According to the RAE Dictionary, Art comes from the Latin *“ars, artis”*, and this comes from Greek (techne), and is defined as: virtue, availability and the skill to do something; or as a manifestation of human activity by means of which a personal and unbiased vision which interprets what is real or what is imagined with plastic, linguistic or auditory resources.

It has also been said that the etymology is ambiguous in meaning and therefore in their attempt to specify the concept, some have explained that:

a) Generally, art is understood as any activity or production carried out by the human being with an aesthetic and communicative aim, through which ideas, emotions or a vision of the world are expressed by means of different plastic, linguistic, auditory or mixed resources.

b): Art is a component of culture, reflecting the economic and social substrata in its conception, and in the transmission of ideas and values inherent in any human culture throughout time and space. It is usually thought that with the appearance of homo sapiens, art had a ritual, magical or religious function to begin with, but it changed with evolution, acquiring an aesthetic component and a social, pedagogic, mercantile or ornamental function.

c) According to the culture, time or society, ‘art’ is widely accepted as denoting any human activity done with care and dedication or any combination of rules necessary to develop an activity ideally. This is how “culinary art”, “martial arts”, etc., are spoken of.

Giordano Bruno was one of the first thinkers who anticipated modern ideas: He said that **creation is infinite, there is no centre or limit – neither God nor man -, everything is movement, dynamism. For Bruno, there are as many arts as artists, introducing the artist’s idea of originality. Art does not have rules, it is not learnt, but rather it comes from inspiration.**

Kandinsky, in his book Concerning the Spiritual in Art, situates us mainly in the pragmatic formula of the expressionists of his era affirming that: **The other art, capable of evolving, is also based on its spiritual era, but it is not only an echo and mirror of it, but it contains a revitalising, prophetic energy which acts widely and deeply. Spiritual life, in which art is also found and of which art is one of its strongest agents, is a complex but determined movement, translatable in simple terms, which drives forward and upward. This movement is that of knowledge. It may adopt many forms, but in essence it always maintains an identical internal sense, the same aim.** And later on he adds:

**… the spiritual night is observed hovering more and more. The grey shadows descend on startled souls, and the higher, pursued and weakened by doubt and fear, sometimes choose the slow darkening to the immediate and violent fall into total darkness. Art, which is then humiliated, is used solely for material ends. It seeks its reality in hard material, and so ignores the exquisite. The objects, the reproduction of which it believes to be its only goal, remain the same. The what in art disappears eo ipso. The exclusive question which concerns them is how is a particular object represented in relation to the artist. Art loses its spirit.**

**The artist and inspiration**

The artist in his/her most genuine inspiration feels driven to express a synthesis (poetic, in the broadest sense) of the reality in which s/he lives, through the language of metaphor, allegory or symbol. That inspiration, when it is sufficiently charged with affection, when it stirs, when it is experienced as an internal arousal which strives to manifest itself in word, form or colour, harmonious sounds, the body, etc. explains how a particular state of consciousness can invade dreams, fantasies and wakefulness.

The artistic experience lives thus as a call to express a profound sentiment which implies the strong impulse of wanting to be free to create, to feel transformed.

And that reality which the artist synthesises aesthetically in his/her expression is made up of two key aspects: Their own biography and the era in which they are living, elegantly fused. However there is also a possible third aspect: The realm of the trans-human, of that which may be of sacred origin and which is not governed by biographical and epochal moulds.

From this realm inspiring signals may be reached which the artist will translate, inexorably, with the adornments of the era, given that all artistic discipline is conditioned by the landscapes and looks of each historical moment, even if that which one wants to express originally comes from that mythical world without psycho-social frontiers.

We can see throughout history that creation is the search for a more profound meaning. A meaning that somehow transcends the artist.

We can freely imagine and travel through time until managing to see the human being when discovering fire…, and how with intention learns to preserve it…, and later on transport it from one place to another… and that a long time will go by until it can created and finally dominated… This is how pottery and the manipulation of metals were born continuing until reaching our time.

We observe in the passing of time of our species that during this whole journey art has always been with us, this being an intentional process of the consciousness to express different internal states and the search of the human being through creation.

As Adolfo Salazar put it so well with regard to musical expression, **Auditory language implies the capacity to represent and coordinate abstract symbols giving them spiritual meaning.**

From its earliest days, art was closely linked to *”the sacred”* and to *”the magical”*. Therefore we see in initiation rites, in invocations, in pleas to the forces of nature, in contacts with the divine, in healing as a vehicle for transforming the essence of elements and people, and also for producing unusual states of consciousness that mobilise profound emotions. We can observe all these for example in different shamanic ceremonies that still exist.

In western culture in Greece, for example, art is still closely linked to the mythical as we see in orphic and Dionysian rites.

Also in the VI century BCE Pythagoras was attributed with important musical mathematical discoveries: like the discovery of the science of harmony, of musical proportion, the importance of arithmetic for music, the theory of spheres, etc. For the Pythagoreans **the cosmos was composed of numbers and subjective aesthetic experience could be measured. The octave interval has a strong metaphysical flavour of harmony in a complete sense, as a compendium of a series of numerical properties which will enable *“to tune”* both the cosmos (worldly music) and the human soul (human music).**

Salazar, in his book *“The great structures of music”* says that **When it is essential to put a spirit’s action to the test, you will have to summon it thanks to a language that only it and we, certain privileged beings, know. The increasingly complex action of calling the spirits has been known by the name of magic, and the man who puts it into practice as a magician. Since music is one of his means of communication with those gods (even in our times) the man who sings the formula to invoke doubly imitates with the music of the word and with the gesture accompanying it, since this imitation is the basis of all magic.**

**That is why there are divinities hidden in the sounds, in the notes, and the constitution of a scale which is a magical operation which has spread from the old east including India and China bringing to the Greek west a whole theory in which the ideas of music, divinity and astronomy come together, being projected towards a space where the planets spin, governed by harmonies the sounds of which are represented in Greek by letters of the alphabet, which name, in turn, the star and its corresponding sound, as well as the day of the week to which it is devoted.**

**Magical creation does not have beauty as its aim, but another aim much more essential to spiritual issues. Therefore, there is a long historical road between the stirring, which consists of putting the invisible spirit into movement by means of the magical spell and moving our spirit that raises us by means of art.**

In the Middle Ages, thanks to the melting pot of races and cultures that occurred with migrations of Arabs and Jews, knowledge, instruments, techniques, medical theories, mathematics, architecture, etc. became interwoven and an artistic expression was born that synthesised these elements with a clear humanist style in places such as old Toledo, or the kingdom of Alfonso the Wise in the XIII century. Or in the court of Rodolfo II in the renaissance.

In the renaissance the new ideal of music was established as *“to move the emotions”* of the listener adding the understanding of the lyric in the vocal works, this idea would reach completion in the baroque thanks to the accompanying melody and the rhetoric appears in order to move these emotions.

History continues and has always accompanied the new searches of expression and searches of the artist. As, for example, Schumann would say: “the mission of the artist is to throw light upon the darkness of the human heart”.

Or Goethe enunciating that **the artist addresses the world through a totality not found in nature, it is the fruit of his own spirit, or better, the inspiration of a divine breath.**

Kant in Critique of Judgment: States that **there can be no objective rule of taste by which what is beautiful may be defined by means of concepts. For every judgement from that source is aesthetic, i.e., its determining ground is the feeling of the subject, and not any concept of an object.**

Kandinsky also, in the aforementioned book, says: **Schömberg clearly senses that complete freedom, the only medium in which Art can develop, will never be absolute. A certain quota of freedom corresponds to each period and even the most effective spirit may not exceed those limits…. His music pushed us to a new area in which the musical experiences are purely emotional and not auditory. It is the birth of future music.**

Further on he adds: **Art in its entirety does not involve unnecessary creation from entities that are diluted into nothing, but is a force which contributes to the development and sensitivity of the human soul.**

**When religion, science and morality are shaken, and their external foundations predict collapse, man diverts his attention from the exterior and concentrates on himself.**

His definition of beauty is **related with that which enriches and refines the soul, even immaterially.**

Silo, in his book Psychology Notes 4, defines inspired consciousness as **”… a global structure capable of achieving immediate intuitions of reality. On the other hand, it is well suited to organize ensembles of experience and to prioritize expressions which are usually transmitted through Philosophy, Science, Art and Mysticism.” “…it is more than an extreme introjection or an extreme projection since it makes use of either of these depending on its purpose. This last point is made evident when the inspired consciousness responds to a present intention or, in some cases, when it responds to an intention that is not present but that acts copresently”… “The various artistic styles which respond to epochal conditions are not simply fashions or ways to generate, capture, or interpret the artistic work, but rather ways of “preparing oneself” to receive and to give sensory impacts. This “disposition” modulates the individual or collective sensibility and is, therefore, the one pre-dialogical that permits us to establish communication aesthetics.”**

In this brief journey through history and some statements by way of example we are able to observe that creation is the search for a more profound meaning. A meaning that in a certain way transcends the artist.

This intentionality has accompanied man since his earliest times, because it is a way whether about asceticism, about the search for the sacred, about contact with unusual states of consciousness or simply catharsis.

It is this creative intention of the artist that manages to connect it at times with a sensitivity which goes beyond the cultural and aesthetic models of his/her contemporaries.

Today, in the middle of huge global destructuration, in an era where a disillusioned consciousness prevails, where the human being does not see a clear future, where a lack of communication and violence are increasing, we artists must establish a clear choice in favour of life and of an inspired culture from and for the future.

In the light of all that has been said we propose here and now to link all those who are interested in developing a space for interchange and deepening of experiences that are projected in time and may, from a position of parity, contribute to the revaluing of profound searches.

*translation by Rhona Desmond*