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Week Eight - Blog 3

Page history last edited by PBworks 16 years, 10 months ago

Week Eight, Blog Three: Definition

 

All Play and No Work Makes Many a Dead Boy?

 

(Art) is superfluous, but often fun to create. So, I do so sparingly. It may serve the role of providing clarity for the confused where there is turbidity through reason, though. As such, it is valuable (this is not to say that it has no inherent or instrumental value otherwise). However, that is really an impetus for education reform, rather than a restructuring of the model. – Cory Vilardi

 

I open this essay with an excerpt from what amounts to an apology; a necessary explanation for why I have in the past forgone (and will forgo in the future) the “reasonable” route and chosen art in its stead. I do so because I view this justification as both telling and symbolic, for it at once reveals several assumptions about art’s proper role in the human experience and embodies the internal discord within alternative appointments. Let us work diffusively from this perspective and contextualize the apparent dissonance and disparate conceptions of art’s function in society.

 

When I stated that art was superfluous, the implicit claim was that art is not essential to the human experience. It serves no evolutionary necessity; it serves no function for survival or even for a rather basic living standard. But, beyond being unessential, art is potentially deleterious, in that it may divert one’s energy from more exigent concerns (I think that I would have said that art necessarily does carry this characteristic). This, too, is to say that art is purely aesthetic, and as such is merely an entertainment resource. This may indeed imbue art with an inherent moral value, but it would not seem to justify the proposed inverse relationship with pleasure for non-creators, philistines, and unacquainted victims all and sundry. So here we have art defined as a source of pleasure – as entertainment – and as potentially a needless diversion from matters of greater concern. Art, for the artist and for the audience, is a vehicle of escapism.

 

But, this definition would seem to clearly mischaracterize the social function of art, (although it does, in one sense, describe what art has historically been and that for which, perhaps all too often, art continues to strive). Art has and likely ought to play a role other than that of the consciousness altering drug, and to circumscribe art in this manner denies its history and severely undermines its potential. In some sense, though, art’s other functions are perhaps sub-functions of this greater inebriation. Take for example the role of artistic expression in communicating myriad essential aspects of social experience. In this role, art is a transformation and concentration of reality into a conceptual form, whereby the artist is able to simultaneously create and receive her own angle of beingness, placing her in the unique position of performer and audience. This is of course a conceptualization of a perceived objective reality (or potential reality), and so it retains the element of fantasy described in our characterization of art as entertainment. But notice, too, that art now serves the function of communicating social understandings, myths, and expectations. Art is no longer just entertainment.

 

But, art is entertainment, at least it can be, and this serves a vital function as well. Art provides that vehicle by which we may escape the pressures and frustrations of daily life; and this escape is essential as a means of regeneration (both physically in a limited sense and spiritually in a non-theocratic sense) and a source of inspiration. Art (or entertainment generally) helps clear and often redirects the mind, and this is valuable.

 

So, art inspires...

 

Inspires what?

 

More than reflecting one’s social relationship with reality, art affects it. Art affects one’s relationship with people, with the natural environment en bloc, and with the conscious phenomenon. Recall the words of Deepak Chopra:

 

There is no creative impulse in the absence of discontent(1)

 

and recognize how art helps marginalized groups define their respective social identities, and then recreate them. Art allows one to imagine the unknown and to speculate; and this is an invaluable quality.

 

But, again, whether art is purely a diversion, or a more sophisticated social act, it still does not excuse the artist from his/her social responsibilities; that is to say that an artist that aims to create “art for art’s sake” narrowly redefines its role and their own in the process of creation. Art ceases to be art (as I have defined it), or at best is rendered an introspective, painfully solipsistic realization of minimal import.

 

One social responsibility an artist might have, or at least might take on, is edification, and this is addressed in the opening “apology” to this essay, where I state:

 

(Art) may serve the role of providing clarity for the confused where there is turbidity through reason, though.

 

I imagine that almost everyone has experienced art in this role, whether in the form of an overwhelmingly apropos musical composition, a sublime oil painting, or a dance performance the forces one to reconsider the physical limits of the human body. But for those who haven’t, I will explore this claim further.

 

What makes art so potentially effective as a pedagogical tool is that, unlike reason, or science more specifically, it can ask (or incite) more interesting questions, and is limitless in its potential answers, as art is free from the constraints of reason; there need be no concern for empirical support or linear cause-effect relationships, as

art (...) can engage in various means of highly selective perception and expression, calculated distortion, even conscious subterfuge, all precisely in order to elicit in us new thoughts and perceptions not spontaneously generated by the material world as commonly perceived.(2)

 

Perhaps most important, though, is that art has the ability to address ideas that are inexpressible through language, yet understood through elements of art. Those qualities of existence that are to the extent that they are perceived, but aren’t to the extent that they are indescribable. Where language is insufficient, art may do the trick. This is probably an uncontroversial addendum to a definition of art’s role in the human experience, and I imagine an appreciated one.

 

However, it would seem that if an act of artistic expression intends to convey an idea, insofar as this idea can be expressed through language (principally reason), the poignancy of the statement or the imagination reflected is of no concern. Of course, there are times when the most articulate, cogent argument reads as nonsense, and in these cases art may prove an effective alternative. Reason may be the truest form of understanding, but it is often the faultiest mechanism for conveyance. But, for those cases when the idea can almost certainly be expressed through language, art may represent an obstacle, not an aid. This is particularly significant when the idea expressed is deemed important—that is, it is critical that it be understood by the audience—and when the infusion of art in education is more confusing than enlightening.

 

Returning once more to my original quote, one can clearly see where I had significantly erred. Art is hardly superfluous. Indeed, art “may serve the role of providing clarity for the confused where there is turbidity through reason.” But, while art reflects the human experience and its potential, it is not absolved from social responsibility. On some level, art is a respite from life’s travails, and to that extent it is valuable, irrespective of alternative social roles.


 

“Everything has been done before” and the posited non-coincidental ubiquitous trope imply determinism, which in turn implies a mechanistic nature, which, by definition, denies the organismic paradigm—more importantly, it simplifies reality in a rather perverse an unimaginative way." – Cory Vilardi

 

Definition Two?


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