Questões sobre Vocabulário | Vocabulary

        We do not know how art began any more than we know how language started. If we take art to mean such activities as building temples and houses, making pictures and sculptures, or weaving patterns, there is no people in all the world without art. If, on the other hand, we mean by art some kind of beautiful luxury, something to enjoy in museums and exhibitions or something special to use as a precious decoration in the best parlour, we must realize that this use of the word is a very recent development. We can best understand this difference if we think of architecture. There is scarcely any building in the world which was not erected for a particular purpose. Those who use these buildings as places of worship or entertainment, or as dwellings, judge them first and foremost by standards of utility. But apart from this, they may like or dislike the design or the proportions of the structure, and appreciate the efforts of the good architect to make it not only practical but right. In the past the attitude to paintings and statues was often similar. They were not thought of as mere works of art but as objects which had a definite function.

         Similarly, we are not likely to understand the art of the past if we are quite ignorant of the aims it had to serve. The further we go back in history, the more definite but also the more strange are the aims which art was supposed to serve. The same applies if we leave towns and cities and go to the peasants or, better still, if we travel to the peoples whose ways of life still resemble the conditions in which our remote ancestors lived. Among them there is no difference between building and image-making as far as usefulness is concerned. Their huts are there to shelter them from rain, wind and sunshine and the spirits which produce them; images are made to protect them against other powers which are, to them, as real as the forces of nature. Pictures and statues, in other words, are used to work magic.

E. H. Gombrich. The story of art.

New York, Phaidon, 2024. 16th ed. p. 9-10 (adapted). 

Instruction: answer question based on the following text. 

(Available in: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jean-Michel-Basquiat – text especially adapted for this test).

Text 1A4-I

   By the middle years of the 20th century, the optimistic story of limitless progress through scientific and technological advance came to be rivalled and sometimes overshadowed by a much more pessimistic, even apocalyptic vision of the trajectory of the modern project. It began to seem increasingly possible that technology would come to master its creators and carry humanity toward unforeseen and possibly catastrophic outcomes.

   Premonitions of technological wizardry leading to disasters are extremely old, dating back at least to the myth of Icarus, who is said to have fatally fallen into the sea after flying too close to the sun on wings his father, Daedalus, constructed. As the Industrial Revolution gathered steam, dark anticipations became increasingly widespread, in works such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus and Karel Capek’s R.U.R. Perhaps technology, not man, was “in the saddle,” as Henry Adams worried. And perhaps machines, becoming ever more capable and interconnected, were the next step in the evolution of life, destined to dominate and eventually eliminate humanity, as Samuel Butler warned. The contours of the future, H. G. Wells announced in one of his famous lectures, “The Discovery of the Future,” were difficult to discern but would surely be unlike the past or the present, and definitely included disasters of new types and magnitudes.

   In the ghastly world wars, technological advances empowered barbarism on a new scale, destroying the credibility of the simple modernist faith that more potent tools are a straight path to human betterment. Rather, technological advance has produced a cornucopia of double-edged swords, with amplified possibilities for both progress and disaster. A growing herd of horsemen of the anthropogenic apocalypse have ominously appeared on the human horizon of possibility: nuclear weapons, genetic engineering, total surveillance despotism, runaway artificial intelligence, and rampant environmental decay.

Daniel Deudney. Dark Skies: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics, and the Ends of Humanity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020 (adapted).