Arts and Ideas

Arts & Ideas is a history of the humanities—art, architecture, music, literature, and philosophy—from the ancient world to the present day. It highlights the major styles of arts and letters as they crystallized in centers of civilization at moments of high cultural achievement, such as 5th-century B.C. Athens and Renaissance Florence.
The underlying concept of Arts & Ideas is the belief that deeper human understanding can be acquired by studying the creative revelations of artists, poets, philosophers, and composers, from our own time and from the past. More broadly, the arts, when considered in their natural humanistic and cultural context, can reveal the panorama of ever-changing human images and attitudes, as people and artists over the centuries express their conceptions of themselves, their social surroundings, and their place in the universal scheme of things. All join in the ceaseless quest to create significance for life. The ultimate objective is the understanding of self and society through familiarity with evolving visual, verbal, and tonal imagery.