout everyday life. They turn down gradually, without a great part of the obstacles and high points and low points. This type of ailment happens in just 15% of all patients with MS, yet it is anyway most normal sort of MS in patients who build up the sickness after the age of forty. Because of this fundamental contrast in the sickness course, different standards are utilized to make an exact determination of PPMS. The rules to analyze a backsliding type of MS require affirmation of at any rate 2 separate regions of misfortune (circulation in space) in focal sensory system (CNS) that happened at various focuses in timespan (dissemination in time). In PPMS, however, there is little measure of aggravation. Or maybe, nerve harm rules. Harmed nerves upset the transmission of nerve signals and messages. This gives a raise to neurological side effects. Indications of scar tissue or sores may in the long run structure up and down the harmed nerves in the mind and furthermore in the spinal string. Dynamic backsliding: Dynamic backsliding various sclerosis (PRMS) is the smallest normal of the four infection types. Like those with PPMS, patients having PRMS experience consistently declining neurologic capacity, malady movement from the very beginning, notwithstanding rare backslides like those accomplished by patients with backsliding transmitting MS. Since PRMS is dynamic from starting, it might be first analyzed as PPMS, and afterward in this way travel to PRMS when a backslide or assaults happens. In spite of the fact that this ailment type is dynamic from the start, each patient’s manifestations and pace of movement will in general be extraordinary. In this kind of different sclerosis, side effects initially progress gradually yet in the long run get most exceedingly awful over the timeframe. This sort of MS influences about 5% of all the patient experiencing MS. No two patients are probably going to have a similar sort of MS side effects in the comparable way. Hardly any side effects may go back and forth or come out once and not until the end of time. A backslide can keep going a long or brief timeframe from 24 hours to various weeks. During a backslide or assault new manifestations may show up or old side effects for the second decline. In PRMS, backslides may or probably won't be trailed by a little recuperation. Be that as it may, there are no reductions at all. CAUSES Despite the fact that the underlying driver of different sclerosis is as yet obscure,

Ptcl Report

1. Presentation: Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL) is aâ mega corporationâ and a main media transmission expert in the State of Pakistan. The company gives and implements approaches to the telephonic administrations across the nation and is the spine for nation's media transmission framework in spite of appearance of a handfuls other media transmission companies, including Telenor Corps and China Mobile Ltd. The organization oversaw and works around ~2000 phone trades the nation over, giving the biggest fixed line network.Data and spine administrations, for example, GSM, CDMA, Broadband Internet, and IPTV, discount are an expanding some portion of its business. From the beginnings of Posts ; Telegraph Department in 1947 and foundation of Pakistan Telephone ; Telegraph Department in 1962, PTCL has been a significant player in media transmission in Pakistan. In spite of having built up a system of tremendous size, PTCL activities and strategies have pulled i n customary analysis from other littler administrators and the common society of Pakistan.Pakistan Telecommunication Corporation (PTC) took over tasks and capacities from Pakistan Telephone and Telegraph Department under Pakistan Telecommunication Corporation Act 1991. In 1995, Pakistan Telecommunication (Reorganization) Ordinance shaped the reason for PTCL restraining infrastructure over fundamental communication in the nation. The arrangements of the Ordinance were loaned changelessness in October 1996 through Pakistan Telecommunication (Reorganization) Act.The same year, Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited was framed and recorded on every single stock trade of Pakistan PTCL propelled its versatile and information administrations auxiliaries in 2001 by the name of Ufone and PakNet separately. None of the brands made it to the top openings in the particular rivalries Lately, notwithstanding, Ufone had expanded its piece of the pie in the cell area. The PakNet brand has succe ssfully broken down over the timeframe. Ongoing DSL administrations propelled by PTCL mirror this by the presentation of another brand name and activity of the administration being legitimately regulated by PTCL. . 1 Vision To be the main Information and Communication Technology Service Provider in the area by accomplishing consumer loyalty and boosting investors' value’. What's to come is unfurling around us. In times to come, we will be the connection that permits worldwide correspondence. We are endeavoring towards preparing the world for what's to come. By turning out to be accomplices in advancement, we are prepared to shape a future that offers telecom benefits that bring us closer. 1. 2 Mission To accomplish our main goal by having: A hierarchical situation that encourages polished skill, inspiration and quality * A domain that is financially savvy and quality cognizant * Services that depend on the most ideal innovation * â€Å"Quality† and â€Å"Time† c ognizant client assistance * Sustained development in income and gainfulness 4. Administrations OF PTCL Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited not just Provides Conventional phone offices, it likewise offers optical fiber administrations to the private segment. We will quickly examine beneath the product offerings being offered by the PTCL.Basically PTCL partition their administrations into two sections. 1 Services for consumers2. Administrations for corporate clients 4. 1 Services for Consumers These administrations are fundamentally for the regular clients (Individual/home clients) those utilization phone in their home/work spot and they are essentially non business clients. a) New Telephone Connections: As referenced prior, PTCL is by and by the main telecom organization, who gave fixed-line communication in the nation. So at whatever point, any Private business concern or any individual needs another phone association for arrangement of telephone utility. ) Value Added Servi ces: CLI (Caller’s Line Identification) Caller Line Identification (CLI): Calling line Identification (CLI) permit clients to recognize the guest before getting the telephone collector. To buy in to CLI administrations, client needs a phone set with show ability or a CLI gadget appended to the telephone. In this way producing a record on I/N stage and any call produced using that phone will be charged to this record. The administration will give condition of craftsmanship innovative offices to the endorsers. 5. Client CARE and CUSTOMER SERVICES DEPARTMENTPTCL has built up its Customer Services Department at various levels the outline of the said office is as per the following. Corporate Customer Care Center Operation Region Level Customer Services Centers Tensile Level Toll Free Help Lines for Complaint & Enquiry now we quickly present the elements of these: Corporate Customer Care Centerâ to encourage Corporate Customers PTCL has set up Corporate Customer Care Centers at all Operation Regional Head Quarter Level, in all the small urban areas countrywide. The Corporate Customers can get their issues settled under one rooftop in a one window condition by dialing UAN 111 20 2.The Customer Relation Officers register the grievances and forward these to the related office. Client Services Centers to encourage shoppers PTCL has set up Customer Services Centers at all Tensile Level urban communities/workplaces. Here the customers can utilize Fax Facility, Voice Telephony for Local/NWD/ISD dialing. On divisional Offices Level copy telephone bills may likewise be acquired from C. S. C’s. Cost Free Help Lines PTCL offers cutting edge call focus system to its all kind of esteemed clients forâ convenient much of the time posed Inquiries, Complaints in regards to their administrations, T/No enquiry.The following three Toll Free T/Numbers are accessible for this reason. a) 1236 (Service Activation) This cost free No is utilized to change the levy bundles of land line, WLL (V-fone),v PTCL telephone n net help actuation, and for Broad Band clients. The administration actuation is electronically requested and enacted inside 24 hours through concerned office) 1217 (Telephone Directory)This office is likewise Toll Free and is utilized to acquire the phone quantities of some particular endorsers (College, Govt. workplaces, Private workplaces and so forth. ).This is incorporated and is being utilized as Telephone Directory) 1218 (Land Line Complaints 6. Ventures and Assignments During Internship I was alloted to present the every day showcase visit report to the specialist official in which I needed to discover the new costumers just as to record the objections of the costumers with respect to the items they use or any proposals were constantly invited. Additionally I was doled out to meet at any rate 15 possibilities and make them mindful about Products and administrations like BB, Evo, IPtv, D-SET, H- set, Pstn, and Tab For this exposure I was prepared for multi week to make right exposure about the association. . Proposals: * Pakistan Telecommunication Company should Increase Publicity and Advertisement Activities. * Recruitment and choice open doors ought to be expanded. * Free Seminars ought to be sorted out. * They ought concentrate on metropolitan urban communities as well as should take close thoughtfulness regarding the provincial territories and modest communities. * They ought to improve their Costumer care administrations. * To build their sell exercises they ought to make better methodologies. Ptcl Report 1. Presentation: Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL) is aâ mega corporationâ and a main media transmission expert in the State of Pakistan. The enterprise gives and authorizes arrangements to the telephonic administrations across the nation and is the spine for nation's media transmission foundation in spite of appearance of a handfuls other telecom companies, including Telenor Corps and China Mobile Ltd. The company oversaw and works around ~2000 phone trades the nation over, giving the biggest fixed line network.Data and spine administrations, for example, GSM, CDMA, Broadband Internet, and IPTV, discount are an expanding some portion of its business. From the beginnings of Posts ; Telegraph Department in 1947 and foundation of Pakistan Telephone ; Telegraph Department in 1962, PTCL has been a significant player in media transmission in Pakistan. In spite of having set up a system of colossal size, PTCL activities and arrangements have pulled in normal ana lysis from other littler administrators and the common society of Pakistan.Pakistan Telecommunication Corporation (PTC) took over tasks and capacities from Pakistan Telephone and Telegraph Department under Pakistan Telecommunication Corporation Act 1991. In 1995, Pakistan Telecommunication (Reorganization) Ordinance shaped the reason for PTCL imposing business model over essential communication in the nation. The arrangements of the Ordinance were loaned perpetual quality in October 1996 through Pakistan Telecommunication (Reorganization) Act.The same year, Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited was shaped and recorded on every single stock trade of Pakistan PTCL propelled its versatile and information administrations auxiliaries in 2001 by the name of Ufone and PakNet separately. None of the brands made it to the top spaces in the separate rivalries Lately, be that as it may, Ufone had expanded its piece of the overall industry in the cell area. The PakNet brand has successfull y broken up over the timeframe. Late DSL administrations propelled by PTCL mirror this by the presentation of another brand name and activity of the administration being straightforwardly administered by PTCL. . 1 Vision To be the main Information and Communication Technology Service Provider in the area by accomplishing consumer loyalty and expanding investors' value’. What's to come is unfurling around us. In times to come, we will be the connection that permits worldwide correspondence. We are endeavoring towards activating the world for what's to come. By turning out to be accomplices in development, we are prepared to shape a future that offers telecom benefits that bring us closer. 1. 2 Mission To accomplish our central goal by having: A hierarchical situation that cultivates proficient

MOMENTOS IMPRESIONANTES

MOMENTOS IMPRESIONANTES I remember the first time I went to a market in my hometown. It was on one of those rare cold days, with icy sheets of rain washing the narrow, crowded, intertwining market streets. As I raced after my mom, who navigated the labyrinthine marketplace with the ease familiarity bestows on the well-practiced, the shouts of people reached my ears. “Come and see this; it’s good!” “We have what you want, sir, trust us!” I turned to look at one of themâ€" I have no idea what happened next. The world beneath me dropped. My feet plummeted, crushed against underground stone, which had formerly been hidden by the gutter I had just fallen into. I burst into tears at once, frightened, certain of impending death, screaming for my mom. Muddy water pounced on my legs with icy strength. A few minutes later, I was shivering beside my mom underneath one of the marketplace shelters, my tears replaced by the merry expectation of some consolation gift she had promised me. You probably think falling into a gutter undoubtedly filled with subterranean aliens would be enough to enforce calculating wariness on me, but I faithfully subscribe to my involuntary requirement of one superbly clumsy act every month, ranging from tumbling down two flights of stairs (grade five) to trying to sit back on a chair while holding a bottle of water and having it spill all over me (last afternoon). These moments were impressionable enough to add “klutz-king” to the several phrases I identify with, but thankfully, at MIT, the bulk of impressionable moments come from other sources, and I want to share a few of several with you. 1) THE MIT EXPERIENCE ITSELF: “MIT is amazing” has probably been said enough times to force this trite, self-conscious statement into hiding, but it constantly rings as true, and my experiences everyday intertwine with the awe MIT creates. My classes really make me work harder than I’ve ever had to, an effect self-evident in me staying up late on several nights to finish aggravating p-sets, and in me having to think more extensively than high school ever needed me to. I think, without meaning to, I might have underestimated the extent to which I would be challenged by my classes. “MIT is hard” had been said enough times to steel my mind towards this expectation but there’s a distinct line between expectation and experience, one I’m more clearly aware of, one that encourages me to be focused and persistent without being overly work-consumed and alienating. I have superbly interesting classes taught by well-accomplished professors, and the amount of information they transmit each week is enormous. As time builds up and moves along, you race alongside it, barely mindful of how much you’re learning until you sit back and think of how much you know this week that you didn’t know two weeks ago. And even when you’re not mindful of the exponential rise MIT gives your scholastic awareness, it doesn’t stop you from feeling overwhelmed and just a bit proud in one of several moments you grind to a halt and realize what it truly means to be here. And if you’re lucky, while heading to a dining hall for lunch one normal day after class, you might grind to a halt for a different reason altogether. Because something rather interesting just caught your eye. That’s the MIT Alchemist Statue, toting a dark hat and shades in respect to Breaking Bad, a phenomenal TV show that recently came to an end. One more thing about the alchemist…it’s the solution to the puzzle I talked about last month. How exactly? Well, that’s up to you to figure out. 2) A P-SET MIRACLE: What are p-sets? You know those things MIT students are constantly whining about? Those things that eagerly burst out of their lips right next to words like “hosed” and “overworked” and “all-nighter” in response to “How are you doing?” Yeah, p-sets are ferocious creatures. Nick Garcia is someone I’ve gotten unbelievably close to, and we were working on an 18.01 p-set in his room about two weeks ago. A nasty-looking problem involving logarithmic inequalities stared us in the face, and we battled it separately. I kept coming up with several ways to start attacking the problem but after chasing these inspirations for a few minutes, I always met a dead end. As time shot forward, I felt my spring of ideas run thin. Nick was also stuck. “I just keep trying these methods,” I told him in despair, “but nothing works. I don’t even know how to start.” “I’m stuck too,” he replied wearily, telling me about a method he had started out with, which he had bounced around his head for some time without results. I was rigid at once, my mind spinning. Hang on. Hang on just one second… “Oh my God!” I nearly yelled. “Yes, Nick, that’s brilliant! Your idea! It works!” “What?” Nick replied. “How?” So I showed him how it did, and the problem was solved. This isn’t my typical p-set experience, or my typical experience with problems in general. The trick to a difficult p-set always lies in some central idea. While collaborating, you always either figure out that central idea by yourself and prod others onto that path with several hints and suggestions, or have someone who has figured it out lead you onto that path. What happened with Nick and me was different: he figured out the first half of the idea, which had evaded revealing itself in all the methods I had started out trying. I couldn’t figure out the first half of the idea, but he could. And he couldn’t figure out the second half of the idea, but from what he had figured out, I could see the second half. We solved the problem together. It wasn’t a case of “I-figured-it-out-and-now-I’ll-drop-hints-so-you-can-figure-it-out”. It was collaboration at its best and truest sense. E ach of us held a distinct hemisphere of the solution, and somehow, we were able to unite them. Silly as it may sound, it felt truly magical. 3) A KING DOWN THE STREET: One of the unspoken MIT graduation requirements involves giving the list of “101 Things to Do Before You Graduate” a serious attempt. In honor of one of the list requirements which demanded that students sample the fine burgers and frappes at a nearby restaurant called Bartley’s, my roommate and I headed there last week. From the pictures, you can tell we’re on the right track to graduation. It turns out Bartley’s is right next to the Harvard Book Store, so after stuffing ourselves on the enormous deliciousness the restaurant offers, we headed to the bookstore. There, I came across two Stephen King books I had been trying to get for a while, and was instantly excited. Ever since I read Cell by Stephen King a few years ago, he’s been my absolute favorite author, and I’ve read fourteen other books by him since then. I kept babbling to my roommate James on how amazing Stephen King was, and only paused when I had to pay for the books. The cashier looked at them with some fascination, and said something that absolutely blew my mind. “Stephen King? Hmm, he’s going to read from his new book at Harvard University tonight.” My brain took this bit of news in, digested it very carefully, agreed that I wasn’t hallucinating and sent out the message that I could begin freaking out. I exploded at once, unable to help myself, letting out a stream of excited, barely intelligible words. “Oh my God…you can’t…you CAN’T…be serious!” My excitement was short-lived though. It turned out the event wasn’t open to the public anymore. Tickets to see Stephen King had sold out two months ago, twenty-five minutes after ticket sales had opened. Undeterred, I headed to Harvard, my awesome roommate beside me. We saw the Harvard Memorial Church, from which a heartbreakingly long line emerged. After a while, I accepted the tragic realization that I wouldn’t see Stephen King. Not yet. And that was fine for now. For now, I still had his books and could still imagine his voice, rife with descriptive ingenuity, filling my head with a wonderful world in which not-so-wonderful things happened. 4) COOL PURPLE ALIENS: What weird alien creature is that? It seems to be some kind of mysterious fairy-queen, with special powers and the…no, no, nope. It’s a shopping cart. The official name is actually The Hanicorn. One of my friends Hannah joined a sorority a few weeks ago, and by a nice process of mutual selection, got assigned to a “Big Sister”, who, to show her appreciation for Hannah’s awesomeness, baked a cake that filled the entire base of a shopping cart. Hannah trundled the beautifully decorated cart around campus to every single one of her classes, letting friends dig in and grab as many chunks of cake as they could. By 5pm, we had our last class (Ancient Greek Philosophy) and the cake had still not been fully demolished. It’s definitely not every day you get to see people reach into the bowel of a pretty purple unicorn and come out holding a fat chunk of cake. 5) SEPTEMBER 12: On September 12, 2013, something infinitely awesome happened to me. Enough said. 6) COLD FRIDAY NIGHTS: The first friend I made at MIT, Isaac Cabrera, called me last weekend, asking if I wanted to hang out. Fifteen minutes later, we met beside the Alchemist and had a short conversation. We were both hungry, and Isaac suggested an Indian restaurant, which was apparently right next to my dorm. My stomach agreed pleasantly with his words of wisdom, leading to an awesome dinner of several multi-syllable meals I had never had before. After dinner, we headed out. It was one of those brutally cold Friday nights, and my T-shirt wasn’t doing very well in keeping me warm so Isaac and I headed to his dorm where he gave me one of his leather jackets. As soon as I put them on, I felt simultaneously warm and hardcore. There’s something about leather jackets that give you the sense you can ride a motorcycle upside down. Wait, don’t try this. I’m serious. Don’t. Appeased stomachs, check. Grand Theft Auto-style jackets, check. We headed out across the Harvard Bridge and into the heart of Boston. Turns out there is a world outside of MIT, one I probably need to frequent more often. We ended up walking about four miles, during which time Isaac and I spoke about classes, about Taylor Swift (yay!), about his home in California, about the awful, unpredictable pleasantly flexible Boston weather, about music. We walked past looming skyscrapers, through roads crawling with happy weekend-loving pedestrians, and ended up at the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Isaac loves operas and orchestras, and we tried to get into one of the shows, but the final show was already more than halfway done, so we decided to try again some other time. We headed back to his dorm at MIT and spent an outrageous amount of time laughing over several episodes of South Park and Family Guy. We watched it on his desktop, which was powered by a blue-glowing, unique-looking CPU he had constructed by himself from basic parts. You don’t really need much to have an amazing weekend…just a person, someone you can freely embarrass yourself around. Sure, there’s always work looming around the corner (it’s no secret that a new p-set pops up right after you submit a current one), but here’s the shocker: sometimes, work can wait. It can. And when you realize this, you can create awesome experiences with the people you care about. Plus or minus a few snapshots of the beautiful city of Boston swathed in mist. On a cold Friday night.

To Be True to Yourself in a World That Is Constantly...

To be true to yourself in a world that is constantly making you something else is a great achievement All of us possess qualities that differentiate us from other human beings. These distinguishing features could be more or less highlighted in appearance, mindset or capabilities, but they will always persist and determine the nature of our personality. Unfortunately these characteristic attributes are deteriorating as humanity is moulding us into the â€Å"perfect person† influencing us to stray away from who we are (our so called â€Å"insignificant† selves) to what is desirable (a flawless model). Staying true to yourself means to stick to what you believe in and being whom you were meant to be, it means not sacrificing who you are to fit in with†¦show more content†¦According to Anastasia Goodstein, from Huffington Post, â€Å"80 percent of girls have purchased an item as a result of an ad in a teen magazine and 63 percent trust magazine ads.† As a result girls become convinced that they require particular fashions to belong in a society that emphasiz es materialism. Moreover, most of the fashion, diet and lifestyle advice is directed toward being desirable to men. Magazines stress sexuality as a central identity, minimizing all other attributes. The girls reading teen magazines begin to digest and trust the message that they are only sexual objects. Peer pressure is the influence exerted by a social group or an individual, encouraging other persons to change their attitudes, values, or behaviours in order to conform to group norms. Peer pressure is most commonly associated with youth, in part because most youth spend large amounts of time in schools and other fixed groups that they do not choose and are seen as lacking the maturity to handle pressure from friends. Peer pressure can also have positive effects when people are pressured toward positive behaviour, such as volunteering for charity or excelling in academics or athletics, by their peers. However Risk taking behaviour is seemingly the most common as these same people engage inShow MoreRelatedPicture Waking Up To A World Where There’S No Forms Of1302 Words   |  6 PagesPicture waking up to a world where there’s no forms of writing to be read and there’s not a book in sight. Picture a world with no true forms of literacy art. Communications in al l forms are gone. Education would crumble, our histories would almost be nonexistent. We would just be a memory including our past. It’s hard to imagine a world without these things. What would things be like? 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Factors That Affect Social Mobility Essay - 1338 Words

1) What are some of the factors that affect social mobility? Can these be overcome? Education: â€Å"Over the past fifty years, Asian Americans, Latinos/as, and African Americans have placed great importance on education as a mean of attaining the American Dream. Many people of color have moved into the upper middle class by acquiring a higher level of education† (Kendall, D. 2014. p.219). Attaining an education does not always guarantee wealth and success for persons of color all the time, but it is a tool in which once received, no one can take away from you. Class: â€Å"People may become members of a class other than that of their parents through both intergenerational and intergenerational mobility† (Kendall, D. 2014. p.215). Encumbered with education, by working to attain your degree and with a lot of determination you are able to surpass what your parents attained. All parents would like to see their children do better than the norm. Gender: Women have continued to face a higher risk of being poor because they bear the major economic and emotional burdens of raising children when they are single heads of households. There is currently gender wage gap between female and male workers, which is linked to the structural functionalistic views of what role each gender is â€Å"suppose† to play. The women should stay at home and raise the children(s), while the man, is looked upon as the provided. 2) Do you believe the structural-functionalist or the social conflict approach bestShow MoreRelatedSocial Class Of Social Mobility1491 Words   |  6 Pages Social Class Myths in America Social mobility in the United States is commonly seen as an opportunity available to every individual to assume a higher economic status through conscientious willpower. However, recent studies have brought to question the extent to which social mobility can be achieved. 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AMERICAN CULTURE Visual and performing arts 3. Arts and letters The arts, more than other features of culture, provide avenues for the expression of imagination and personal vision. They offer a range of emotional and intellectual pleasures to consumers of art and are an important way in which a culture represents itself. We will write a custom essay sample on Vbnm or any similar topic only for you Order Now There has long been a Western tradition distinguishing those arts that appeal to the multitude, such as popular music, from those—such as classical orchestral music—normally available to the elite of learning and taste. Popular art forms are usually seen as more representative American products. In the United States in the recent past, there has been a blending of popular and elite art forms, as all the arts experienced a period of remarkable cross-fertilization. Because popular art forms are so widely distributed, arts of all kinds have prospered. The arts in the United States express the many faces and the enormous creative range of the American people. Especially since World War II, American innovations and the immense energy displayed in literature, dance, and music have made American cultural works world famous. Arts in the United States have become internationally prominent in ways that are unparalleled in history. American art forms during the second half of the 20th century often defined the styles and qualities that the rest of the world emulated. At the end of the 20th century, American art was considered equal in quality and vitality to art produced in the rest of the world. Throughout the 20th century, American arts have grown to incorporate new visions and voices. Much of this new artistic energy came in the wake of America’s emergence as a superpower after World War II. But it was also due to the growth of New York City as an important center for publishing and the arts, and the immigration of artists and intellectuals fleeing fascism in Europe before and during the war. An outpouring of talent also followed the civil rights and protest movements of the 1960s, as cultural discrimination against blacks, women, and other groups diminished. American arts flourish in many places and receive support from private foundations, large corporations, local governments, federal agencies, museums, galleries, and individuals. What is considered worthy of support often depends on definitions of quality and of what constitutes art. This is a tricky subject when the popular arts are increasingly incorporated into the domain of the fine arts and new forms such as performance art and conceptual art appear. As a result, defining what is art affects what students are taught about past traditions (for example, Native American tent paintings, oral traditions, and slave narratives) and what is produced in the future. While some practitioners, such as studio artists, are more vulnerable to these definitions because they depend on financial support to exercise their talents, others, such as poets and photographers, are less immediately constrained. Artists operate in a world where those who theorize and critique their work have taken on an increasingly important role. Audiences are influenced by a variety of intermediaries—critics, the schools, foundations that offer grants, the National Endowment for the Arts, gallery owners, publishers, and theater producers. In some areas, such as the performing arts, popular audiences may ultimately define success. In other arts, such as painting and sculpture, success is far more dependent on critics and a few, often wealthy, art collectors. Writers depend on publishers and on the public for their success. Unlike their predecessors, who relied on formal criteria and appealed to aesthetic judgments, critics at the end of the 20th century leaned more toward popular tastes, taking into account groups previously ignored and valuing the merger of popular and elite forms. These critics often relied less on aesthetic judgments than on social measures and were eager to place artistic productions in the context of the time and social conditions in which they were created. Whereas earlier critics attempted to create an American tradition of high art, later critics used art as a means to give power and approval to nonelite groups who were previously not considered worthy of including in the nation’s artistic heritage. Not so long ago, culture and the arts were assumed to be an unalterable inheritance—the accumulated wisdom and highest forms of achievement that were established in the past. In the 20th century generally, and certainly since World War II, artists have been boldly destroying older traditions in sculpture, painting, dance, music, and literature. The arts have changed rapidly, with one movement replacing another in quick succession. a) Visual arts. The visual arts have traditionally included forms of expression that appeal to the eyes through painted surfaces, and to the sense of space through carved or molded materials. In the 19th century, photographs were added to the paintings, drawings, and sculpture that make up the visual arts. The visual arts were further augmented in the 20th century by the addition of other materials, such as found objects. These changes were accompanied by a profound alteration in tastes, as earlier emphasis on realistic representation of people, objects, and landscapes made way for a greater range of imaginative forms. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, American art was considered inferior to European art. Despite noted American painters such as Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, Mary Cassatt, and John Marin, American visual arts barely had an international presence. American art began to flourish during the Great Depression of the 1930s as New Deal government programs provided support to artists along with other sectors of the population. Artists connected with each other and developed a sense of common purpose through programs of the Public Works Administration, such as the Federal Art Project, as well as programs sponsored by the Treasury Department. Most of the art of the period, including painting, photography, and mural work, focused on the plight of the American people during the depression, and most artists painted real people in difficult circumstances. Artists such as Thomas Hart Benton and Ben Shahn expressed the suffering of ordinary people through their representations of struggling farmers and workers. While artists such as Benton and Grant Wood focused on rural life, many painters of the 1930s and 1940s depicted the multicultural life of the American city. Jacob Lawrence, for example, re-created the history and lives of African Americans. Other artists, such as Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper, tried to use human figures to describe emotional states such as loneliness and despair. Abstract Expressionism. Shortly after World War II, American art began to garner worldwide attention and admiration. This change was due to the innovative fervor of abstract expressionism in the 1950s and to subsequent modern art movements and artists. The abstract expressionists of the mid-20th century broke from the realist and figurative tradition set in the 1930s. They emphasized their connection to international artistic visions rather than the particularities of people and place, and most abstract expressionists did not paint human figures (although artist Willem de Kooning did portrayals of women). Color, shape, and movement dominated the canvases of abstract expressionists. Some artists broke with the Western art tradition by adopting innovative painting styles—during the 1950s Jackson Pollock â€Å"painted† by dripping paint on canvases without the use of brushes, while the paintings of Mark Rothko often consisted of large patches of color that seem to vibrate. Abstract expressionists felt alienated from their surrounding culture and used art to challenge society’s conventions. The work of each artist was quite individual and distinctive, but all the artists identified with the radicalism of artistic creativity. The artists were eager to challenge conventions and limits on expression in order to redefine the nature of art. Their radicalism came from liberating themselves from the confining artistic traditions of the past. The most notable activity took place in New York City, which became one of the world’s most important art centers during the second half of the 20th century. The radical fervor and inventiveness of the abstract expressionists, their frequent association with each other in New York City’s Greenwich Village, and the support of a group of gallery owners and dealers turned them into an artistic movement. Also known as the New York School, the participants included Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, and Arshile Gorky, in addition to Rothko and Pollock. The members of the New York School came from diverse backgrounds such as the American Midwest and Northwest, Armenia, and Russia, bringing an international flavor to the group and its artistic visions. They hoped to appeal to art audiences everywhere, regardless of culture, and they felt connected to the radical innovations introduced earlier in the 20th century by European artists such as Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp. Some of the artists—Hans Hofmann, Gorky, Rothko, and de Kooning—were not born in the United States, but all the artists saw themselves as part of an international creative movement and an aesthetic rebellion. As artists felt released from the boundaries and conventions of the past and free to emphasize expressiveness and innovation, the abstract expressionists gave way to other innovative styles in American art. Beginning in the 1930s Joseph Cornell created hundreds of boxed assemblages, usually from found objects, with each based on a single theme to create a mood of contemplation and sometimes of reverence. Cornell’s boxes exemplify the modern fascination with individual vision, art that breaks down boundaries between forms such as painting and sculpture, and the use of everyday objects toward a new end. Other artists, such as Robert Rauschenberg, combined disparate objects to create large, collage-like sculptures known as combines in the 1950s. Jasper Johns, a painter, sculptor, and printmaker, recreated countless familiar objects, most memorably the American flag. The most prominent American artistic style to follow abstract expressionism was the pop art movement that began in the 1950s. Pop art attempted to connect traditional art and popular culture by using images from mass culture. To shake viewers out of their preconceived notions about art, sculptor Claes Oldenburg used everyday objects such as pillows and beds to create witty, soft sculptures. Roy Lichtenstein took this a step further by elevating the techniques of commercial art, notably cartooning, into fine art worthy of galleries and museums. Lichtenstein’s large, blown-up cartoons fill the surface of his canvases with grainy black dots and question the existence of a distinct realm of high art. These artists tried to make their audiences see ordinary objects in a refreshing new way, thereby breaking down the conventions that formerly defined what was worthy of artistic representation. Probably the best-known pop artist, and a leader in the movement, was Andy Warhol, whose images of a Campbell’s soup can and of the actress Marilyn Monroe explicitly eroded the boundaries between the art world and mass culture. Warhol also cultivated his status as a celebrity. He worked in film as a director and producer to break down the boundaries between traditional and popular art. Unlike the abstract expressionists, whose conceptual works were often difficult to understand, Andy Warhol’s pictures, and his own face, were instantly recognizable. Conceptual art, as it came to be known in the 1960s, like its predecessors, sought to break free of traditional artistic associations. In conceptual art, as practiced by Sol LeWitt and Joseph Kosuth, concept takes precedent over actual object, by stimulating thought rather than following an art tradition based on conventional standards of beauty and artisanship. Modern artists changed the meaning of traditional visual arts and brought a new imaginative dimension to ordinary experience. Art was no longer viewed as separate and distinct, housed in museums as part of a historical inheritance, but as a continuous creative process. This emphasis on constant change, as well as on the ordinary and mundane, reflected a distinctly American democratizing perspective. Viewing art in this way removed the emphasis from technique and polished performance, and many modern artworks and experiences became more about expressing ideas than about perfecting finished products. Photography. Photography is probably the most democratic modern art form because it can be, and is, practiced by most Americans. Since 1888, when George Eastman developed the Kodak camera that allowed anyone to take pictures, photography has struggled to be recognized as a fine art form. In the early part of the 20th century, photographer, editor, and artistic impresario Alfred Stieglitz established 291, a gallery in New York City, with fellow photographer Edward Steichen, to showcase the works of photographers and painters. They also published a magazine called Camera Work to increase awareness about photographic art. In the United States, photographic art had to compete with the widely available commercial photography in news and fashion magazines. By the 1950s the tradition of photojournalism, which presented news stories primarily with photographs, had produced many outstanding works. In 1955 Steichen, who was director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, called attention to this work in an exhibition called The Family of Man. Throughout the 20th century, most professional photographers earned their living as portraitists or photojournalists, not as artists. One of the most important exceptions was Ansel Adams, who took majestic photographs of the Western American landscape. Adams used his art to stimulate social awareness and to support the conservation cause of the Sierra Club. He helped found the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art in 1940, and six years later helped establish the photography department at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco (now the San Francisco Art Institute). He also held annual photography workshops at Yosemite National Park from 1955 to 1981 and wrote a series of influential books on photographic technique. Adams’s elegant landscape photography was only one small stream in a growing current of interest in photography as an art form. Early in the 20th century, teacher-turned-photographer Lewis Hine established a documentary tradition in photography by capturing actual people, places, and events. Hine photographed urban conditions and workers, including child laborers. Along with their artistic value, the photographs often implicitly called for social reform. In the 1930s and 1940s, photographers joined with other depression-era artists supported by the federal government to create a hotographic record of rural America. Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Arthur Rothstein, among others, produced memorable and widely reproduced portraits of rural poverty and American distress during the Great Depression and during the dust storms of the period. In 1959, after touring the United States for two years, Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank published The Americans, one of the landmarks of documentary photography. His photographs of everyday life in America introduced viewers to a depressing, and often depressed, America that existed in the midst of prosperity and world power. Photographers continued to search for new photographic viewpoints. This search was perhaps most disturbingly embodied in the work of Diane Arbus. Her photos of mental patients and her surreal depictions of Americans altered the viewer’s relationship to the photograph. Arbus emphasized artistic alienation and forced viewers to stare at images that often made them uncomfortable, thus changing the meaning of the ordinary reality that photographs are meant to capture. American photography continues to flourish. The many variants of art photography and socially conscious documentary photography are widely available in galleries, books, and magazines. A host of other visual arts thrive, although they are far less connected to traditional fine arts than photography. Decorative arts include, but are not limited to, art glass, furniture, jewelry, pottery, metalwork, and quilts. Often exhibited in craft galleries and studios, these decorative arts rely on ideals of beauty in shape and color as well as an appreciation of well-executed crafts. Some of these forms are also developed commercially. The decorative arts provide a wide range of opportunity for creative expression and have become a means for Americans to actively participate in art and to purchase art for their homes that is more affordable than works produced by many contemporary fine artists. 4. Performing arts As in other cultural spheres, the performing arts in the United States in the 20th century increasingly blended traditional and popular art forms. The classical performing arts—music, opera, dance, and theater—were not a widespread feature of American culture in the first half of the 20th century. These arts were generally imported from or strongly influenced by Europe and were mainly appreciated by the wealthy and well educated. Traditional art usually referred to classical forms in ballet and opera, orchestral or chamber music, and serious drama. The distinctions between traditional music and popular music were firmly drawn in most areas. During the 20th century, the American performing arts began to incorporate wider groups of people. The African American community produced great musicians who became widely known around the country. Jazz and blues singers such as Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Billie Holiday spread their sounds to black and white audiences. In the 1930s and 1940s, the swing music of Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, and Glenn Miller adapted jazz to make a unique American music that was popular around the country. The American performing arts also blended Latin American influences beginning in the 20th century. Between 1900 and 1940, Latin American dances, such as the tango from Argentina and the rumba from Cuba, were introduced into the United States. In the 1940s a fusion of Latin and jazz elements was stimulated first by the Afro-Cuban mambo and later on by the Brazilian bossa nova. Throughout the 20th century, dynamic classical institutions in the United States attracted international talent. Noted Russian-born choreographer George Balanchine established the short-lived American Ballet Company in the 1930s; later he founded the company that in the 1940s would become the New York City Ballet. The American Ballet Theatre, also established during the 1940s, brought in non-American dancers as well. By the 1970s this company had attracted Soviet defector Mikhail Baryshnikov, an internationally acclaimed dancer who served as the company’s artistic director during the 1980s. In classical music, influential Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, who composed symphonies using innovative musical styles, moved to the United States in 1939. German-born pianist, composer, and conductor Andre Previn, who started out as a jazz pianist in the 1940s, went on to conduct a number of distinguished American symphony orchestras. Another Soviet, cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, became conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D. C. , in 1977. Some of the most innovative artists in the first half of the 20th century successfully incorporated new forms into classical traditions. Composers George Gershwin and Aaron Copland, and dancer Isadora Duncan were notable examples. Gershwin combined jazz and spiritual music with classical in popular works such as Rhapsody in Blue (1924) and the opera Porgy and Bess (1935). Copland developed a unique style that was influenced by jazz and American folk music. Early in the century, Duncan redefined dance along more expressive and free-form lines. Some artists in music and dance, such as composer John Cage and dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham, were even more experimental. During the 1930s Cage worked with electronically produced sounds and sounds made with everyday objects such as pots and pans. He even invented a new kind of piano. During the late 1930s, avant-garde choreographer Cunningham began to collaborate with Cage on a number of projects. Perhaps the greatest, and certainly the most popular, American innovation was the Broadway musical, which also became a movie staple. Beginning in the 1920s, the Broadway musical combined music, dance, and dramatic performance in ways that surpassed the older vaudeville shows and musical revues but without being as complex as European grand opera. By the 1960s, this American musical tradition was well established and had produced extraordinary works by important musicians and lyricists such as George and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, Jerome Kern, and Oscar Hammerstein II. These productions required an immense effort to coordinate music, drama, and dance. Because of this, the musical became the incubator of an American modern dance tradition that produced some of America’s greatest choreographers, among them Jerome Robbins, Gene Kelly, and Bob Fosse. In the 1940s and 1950s the American musical tradition was so dynamic that it attracted outstanding classically trained musicians such as Leonard Bernstein. Bernstein composed the music for West Side Story, an updated version of Romeo and Juliet set in New York that became an instant classic in 1957. The following year, Bernstein became the first American-born conductor to lead a major American orchestra, the New York Philharmonic. He was an international sensation who traveled the world as an ambassador of the American style of conducting. He brought the art of classical music to the public, especially through his â€Å"Young People’s Concerts,† television shows that were seen around the world. Bernstein used the many facets of the musical tradition as a force for change in the music world and as a way of bringing attention to American innovation. In many ways, Bernstein embodied a transformation of American music that began in the 1960s. The changes that took place during the 1960s and 1970s resulted from a significant increase in funding for the arts and their increased availability to larger audiences. New York City, the American center for art performances, experienced an artistic explosion in the 1960s and 1970s. Experimental off-Broadway theaters opened, new ballet companies were established that often emphasized modern forms or blended modern with classical (Martha Graham was an especially important influence), and an experimental music scene developed that included composers such as Philip Glass and performance groups such as the Guarneri String Quartet. Dramatic innovation also continued to expand with the works of playwrights such as Edward Albee, Tony Kushner, and David Mamet. As the variety of performances expanded, so did the serious crossover between traditional and popular music forms. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, an expanded repertoire of traditional arts was being conveyed to new audiences. Popular music and jazz could be heard in formal settings such as Carnegie Hall, which had once been restricted to classical music, while the Brooklyn Academy of Music became a venue for experimental music, exotic and ethnic dance presentations, and traditional productions of grand opera. Innovative producer Joseph Papp had been staging Shakespeare in Central Park since the 1950s. Boston conductor Arthur Fiedler was playing a mixed repertoire of classical and popular favorites to large audiences, often outdoors, with the Boston Pops Orchestra. By the mid-1970s the United States had several world-class symphony orchestras, including those in Chicago; New York; Cleveland, Ohio; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Even grand opera was affected. Once a specialized taste that often required extensive knowledge, opera in the United States increased in popularity as the roster of respected institutions grew to include companies in Seattle, Washington; Houston, Texas; and Santa Fe, New Mexico. American composers such as John Adams and Philip Glass began composing modern operas in a new minimalist style during the 1970s and 1980s. The crossover in tastes also influenced the Broadway musical, probably America’s most durable music form. Starting in the 1960s, rock music became an ingredient in musical productions such as Hair (1967). By the 1990s, it had become an even stronger presence in musicals such as Bring in Da Noise, Bring in Da Funk (1996), which used African American music and dance traditions, and Rent (1996) a modern, rock version of the classic opera La Boheme. This updating of the musical opened the theater to new ethnic audiences who had not previously attended Broadway shows, as well as to young audiences who had been raised on rock music. Performances of all kinds have become more available across the country. This is due to both the sheer increase in the number of performance groups as well as to advances in transportation. In the last quarter of the 20th century, the number of major American symphonies doubled, the number of resident theaters increased fourfold, and the number of dance companies increased tenfold. At the same time, planes made it easier for artists to travel. Artists and companies regularly tour, and they expand the audiences for individual artists such as performance artist Laurie Anderson and opera singer Jessye Norman, for musical groups such as the Juilliard Quartet, and for dance troupes such as the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Full-scale theater productions and musicals first presented on Broadway now reach cities across the country. The United States, once a provincial outpost with a limited European tradition in performance, has become a flourishing center for the performing arts. . Arts and letters The arts, more than other features of culture, provide avenues for the expression of imagination and personal vision. They offer a range of emotional and intellectual pleasures to consumers of art and are an important way in which a culture represents itself. There has long been a Western tradition distinguishing those arts that appeal to the multitude, such as popul ar music, from those—such as classical orchestral music—normally available to the elite of learning and taste. Popular art forms are usually seen as more representative American products. In the United States in the recent past, there has been a blending of popular and elite art forms, as all the arts experienced a period of remarkable cross-fertilization. Because popular art forms are so widely distributed, arts of all kinds have prospered. The arts in the United States express the many faces and the enormous creative range of the American people. Especially since World War II, American innovations and the immense energy displayed in literature, dance, and music have made American cultural works world famous. Arts in the United States have become internationally prominent in ways that are unparalleled in history. American art forms during the second half of the 20th century often defined the styles and qualities that the rest of the world emulated. At the end of the 20th century, American art was considered equal in quality and vitality to art produced in the rest of the world. Throughout the 20th century, American arts have grown to incorporate new visions and voices. Much of this new artistic energy came in the wake of America’s emergence as a superpower after World War II. But it was also due to the growth of New York City as an important center for publishing and the arts, and the immigration of artists and intellectuals fleeing fascism in Europe before and during the war. An outpouring of talent also followed the civil rights and protest movements of the 1960s, as cultural discrimination against blacks, women, and other groups diminished. American arts flourish in many places and receive support from private foundations, large corporations, local governments, federal agencies, museums, galleries, and individuals. What is considered worthy of support often depends on definitions of quality and of what constitutes art. This is a tricky subject when the popular arts are increasingly incorporated into the domain of the fine arts and new forms such as performance art and conceptual art appear. As a result, defining what is art affects what students are taught about past traditions (for example, Native American tent paintings, oral traditions, and slave narratives) and what is produced in the future. While some practitioners, such as studio artists, are more vulnerable to these definitions because they depend on financial support to exercise their talents, others, such as poets and photographers, are less immediately constrained. Artists operate in a world where those who theorize and critique their work have taken on an increasingly important role. Audiences are influenced by a variety of intermediaries—critics, the schools, foundations that offer grants, the National Endowment for the Arts, gallery owners, publishers, and theater producers. In some areas, such as the performing arts, popular audiences may ultimately define success. In other arts, such as painting and sculpture, success is far more dependent on critics and a few, often wealthy, art collectors. Writers depend on publishers and on the public for their success. Unlike their predecessors, who relied on formal criteria and appealed to aesthetic judgments, critics at the end of the 20th century leaned more toward popular tastes, taking into account groups previously ignored and valuing the merger of popular and elite forms. These critics ften relied less on aesthetic judgments than on social measures and were eager to place artistic productions in the context of the time and social conditions in which they were created. Whereas earlier critics attempted to create an American tradition of high art, later critics used art as a means to give power and approval to nonelite groups who were previously not considered worthy of including in the nation’s artisti c heritage. Not so long ago, culture and the arts were assumed to be an unalterable inheritance—the accumulated wisdom and highest forms of achievement that were established in the past. In the 20th century generally, and certainly since World War II, artists have been boldly destroying older traditions in sculpture, painting, dance, music, and literature. The arts have changed rapidly, with one movement replacing another in quick succession. a) Visual arts. The visual arts have traditionally included forms of expression that appeal to the eyes through painted surfaces, and to the sense of space through carved or molded materials. In the 19th century, photographs were added to the paintings, drawings, and sculpture that make up the visual arts. The visual arts were further augmented in the 20th century by the addition of other materials, such as found objects. These changes were accompanied by a profound alteration in tastes, as earlier emphasis on realistic representation of people, objects, and landscapes made way for a greater range of imaginative forms. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, American art was considered inferior to European art. Despite noted American painters such as Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, Mary Cassatt, and John Marin, American visual arts barely had an international presence. American art began to flourish during the Great Depression of the 1930s as New Deal government programs provided support to artists along with other sectors of the population. Artists connected with each other and developed a sense of common purpose through programs of the Public Works Administration, such as the Federal Art Project, as well as programs sponsored by the Treasury Department. Most of the art of the period, including painting, photography, and mural work, focused on the plight of the American people during the depression, and most artists painted real people in difficult circumstances. Artists such as Thomas Hart Benton and Ben Shahn expressed the suffering of ordinary people through their representations of struggling farmers and workers. While artists such as Benton and Grant Wood focused on rural life, many painters of the 1930s and 1940s depicted the multicultural life of the American city. Jacob Lawrence, for example, re-created the history and lives of African Americans. Other artists, such as Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper, tried to use human figures to describe emotional states such as loneliness and despair. Abstract Expressionism. Shortly after World War II, American art began to garner worldwide attention and admiration. This change was due to the innovative fervor of abstract expressionism in the 1950s and to subsequent modern art movements and artists. The abstract expressionists of the mid-20th century broke from the realist and figurative tradition set in the 1930s. They emphasized their connection to international artistic visions rather than the particularities of people and place, and most abstract expressionists did not paint human figures (although artist Willem de Kooning did portrayals of women). Color, shape, and movement dominated the canvases of abstract expressionists. Some artists broke with the Western art tradition by adopting innovative painting styles—during the 1950s Jackson Pollock â€Å"painted† by dripping paint on canvases without the use of brushes, while the paintings of Mark Rothko often consisted of large patches of color that seem to vibrate. Abstract expressionists felt alienated from their surrounding culture and used art to challenge society’s conventions. The work of each artist was quite individual and distinctive, but all the artists identified with the radicalism of artistic creativity. The artists were eager to challenge conventions and limits on expression in order to redefine the nature of art. Their radicalism came from liberating themselves from the confining artistic traditions of the past. The most notable activity took place in New York City, which became one of the world’s most important art centers during the second half of the 20th century. The radical fervor and inventiveness of the abstract expressionists, their frequent association with each other in New York City’s Greenwich Village, and the support of a group of gallery owners and dealers turned them into an artistic movement. Also known as the New York School, the participants included Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, and Arshile Gorky, in addition to Rothko and Pollock. The members of the New York School came from diverse backgrounds such as the American Midwest and Northwest, Armenia, and Russia, bringing an international flavor to the group and its artistic visions. They hoped to appeal to art audiences everywhere, regardless of culture, and they felt connected to the radical innovations introduced earlier in the 20th century by European artists such as Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp. Some of the artists—Hans Hofmann, Gorky, Rothko, and de Kooning—were not born in the United States, but all the artists saw themselves as part of an international creative movement and an aesthetic rebellion. As artists felt released from the boundaries and conventions of the past and free to emphasize expressiveness and innovation, the abstract expressionists gave way to other innovative styles in American art. Beginning in the 1930s Joseph Cornell created hundreds of boxed assemblages, usually from found objects, with each based on a single theme to create a mood of contemplation and sometimes of reverence. Cornell’s boxes exemplify the modern fascination with individual vision, art that breaks down boundaries between forms such as painting and sculpture, and the use of everyday objects toward a new end. Other artists, such as Robert Rauschenberg, combined disparate objects to create large, collage-like sculptures known as combines in the 1950s. Jasper Johns, a painter, sculptor, and printmaker, recreated countless familiar objects, most memorably the American flag. The most prominent American artistic style to follow abstract expressionism was the pop art movement that began in the 1950s. Pop art attempted to connect traditional art and popular culture by using images from mass culture. To shake viewers out of their preconceived notions about art, sculptor Claes Oldenburg used everyday objects such as pillows and beds to create witty, soft sculptures. Roy Lichtenstein took this a step further by elevating the techniques of commercial art, notably cartooning, into fine art worthy of galleries and museums. Lichtenstein’s large, blown-up cartoons fill the surface of his canvases with grainy black dots and question the existence of a distinct realm of high art. These artists tried to make their audiences see ordinary objects in a refreshing new way, thereby breaking down the conventions that formerly defined what was worthy of artistic representation. Probably the best-known pop artist, and a leader in the movement, was Andy Warhol, whose images of a Campbell’s soup can and of the actress Marilyn Monroe explicitly eroded the boundaries between the art world and mass culture. Warhol also cultivated his status as a celebrity. He worked in film as a director and producer to break down the boundaries between traditional and opular art. Unlike the abstract expressionists, whose conceptual works were often difficult to understand, Andy Warhol’s pictures, and his own face, were instantly recognizable. Conceptual art, as it came to be known in the 1960s, like its predecessors, sought to break free of traditional artistic associations. In conceptual art, as practiced by Sol LeWitt and Joseph Kosuth, concept takes precedent over actual object, by stimulating thought rather than following an art tradition based on conventional standards of beauty and artisanship. Modern artists changed the meaning of traditional visual arts and brought a new imaginative dimension to ordinary experience. Art was no longer viewed as separate and distinct, housed in museums as part of a historical inheritance, but as a continuous creative process. This emphasis on constant change, as well as on the ordinary and mundane, reflected a distinctly American democratizing perspective. Viewing art in this way removed the emphasis from technique and polished performance, and many modern artworks and experiences became more about expressing ideas than about perfecting finished products. Photography. Photography is probably the most democratic modern art form because it can be, and is, practiced by most Americans. Since 1888, when George Eastman developed the Kodak camera that allowed anyone to take pictures, photography has struggled to be recognized as a fine art form. In the early part of the 20th century, photographer, editor, and artistic impresario Alfred Stieglitz established 291, a gallery in New York City, with fellow photographer Edward Steichen, to showcase the works of photographers and painters. They also published a magazine called Camera Work to increase awareness about photographic art. In the United States, photographic art had to compete with the widely available commercial photography in news and fashion magazines. By the 1950s the tradition of photojournalism, which presented news stories primarily with photographs, had produced many outstanding works. In 1955 Steichen, who was director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, called attention to this work in an exhibition called The Family of Man. Throughout the 20th century, most professional photographers earned their living as portraitists or photojournalists, not as artists. One of the most important exceptions was Ansel Adams, who took majestic photographs of the Western American landscape. Adams used his art to stimulate social awareness and to support the conservation cause of the Sierra Club. He helped found the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art in 1940, and six years later helped establish the photography department at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco (now the San Francisco Art Institute). He also held annual photography workshops at Yosemite National Park from 1955 to 1981 and wrote a series of influential books on photographic technique. Adams’s elegant landscape photography was only one small stream in a growing current of interest in photography as an art form. Early in the 20th century, teacher-turned-photographer Lewis Hine established a documentary tradition in photography by capturing actual people, places, and events. Hine photographed urban conditions and workers, including child laborers. Along with their artistic value, the photographs often implicitly called for social reform. In the 1930s and 1940s, photographers joined with other depression-era artists supported by the federal government to create a photographic record of rural America. Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Arthur Rothstein, among others, produced memorable and widely reproduced portraits of rural poverty and American distress during the Great Depression and during the dust storms of the period. In 1959, after touring the United States for two years, Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank published The Americans, one of the landmarks of documentary photography. His photographs of everyday life in America introduced viewers to a depressing, and often depressed, America that existed in the midst of prosperity and world power. Photographers continued to search for new photographic viewpoints. This search was perhaps most disturbingly embodied in the work of Diane Arbus. Her photos of mental patients and her surreal depictions of Americans altered the viewer’s relationship to the photograph. Arbus emphasized artistic alienation and forced viewers to stare at images that often made them uncomfortable, thus changing the meaning of the ordinary reality that photographs are meant to capture. American photography continues to flourish. The many variants of art photography and socially conscious documentary photography are widely available in galleries, books, and magazines. A host of other visual arts thrive, although they are far less connected to traditional fine arts than photography. Decorative arts include, but are not limited to, art glass, furniture, jewelry, pottery, metalwork, and quilts. Often exhibited in craft galleries and studios, these decorative arts rely on ideals of beauty in shape and color as well as an appreciation of well-executed crafts. Some of these forms are also developed commercially. The decorative arts provide a wide range of opportunity for creative expression and have become a means for Americans to actively participate in art and to purchase art for their homes that is more affordable than works produced by many contemporary fine artists. . Performing arts As in other cultural spheres, the performing arts in the United States in the 20th century increasingly blended traditional and popular art forms. The classical performing arts—music, opera, dance, and theater—were not a widespread feature of American culture in the first half of the 20th century. These arts were generally imported from or strongly influenced by Europe and were mainly appreciated by the wealthy and well educated. Traditional art usually referred to classical forms in ballet and opera, orchestral or chamber music, and serious drama. The distinctions between traditional music and popular music were firmly drawn in most areas. During the 20th century, the American performing arts began to incorporate wider groups of people. The African American community produced great musicians who became widely known around the country. Jazz and blues singers such as Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Billie Holiday spread their sounds to black and white audiences. In the 1930s and 1940s, the swing music of Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, and Glenn Miller adapted jazz to make a unique American music that was popular around the country. The American performing arts also blended Latin American influences beginning in the 20th century. Between 1900 and 1940, Latin American dances, such as the tango from Argentina and the rumba from Cuba, were introduced into the United States. In the 1940s a fusion of Latin and jazz elements was stimulated first by the Afro-Cuban mambo and later on by the Brazilian bossa nova. Throughout the 20th century, dynamic classical institutions in the United States attracted international talent. Noted Russian-born choreographer George Balanchine established the short-lived American Ballet Company in the 1930s; later he founded the company that in the 1940s would become the New York City Ballet. The American Ballet Theatre, also established during the 1940s, brought in non-American dancers as well. By the 1970s this company had attracted Soviet defector Mikhail Baryshnikov, an internationally acclaimed dancer who served as the company’s artistic director during the 1980s. In classical music, influential Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, who composed symphonies using innovative musical styles, moved to the United States in 1939. German-born pianist, composer, and conductor Andre Previn, who started out as a jazz pianist in the 1940s, went on to conduct a number of distinguished American symphony orchestras. Another Soviet, cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, became conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D. C. , in 1977. Some of the most innovative artists in the first half of the 20th century successfully incorporated new forms into classical traditions. Composers George Gershwin and Aaron Copland, and dancer Isadora Duncan were notable examples. Gershwin combined jazz and spiritual music with classical in popular works such as Rhapsody in Blue (1924) and the opera Porgy and Bess (1935). Copland developed a unique style that was influenced by jazz and American folk music. Early in the century, Duncan redefined dance along more expressive and free-form lines. Some artists in music and dance, such as composer John Cage and dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham, were even more experimental. During the 1930s Cage worked with electronically produced sounds and sounds made with everyday objects such as pots and pans. He even invented a new kind of piano. During the late 1930s, avant-garde choreographer Cunningham began to collaborate with Cage on a number of projects. Perhaps the greatest, and certainly the most popular, American innovation was the Broadway musical, which also became a movie staple. Beginning in the 1920s, the Broadway musical combined music, dance, and dramatic performance in ways that surpassed the older vaudeville shows and musical revues but without being as complex as European grand opera. By the 1960s, this American musical tradition was well established and had produced extraordinary works by important musicians and lyricists such as George and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, Jerome Kern, and Oscar Hammerstein II. These productions required an immense effort to coordinate music, drama, and dance. Because of this, the musical became the incubator of an American modern dance tradition that produced some of America’s greatest choreographers, among them Jerome Robbins, Gene Kelly, and Bob Fosse. In the 1940s and 1950s the American musical tradition was so dynamic that it attracted outstanding classically trained musicians such as Leonard Bernstein. Bernstein composed the music for West Side Story, an updated version of Romeo and Juliet set in New York that became an instant classic in 1957. The following year, Bernstein became the first American-born conductor to lead a major American orchestra, the New York Philharmonic. He was an international sensation who traveled the world as an ambassador of the American style of conducting. He brought the art of classical music to the public, especially through his â€Å"Young People’s Concerts,† television shows that were seen around the world. Bernstein used the many facets of the musical tradition as a force for change in the music world and as a way of bringing attention to American innovation. In many ways, Bernstein embodied a transformation of American music that began in the 1960s. The changes that took place during the 1960s and 1970s resulted from a significant increase in funding for the arts and their increased availability to larger audiences. New York City, the American center for art performances, experienced an artistic explosion in the 1960s and 1970s. Experimental off-Broadway theaters opened, new ballet companies were established that often emphasized modern forms or blended modern with classical (Martha Graham was an especially important influence), and an experimental music scene developed that included composers such as Philip Glass and performance groups such as the Guarneri String Quartet. Dramatic innovation also continued to expand with the works of playwrights such as Edward Albee, Tony Kushner, and David Mamet. As the variety of performances expanded, so did the serious crossover between traditional and popular music forms. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, an expanded repertoire of traditional arts was being conveyed to new audiences. Popular music and jazz could be heard in formal settings such as Carnegie Hall, which had once been restricted to classical music, while the Brooklyn Academy of Music became a venue for experimental music, exotic and ethnic dance presentations, and traditional productions of grand opera. Innovative producer Joseph Papp had been staging Shakespeare in Central Park since the 1950s. Boston conductor Arthur Fiedler was playing a mixed repertoire of classical and popular favorites to large audiences, often outdoors, with the Boston Pops Orchestra. By the mid-1970s the United States had several world-class symphony orchestras, including those in Chicago; New York; Cleveland, Ohio; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Even grand opera was affected. Once a specialized taste that often required extensive knowledge, opera in the United States increased in popularity as the roster of respected institutions grew to include companies in Seattle, Washington; Houston, Texas; and Santa Fe, New Mexico. American composers such as John Adams and Philip Glass began composing modern operas in a new minimalist style during the 1970s and 1980s. The crossover in tastes also influenced the Broadway musical, probably America’s most durable music form. Starting in the 1960s, rock music became an ingredient in musical productions such as Hair (1967). By the 1990s, it had become an even stronger presence in musicals such as Bring in Da Noise, Bring in Da Funk (1996), which used African American music and dance traditions, and Rent (1996) a modern, rock version of the classic opera La Boheme. This updating of the musical opened the theater to new ethnic audiences who had not previously attended Broadway shows, as well as to young audiences who had been raised on rock music. Performances of all kinds have become more available across the country. This is due to both the sheer increase in the number of performance groups as well as to advances in transportation. In the last quarter of the 20th century, the number of major American symphonies doubled, the number of resident theaters increased fourfold, and the number of dance companies increased tenfold. At the same time, planes made it easier for artists to travel. Artists and companies regularly tour, and they expand the audiences for individual artists such as performance artist Laurie Anderson and opera singer Jessye Norman, for musical groups such as the Juilliard Quartet, and for dance troupes such as the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Full-scale theater productions and musicals first presented on Broadway now reach cities across the country. The United States, once a provincial outpost with a limited European tradition in performance, has become a flourishing center for the performing arts. How to cite Vbnm, Essay examples