How are visual arts used in the world around us and how are they a part of our everyday life?

The first response to this intriguing question is the visual art of advertising – how we are “sold” a product based on the television advertisements, billboards, magazine ads, internet pop-ups, etc. But often the word “art” implies “fine art,” that is, works of visual creation displayed in galleries, etc. So there at least two ways “art” influences our everyday life.

First, the profession of advertising takes advantage of what is called “visual rhetoric,” the “language”...

The first response to this intriguing question is the visual art of advertising – how we are “sold” a product based on the television advertisements, billboards, magazine ads, internet pop-ups, etc. But often the word “art” implies “fine art,” that is, works of visual creation displayed in galleries, etc. So there at least two ways “art” influences our everyday life.

First, the profession of advertising takes advantage of what is called “visual rhetoric,” the “language” of shape and color (even such subtle features as typefaces). This “language” assumes a universal (or at least a culturally uniform) code between sender and receiver, often subliminal—for example, the color green brings out a response of nature, growth, cleanliness, and thus advertisements and packaging of products of this nature use green wrappers, etc. to elicit a subliminal response of “fresh, natural, clean.” In this way, we are daily affected by visual art.

Another way we are affected (especially by fine art) is as a repository of our cultural history, our “stages of development” as a culture. When we go to a large art museum (the Louvre, the Hermitage Museum, etc.) we are given a visual tour of our progress from classicism to realism, to modern to post-modern, represented by the visual arts but standing for the progress in human thinking, point-of-view, etc. In this way (usually seen in books on art history) we are in touch daily with our place in history.