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Art Essay- Contemporary Artist- Band 6

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Band 6 essay for art. Many artists and very adaptable to questions.

Exhibitions are carefully constructed and curated in an attempt to convey a certain concept and point of view to its their audiences. Curators have a responsibility to not only create an exhibition of aesthetic value but one that renders thought within its audience creating a personal impact. Thus, within the exhibition titled “Who am I? Who are you? Who are we?”, artworks have been specifically organiszed and selected to convey the notion of identity, exploring ideas of the human condition. The exhibition containing a wide variety of artists such as Barbra Kruger, Ryan Presley, Glen Ligon, Marc Quinn, and Francis Bacon respectively, contains five sub-sections: Feminist identity, Australian identity, African American identity, universal and collective identity, and political and social identity. In this way, the exhibition has been shaped to convey to the audience the diversity of identity and individuality within the collectivity, having a wide variety of artistic forms and subject matter in which the audience can resonate with. Hence, the exhibition invites the audience to reconsider their own identity, regardless of their culture, beliefs, and values, and challenge how society views themself. This correlates to my Major Work series “ The curious case of the curious humans”, exploring humanity’s most frequently asked question and thus addressing the human quality of curiosity, in humanity’s constant questioning of the world around them in an attempt to solidify their identity and understand  humanity as a whole.

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Art Essay Examples

Art Essay Examples to Get You Inspired - Top 10 Samples

Published on: May 4, 2023

Last updated on: Jan 30, 2024

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Are you struggling to come up with ideas for your art essay? Or are you looking for examples to help guide you in the right direction? 

Look no further, as we have got you covered!

In this blog, we provide a range of art writing examples that cover different art forms, time periods, and themes. Whether you're interested in the classics or contemporary art, we have something for everyone. These examples offer insight into how to structure your essay, analyze art pieces, and write compelling arguments.

So, let's explore our collection of art essay examples and take the first step toward becoming a better art writer!

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Good Art Essay Examples

In the following section, we will examine a selection of art essay examples that are inspiring for various academic levels.

College Art Essay Examples

Let’s take a look at college art essay examples below:  

The Intersection of Art and Politics: An Analysis of Picasso's Guernica

The Role of Nature in American Art: A Comparative Study

University Art Essay Examples

University-level art essay assignments often differ in length and complexity. Here are two examples:

Gender and Identity in Contemporary Art: A Comparative Study

Art and Activism: The Role of Street Art in Political Movements

A Level Art Essay Examples

Below are some art paper examples A level. Check out: 

The Use Of Color In Wassily Kandinsky's Composition Viii

The Influence of African Art on Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles D'avignon

A Level Fine Art Essay Examples

If you're a student of fine arts, these A-level fine arts examples can serve as inspiration for your own work.

The Use Of Texture In Vincent Van Gogh's Starry Night

Exploring Identity Through Portraiture: A Comparative Study

Art Essay Examples IELTS 

The Impact of Art on Mental Health

The Effects of Technology on Art And Creativity

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AP Art Essay Examples

A Comparison of Neoclassical and Romantic Art

An Examination Of The Effects Of Globalization On Contemporary Art

Types of Art Essay with Examples

Art essays can be categorized into different types. Let's take a brief look at these types with examples:

Art Criticism Essay : A critical essay analyzing and evaluating an artwork, its elements, and its meaning.

The Persistence of Memory" by Salvador Dali: A Critical Analysis

Art History Essay: A comprehensive essay that examines the historical context, development, and significance of an artwork or art movement.

The Renaissance: A Rebirth of Artistic Expression

Exhibition Review: A review of an art exhibition that evaluates the quality and significance of the artwork on display.

A Review of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Exhibition

Contemporary Art Essay: An essay that explores and analyzes contemporary art and its cultural and social context.

The Intersection of Technology and Art in Contemporary Society

Modern Art Essay: An essay that examines modern art and its significance in the development of modernism.

Cubism and its Influence on Modern Art [insert pdf]

Art Theory Essay: An essay that analyzes and critiques various theories and approaches to art.

Feminist Art Theory: A Critical Analysis of its Impact on Contemporary Art [insert pdf]

Additional Art Essay Example

Let’s take a brief look at some added art essay samples:

Artwork Essay Example

Artist Essay Example

Advanced Higher Art Essay Example

Common Art Essay Prompts

Here are some common art essay topics that you may encounter during your coursework:

• Describe a piece of artwork that has inspired you.
• A comparative analysis of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa and Michelangelo's David.
• Analyze the cultural significance of a particular art movement.
• Discuss the relationship between art and politics.
• Compare and contrast two works of art from different time periods or cultures.
• The representation of identity in art
• The Evolution of Artists' Paintings:
• From Traditional to Contemporary Art
• The representation of identity in Frida Kahlo's self-portraits.
• The significance of oil on canvas in the history of art.
• The significance of the Mona Lisa in the Italian Renaissance

Art Essay Topics IELTS

Here are some art essay topics for IELTS students. Take a look: 

• The value of art education.
• The role of museums in preserving art and culture.
• The impact of globalization on contemporary art.
• The influence of technology on art and artists.
• The significance of public art in urban environments.

Tips For Writing a Successful Art Essay

Here are some tips for writing a stand-out art essay:

• Develop a clear thesis statement that guides your essay: Your thesis statement should clearly and concisely state the main argument of your essay.
• Conduct thorough research and analysis of the artwork you are writing about : This includes examining the visual elements of the artwork, researching the artist, and considering the historical significance.
• Use formal and precise language to discuss the artwork: Avoid using colloquial language and instead focus on using formal language to describe the artwork.
• Include specific examples from the artwork to support your arguments: Use specific details from the artwork to back up your analysis.
• Avoid personal bias and subjective language: Your essay should be objective and avoid using personal opinions or subjective language.
• Consider the historical and cultural context of the artwork: Analyze the artwork in the context of the time period and cultural context in which they were created.
• Edit and proofread your essay carefully before submitting it: Ensure your essay is well-organized, coherent, and free of grammatical errors and typos.
• Use proper citation format when referencing sources: Follow the appropriate citation style guidelines and give credit to all sources used in your essay.
• Be concise and focused in your writing: Stick to your main thesis statement and avoid going off-topic or including irrelevant information.
• Read your essay aloud to ensure clarity and coherence: Reading your essay out loud can help you identify inconsistencies or any other mistakes.

The Bottom Line!

We hope that the art essay examples we've explored have provided you with inspiration for your own essay. Art offers endless possibilities for analysis, and your essay is a chance to showcase your unique opinions.

Use these examples as a guide to craft an essay that reflects your personality while demonstrating your knowledge of the subject.

Short on time? Let CollegeEssay.org help you! All you have to do is to ask our experts, " write college essay for me " and they'll help you secure top grades in college.

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2 Issue 2 : Local-Eyes!

Partizaning's first year - an exhibition in December at Vostochnaya Gallery showing a year's worth of projects. (Photo (c) Partizaning)

Partizaning: participatory art, research and creative urban activism

Partizaning leverages artistic interventions in Moscow’s public spaces as tools for social research and transformation, blurring the boundaries between everyday life, urbanism, activism and art.

P artizaning (v): public art practices which strategically challenge, shape, and reinvent urban and social realities.

The last several years have witnessed increased visibility and importance given to DIY cultures and tactical urbanism in cities across the USA, Canada and Europe. This is partially as a response to the financial crisis and limited resources for city maintenance and development, and resistance to the forms of neoliberal urban development. Active, creative citizens have begun to address the inadequacies of government functions, using temporary, creative interventions to suggest alternative realities.

DIY cultures are not new: most recently, they have long existed in Latin America, parts of Asia and in the former USSR (as well as other parts of the world, at different points in time), where capital-led urbanism was not the norm and people lived in circumstances of scarcity. These DIY traditions have demonstrated people’s ingenuity as the best solution in times of necessity; people can invent and deftly make do, especially in the city.

The tactical urbanism movement – led mostly by planners and architects – has built on DIY action in a strategic struggle for bottom up or grassroots urban planning. The same phenomenon is referred to as ‘urban hacking’ in parts of Europe. But what all of these actions share are active resistance and citizen participation in the processes and developments in our cities.

Partizaning’s first documentation exhibition in Amsterdam. (Image (c) Partizaning)

In Russia, we are witnessing a form of strategic, bottom-up urbanism being led by artists who work in the streets and writers, rather than by architects and planners. Creative people are working in public spaces to express themselves and to create dialogues with authorities and with other citizens. In this article I discuss the work I am doing as a member of the project Partizaning, leveraging artistic interventions in public space as a tool for social research and transformation; blurring the boundaries between everyday life, urbanism, activism and art.

Our idea is not to propose a new form of DIY urbanism, but to transform the idea of a top-down, expert planned city into one where residents are active stakeholders in the place they live; a space where they have a right to lead the lives they choose. I explain how we connect the ideas of DIY-ism and participation, as well as how Partizaning is a strategy which is aligned, but different from, tactical urbanism and conventional social art practices by its connection of research and process of creation.

In Context: Urban Planning in Russia

Partizaning’s map of the Moscow Metro which promotes our ideas of affordability, pedestrianism and walkability. (Image (c) Partizaning)

Russian cities are unique, complex entities. Following the revolution in 1917, all Russian land was nationalized and socialized, transferred to State or local authorities. The houses once belonging to the bourgeoisie were divided into accommodation for the proletariat. The collapse of a traditional spatial order required new planning approaches. At the time, ideas of a ‘socialist city’ were debated in terms of the concepts of two groups: the urbanists and dis-urbanists. Dis-urbanists wanted to dissolve the difference between town and country, while Urbanists proposed a contained expansion and planning of existing cities. The Garden City, an idea that flourished in the West, also became a starting point for the Soviet suburb. All this was resolved by the top-down functional and central planning in the form of high-rise apartments with wide-ranging amenities like schools and clinics located nearby. These ‘microrayon’ structures continue to exist today and present just one aspect or challenge of contemporary urban living in Russian cities.

A game about urban tactics which we created and disseminated online and in print. (Photo (c) Partizaning)

After the collapse of the USSR, the country saw the growth of economy and a construction boom as a result of privatization. The Western model of a city and urban development began to take root; but after 20 years of post-Soviet development, most people still live in a reality which created by and for a centrally planned economy. How is this shift to a capital system possible without removing all ideals of social equity?

Reversing urban gentrification with a DIY platform and discussion in Dusseldorf. (Photo (c) Christian Ahlborn)

Russian cities as they now exist are struggling with remnants of Soviet-era urban planning and the development of a neoliberal form of the city. Although highly organized, these plans were not created for people to experience life in the city. Architects and bureaucratic planners promoted ideals like creating social equality through infrastructure and access. But ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union and subsequent privatization of space in the city, there have been many recurring urban issues worldwide, such as traffic, over-consumption and trash generation and resource overuse, each with an environmental impact.

So the idea of a ‘partizan’ re-emerges in this contemporary context of resistance and urban revolution. In Russian, the word means ‘guerrilla’ and the idea we promote is resistance to this form of urban development and engage people in the processes shaping their cities – advocating a sense of creative responsibility. With it, we are seeking to promote a new ideal and a new vision for cities – constructed by and for people, based on their explicit involvement and dialogues. Our work straddles the worlds of art and urbanism: we work in the city and with the public but use artistic venues as just one forum for sharing our ideas.

Partizaning: Participatory Urban Re-planning

The DIY mobile discussion platform to activate abandoned railway tracks in the city. (Photo (c) Partizaning)

The website Partizaning emerged at the end of 2011 as an online project documenting examples of urban interaction and participation, whether social, political, environmental or anything else. Meant to inspire people, we show examples of projects in the public realm as creative achievements of social transformation through DIY and participatory actions. The site is managed by an interdisciplinary group of artists and researchers in two languages, because we realized that the project resonates, not only in Russia but as an idea taking root in cities around the world. So we document projects and people who work with the language of art to transform urban contexts worldwide.

A Public mailbox which we installed in Troparevo Nikulino. (Photo (c) Partizaning)

Part of our goal is to reorient the city around people and their goals and ways of life, rather than around expertise and bureaucracy. We recognize the important role of creativity as commentary and suggestion, while advocating people’s involvement, because residents know the city best and sometimes just need the tools to participate, or to express or converse ideas about it. The problem with how cities have developed is that they are perceived as places of work instead of sites of play and living. If you think of the city as an extension of your home, it is different. You are more willing to plant trees, to clean up trash, to decorate it, to repair it. But this is not an idea that is widely held – people are generally confined to their homes, their cars, and are restricted in public space. Partizaning proposes the idea that unsanctioned repairs and improvements can collectively help to re-create a better city. We have done things like made DIY benches, painted crosswalks and created maps and signs that promote an alternate trajectory for the city.

Scans of the mail received during the Cooperative Urbanism project. (Image (c) Partizaning)

We are motivated by a conflation of art and urbanism and are inspired by the role of the Situationists and of street art and urban interventions which fall into the realm of revolutionary urban and social activism. In Russia and internationally, we engage in participatory processes based on research and culminating in interventions in public space. We think of these interventions more as a process and dialogue. Apart from projects, we try to promote creative grassroots urbanism and participation by giving lectures, presentations and conducting workshops in various cities. We also try to produce a bulletin which is occasionally printed as another format for people to interact with some of our ideas.

Cooperative Urbanism

Public surveys in Amsterdam during the Kunstvlaai Festival. (Photo (c) Partizaning)

In 2012, we did a project based on installing Public Mailboxes in outlying districts of Moscow. An experiment in the idea of collaboration and in the concept of cooperation in the city, we tried to get people to communicate their urban challenges and desires by leaving us anonymous mail. Our goal was to work with the idea of how people could reorganize their city from the bottom up and engage in processes that are generally impenetrable. What we found was that creating unsanctioned and unwatched forums in public space involved children and the elderly, who had varied and different suggestions and ways of using the mailboxes. As part of this project, the mail was scanned and shared with participating municipal authorities who could respond to people’s concerns – but the other part of the project was to encourage people to be the agents of urban change in their own neighbourhoods, particularly if they already knew the problem.

What Should Happen to Sint Nicolaas Lyceum?

In Amsterdam, as part of the Kunstvlaai Festival, we put up large format posters surveying residents in the district under transformation for insights about a building that was going to be demolished. We found people to be apathetic about future changes in their city and wanted to facilitate a public dialogue. This is another way in which we have sought to promote the idea of urban participation in varied contexts.

We are interested in how to facilitate and moderate user-oriented cities, promoting the belief that residents know best what they need and how they should behave in a moderated dialogue with other activists and experts. But one of the concerns and challenges we faces is truly involving overlooked and minorities in the city – voices that remain unheard and invisible, but are part of the urban fabric. In cities like St. Petersburg, Moscow, Amsterdam and Dusseldorf we find that our projects are invariably used by voices that don’t have forums for expression – or become taken over by those who seek to control the socially unaccepted.

Ultimately, as researchers, artists and urbanists, we find ourselves trying to use the language of art as a tool for inquiry to understand urban processes and facilitate a form of participation based on art and ideas of inclusion. To what extent we are successful can be debated, but as an experiment we believe that art in the city has a right to public space and interaction in the same way all urban residents do.

Shriya Malhotra is an urban researcher and intervention artist based in Moscow with Partizaning . She has an MA in Cities and Urbanization from the New School and collaborates on participatory art and process based projects that highlight the unseen or unusual aspects about cities and urban life.

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ESSAY; Moscow's China Card

By William Safire

• Sept. 8, 1986

Every decade or so, China undergoes a political convulsion. In 1948-49, the Communists threw out the Kuomintang; in 1956, Mao's ''Great Leap Forward'' plunged the country into a depression; in 1966, the Cultural Revolution to purify the party brought on a new Dark Ages; in 1976-78, we saw Mao's would-be radical successors, the ''Gang of Four,'' replaced by pragmatic Deng Xiaoping.

Now we are celebrating the 10th anniversary of the death of Mao, and some Pekingologists would have us believe that this decade's upheaval will not come.

Mr. Deng, at 82, has provided for his succession, we are assured: it's all set for Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang to succeed him, with Hu Qili of the next generation right behind. Not to worry, goes the current Edgar Snow-job: China's new era of ''commutalism,'' communism with a capitalist face, will march undisturbed into the next millennium.

I wonder. Maybe the conventional wisdom will prove right for once. But for argument's sake, let's look at what is happening in China through a different set of glasses, seeking truth from facts.

Fact number one is that a wave of materialism is sweeping across the billion people of China. After a generation of repression, good ol' greed is back in the saddle, and an I'm-all right-Deng attitude permeates the new entrepreneurs.

As a longtime expositor of the virtue of greed in powering the engine of social progress, I cannot cluck-cluck at this. But there is a difference between the materialism of the Chinese on Taiwan, who are accustomed to free enterprise, and the lust for the good life of available goods on the mainland, where a terrible thirst has been a-building.

Let us assume that the outburst of materialism in China leads to some reaction: that some spoilsport faction emerges to summon up the ghost of Mao's ideological purity, and that this new gang of fortyish Outs finds its way back in. It is at least a possibility.

I think that shrewd old Deng is well aware of this possibility. That is why, despite his ostentatious rejection of personal cultdom, he is preparing his most dramatic assault on the memory of Mao. That father of the revolution startled the world by breaking with the Soviet Union; Mr. Deng, playing a revisionist Lenin to Mao's Marx, wants to startle the world and overwhelm internal opposition by a rapprochement with Moscow.

Accordingly, fact two: He has abandoned his demand that Russia move back its huge army from the Chinese border, thereby double-crossing his own Army leaders. He has forgotten his requirement that Soviet forces be withdrawn from Afghanistan, thereby double-crossing his Westernish ally, Pakistan.

All Mr. Deng now asks of the Russians is that they try to squeeze their Vietnamese clients to pull out of Cambodia. Of course they'll try - ''best efforts'' is an easy promise - and since the Vietnamese are notoriously independent, Moscow cannot be blamed for not succeeding. Result: Mr. Deng takes the salute from atop the wall in Red Square.

That reestablishes his Communist credentials, defanging hard-left opposition at home. And it is Middle Kingdom orthodoxy; I suspect Chinese agents in the U.S. supply the K.G.B. with intelligence, just as Peking permits our Big Ears on its soil to overhear Kremlin transmissions. Chinese policy has always been to play the barbarians against each other.

This theory would also explain fact three: Mr. Gorbachev's seizure of a U.S. newsman as hostage. It is no coincidence that this particular hostage selection follows China's arrest and expulsion of a reporter for a U.S. newspaper. The Soviet leader, advised by Anatoly Dobrynin, must have known that this slap in the face would jeopardize a summit - and went ahead with his calculated humiliation, similar to Mr. Nixon's mining of Haiphong harbor before his Moscow summit in 1972.

Because the Russians now have the prospect of a pilgrimage to Moscow by Mr. Deng, they can taunt the U.S. President with impunity. As Mr. Dobrynin probably predicted, Mr. Reagan is reduced to begging for the hostage's release, in effect volunteering testimony to a Soviet court, in his eagerness to crown his Presidency with a peacemaking summit.

Now Mr. Gorbachev can hang tough, holding a show trial and thereby delaying negotiations with the U.S. until the Deng visit - or can graciously accede to the Reagan plea, thereby establishing his dominance. And the overconfident Mr. Reagan never suspected, as he sat down to summit poker, that this time the China card was in his opponent's hand.