Art as a Culture

Part 1
I believe what the cave artists were trying to illustrate was their way of life through cave drawings. The cave drawings were mostly animals so I believe that animals had a very important impact in their lives. There are maybe more animals than people in their cave drawings because these people might have been trying to relay some kind of information about them to others who explored the cave. They may have even drew those images to warn others of the potential danger of these specific animals. One painting that stood out to me was the cow with a collar around its neck implying that the artists had some type of domesticated animals living among them. The cave dwellers paintings depicted a culture that could have tried to domesticate these animals and have found some success. However, they may have also tried to record failures such as the painting with the wounded man. It appears as though he was wounded by a bison. One of the difficulties these humans had to navigate in order to paint these pictures was visible light. In order to travel deep into the cave, the cave dwellers would have had to have a light source such as fire. Even then, they must have thought of a way to keep that fire from going out too soon or risk losing track of the patch and becoming lost in pitch darkness. One possible function for this art was probably to warn other people of the dangers of some specific animals as previously mentioned. Another function for these paintings would be a record of events that the cave dwellers have either witnessed or made up. One of the more possible fictions for these drawings would be for story telling purposes. These drawings can give the individual viewer a sense of a background story about them. So when people from that culture would tell stories, they would also have illustrations of that particular story.

Part 2
A commonalty between the Lascaux Cave drawings and modern art are illustrations that tell a story. An example would be for those familiar with the religious story of Adam and Eve. The story involves a man, woman, apple, and a snake. These elements have been drawn into a single picture to illustrate the events leading up to the dramatic part of the story. For those who are not familiar with the story, the painting would be no more than an illustration of a nude man and woman next to an apple tree. The same can be said with the Lascaux cave drawing in my opinion. To a person unfamiliar to the stories of these people, these cave drawings are just painting of animals from earlier humans. To the cave dwellers however, they may have had some important value to a story that was culture specific to them. They may have had something to do with morals of the people and what happens when people disobey their possible life lesson.

Part 3
My favorite type of art are video games. To most this may sound odd because video games are considered to only be for younger people for entertainment purposes and not really considered art. There are many people involved in creating a video game, each with their own unique artistic abilities to make the game's narrative and visual effects as entertaining as possible. In many ways the start of a video game is like the start of a movie. There is a story element that is may or may not change as the game is being made. There are artists who draw sketches of the characters and environment so that the game developers have an idea on what the visual goal is when making the world. Then there are the people who design the levels and character movements along with the programmers who develop the mechanics of the game. There are many more aspects that I have left out which goes to show just how much time and effort goes into these games that most take for granted. The purpose or function of these video games are to immerse the player into these stories that movies can not do by making the player apart of the story. They may try to communicated just about anything like a point of view from a historic event such as in the game "1979 Revolution: Black Friday" which is a choice driven story that revolves around the Iranian revolution of 1979.

The culture of video games have interested the public and now involves many people around the world. It is a relatively new art form and has caused some controversy because of the graphic content some of these games have such as strong language and other adult material. Some developers have adapted however because they now include options to exclude some of the content people may find offensive such as blood and strong language. This art form benefits society because it incorporates the story elements that encourage morally correct behavior. Video games also benefit society by giving the public an outlet to express some emotion that may seem offensive or even dangerous through an imaginary world. The only detrimental aspect to video games is that it could possibly give the wrong ideas to the wrong people. For example, someone who plays a video game that involves shooting people now know that the most effective way to kill them is by shooting their heads. In my opinion however video games do more good than harm if they are used in an appropriate manner and knowing that everything in the video game is fake and not meant to be brought into the real world.