艺术是雅思口语考试中的长盛不衰的题材，各种关于艺术的话题会经常出现在雅思口语考试中。为了应对这些话题，大家有必要准备一些关于艺术的背景材料，这样才能做到在考场上有备无患。

　　Perhaps the oldest dinition of the function of the arts is that they provide pleasure. They offer sheer entertainment. We like stories, as in short fiction and TV specials and popular movies. We enjoy being reminded of the familiar, as in musical patterns we have heard since childhood, and we are pleased by arrangements of color, form, sound, and process that remove us from our everyday cares.

　　Another is that they present us with insight into what is eternal and universal. Traditionally, this has been called the theory of imitation. Behind every profound work of art, this point of view proposes, is a set of principles about humanity that always prevails. A Renaissance painting of a Madonna and child, for many viewers, is somehow a revelation of transcendent spirituality; a Beethoven symphony is the last word on human endurance.

　　To these may be added a third function. The arts are didactic -- they teach us. Shakespeare&aposs Macbeth, for instance, teaches us that inordinate ambition is pernicious. Ingemar Bergman&aposs films urge us not to miss the unspoken and the delicately nuanced. All the narrative arts, in fact, instruct us to some extent. When we watch a play that is deeply moral, we see ourselves in the characters, we recognize our own destinies in the plot, and we find the moral dilemma of the action to be representative of problems in all human relationships.

　　This function of the arts can be denoted as "expressionism" -- the artist&aposs use of a medium to express unique passion and insight. Poets such as Emily Dickinson and Theodore Roethke, painters such as the American sea painter Winslow Homer, the black folk artist Horace Pipkin, and musicians like blues artist Clarence Leadbelly used the arts to express their deepest private feelings and their vision of the universe. What they created were not works that expressed an official or institutional point of view. They elevated the personal to a level of all-consuming importance.

　　A second kind of expressionism also developed in the 19th century. This one was much more offensive. In societies undergoing tremendous change, artists began to use art to agitate for social change.

　　Photographer Sherry Levine has used grotesque images of women to protest the oppression of the female gender by American advertising, law, and social custom. This form of expressionism we can call cultural criticism. That is, artists take a stand against certain practices in the society that they consider to be unjust.

　　One can well understand that these most recent functions of art -- the expression of private feelings and the criticism of society -- are seen as grave threats by citizens who want entertainment, or beauty, or peace.

　　Beethoven&aposs early listeners, accustomed to the predictable harmonies and melodic lengths of Haydn, dismissed his symphonies as literally causing their ears to hurt.

　　Van Gogh, two of whose still life paintings have recently broken all records in selling for $50 million, sold only one of his paintings in his entire career.

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