Visual Arts - The Plastic Arts

The Plastic Arts

Plastic arts is a term, now largely forgotten, encompassing art forms that involve physical manipulation of a plastic medium by moulding or modeling such as sculpture or ceramics. The term has also been applied to all the visual (non-literary, non-musical) arts.

Materials that can be carved or shaped, such as stone or wood, concrete or steel, have also been included in the narrower definition, since, with appropriate tools, such materials are also capable of modulation. This use of the term "plastic" in the arts should not be confused with Piet Mondrian's use, nor with the movement he termed, in French and English, "Neoplasticism."

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Famous quotes containing the words plastic and/or arts:

    The plastic surgeon’s knife slashes at time, which may seem to retreat, but then keeps on coming.
    Mason Cooley (b. 1927)

    Women hock their jewels and their husbands’ insurance policies to acquire an unaccustomed shade in hair or crêpe de chine. Why then is it that when anyone commits anything novel in the arts he should be always greeted by this same peevish howl of pain and surprise? One is led to suspect that the interest people show in these much talked of commodities, painting, music, and writing, cannot be very deep or very genuine when they so wince under an unexpected impact.
    John Dos Passos (1896–1970)