[originaltext] Throughout the history of the arts, the nature of creativity

Throughout the history of the arts, the nature of creativity has remained constant to artists. No matter what objects they select, artists are to bring forth new forces and forms that cause change — to find poetry where no one has ever seen or experienced it before.
    Landscape is another unchanging element of art. It can be found from ancient times through the 17th century Dutch painters to the 19th century romanticists and impressionists. In the 1970s Alfred Leslie, one of the new American realists, continued this practice. Leslie sought out the same place where Thomas Cole, a romanticist, had produced paintings of the same scene a century and a half before. Unlike Cole who insists on a feeling of loneliness and the idea of finding peace in nature, Leslie paints what he actually sees. In his paintings, there is no particular change in emotion, and he includes ordinary things like the highway in the background. He also takes advantage of the latest developments of color photography to help both the eye and the memory when he improves his painting back in his workroom.
    Besides, all art begs the age-old question: What is real? Each generation of artists has shown their understanding of reality in one form or another. The impressionists saw reality in brief emotional effects, the realists in everyday subjects and in forest scenes, and the Cro Magnon cave people in their naturalistic drawings of the animals in the ancient forests. To sum up, understanding reality is a necessary struggle for artists of all periods.
    Over thousands of years the function of the arts has remained relatively constant. Past or present, Eastern or Western, the arts are a basic part of our immediate experience. Many and different are the faces of art, and together they express the basic need and hope of human beings.
Questions 26 to 29 are based on the passage you have just heard.
26. Why are Leslie’s paintings extraordinary?
27. What is the speaker’s opinion of artistic reality?
28. What does the speaker suggest about the arts in the passage?
29. Which of the following is the main topic of the passage?