Symbol of art

As we all know, the first kind of art is symbolic art, the second kind is image art, and the third kind is conceptual art. Among them, image art includes not only the "plastic art" mentioned in the old art classification, that is, painting, sculpture, photography and other art categories, but also the so-called "comprehensive art" such as drama, dance and film. The common feature of these art types is that they all express their artistic content with vivid, concrete and close-to-real artistic images.

It can be clearly seen that in this way of expression, image art and symbolic art have different textures. Symbolic art certainly has a perceptual image, but its image is not integrated with the image of the thing it wants to express. For example, on some national flags, the sky blue color symbolizes freedom, but freedom itself is not a color. For example, some national emblems use "lion" or "eagle" to symbolize their people, but the people are not really "lion" or "eagle". However, video art is different. Generally speaking, the artistic images in painting, sculpture, drama and dance can all find their prototypes in the real world. It is precisely because of this that realism is one of the basic principles of modern plastic arts.

Moreover, from the general reality to the instantaneous and more accurate reality (impressionism), from the objective reality to the internal reality reflected in people's subjective world (modern art schools such as "abstraction" and "cubism"). If we say that in symbolic art, even practical and concrete things can only be expressed in an abstract and conceptual way, then in image art, on the contrary, even for abstract and conceptual things, concrete images can be found. There is no "Virgin Mary" in the world, but in Raphael's Madonna, what female image can be more real and moving than her? This artistic image directly presented in perceptual intuition is a distinctive feature shared by painting, sculpture, photography, drama and dance.

So we call these kinds of art "image art", which is equivalent to Hegel's "classical art" in principle. Hegel said: "Symbolic art is not perfect. ....................................................................................................................................................... The third kind of art in ........................... is "conceptual art", which is commonly referred to as literary art, and its characteristic is that there is no artistic image directly presented in perceptual intuition. It relies on abstract concepts and words as thinking and language entities to express artistic content.

Therefore, its way of expressing art is only a non-artistic way, because it does not use images to express ideas like other arts (symbolic art, video art). On the contrary, it uses ideas to express images. So Rodin once pointed out that literature has such a feature that it can express ideas without images, which is a skill of playing with words and abstract things. In the field of thought, it may bring convenience to literature that other arts can't match. "If this kind of conceptual art also has its image, then its image does not actually exist in intuition as an object, but exists abstractly in imagination as a subject.