I think of art as being like sleep and love. We have to have it in our lives to be fully human. No people we know of in history has ever tried to live without art. It is a core element in communication within all cultures, and it contains information that individuals must have to participate fully in their social environments. But art does more than convey information. It does so in powerful forms that stimulate an emotional charge as well.
Art address subjects that are ordinary and part of everyone’s experience, yet they are never banal. Some are basic and primal—like the magic and mystery of birth, death, nature, and change. Others are less concrete—subjects like love, loss, joy, and sadness. Some are general, such as power and symbolism. Some specific: fear, anger. The possibilities are endless, and so seem the ways of representing them.
Artistic expression has sometimes been rooted in tradition and at other times breaks new ground but it always emerges from the beliefs, values, and methods integral to its culture. In the past, art had a critical role in teaching understandings that were required for full participation in a particular community: art was integrated into myths, rites, and rituals, and woven seamlessly into most religions. Today’s art exists adrift in the fragmented, heterogeneous nature of our contemporary world, but it remains a reflection of us, and is no less important to us. If art once might have taught specifics related to a single culture, it now confronts us with a huge spectrum of ideas. By way of museums and the media, we have access to the art of past and present, and the diversity alone offers us challenges to our understandings and our possibilities. In grappling with these challenges, we learn to think.
For art to work for us today—for it to open us up to many matters of intellectual, emotional, and spiritual significance—we have to be able to examine and extract meaning from it with the fluidity that very young children figure out the world around them, looking and thinking about what they see. To learn all that art has to teach, we have to use our perceptions, and our minds as children do and as little else requires. Because of this, re-education of the eye/mind connection is critical.
The presence of art is not integral to the fabric of our existence the way it once was, and as a consequence we need exposure to it and active experience with it to develop the literacies necessary to mine art for all that it can give.
Probably written in the late 1990s, edited in 2019. I no longer know the original context, though it was printed in some journal or book.