雅思口语话题背景材料：艺术_雅思英语口语

雅思口语话题背景材料：艺术

　　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，雅思建议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 definition 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. Shakespeares Macbeth, for instance, teaches us that inordinate ambition is pernicious. Ingemar Bergmans 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.