I've been doing a lot of complex analyses of society's ills recently. I think about these things mostly when I sit on the bus or ride the train or just walk down the sidewalk, which is a borderline dangerous thing for me to do in the neighborhood where I work. Anyway, I find myself walking out of class at night all charged up with intellectual energy, trying to figure out the causes of everything around me and then, how to bend the causal chain to meet my preconceived notions of what is right and good. I have many, many thoughts--too many thoughts, one might say--about what is happening around me and why it is happening in just that way. I'd like to explore some of my observations, beginning this week with a little theory I like to call "The Janus-faced Nature of Scientific Progress" or "Art! Who Goes There?" (Rocky and Bullwinkle style. Oh yeah).
Walter Benjamin, I'll see your "Age of Mechanical Reproduction," and raise you one "Age of Instant Gratification, Instant Communication and Instant Pretty Much Everything Else."
The theory goes something like this:
Define art however you will--most people do. Art is the means by which humans understand and express their experience in and understanding of the world. That is to say, art is way we make sense of our world. Art is our method of making meaning. It is where we find a certain psychic or spiritual comfort in releasing some part of ourselves into whatever we create. We record our history through art. We create and honor culture. We tell our life stories or woo a lover or mourn the death of a loved one through art.
We paint. We sculpt. We mold and shape. We act. We dramatize. We sing. We play. We write. We "do art" and we do it like no other animal does--because no other animal does. (Well, except for a handful of exotic trained painting zoo animals. But I don't think that really even counts. They learned from us. I think. Consider this an invitation for someone with actual biological knowledge to chime in and teach me something new here...)
As I was saying, art is, in so many ways, the lens we use to look at our world, to understand our place and our purpose. Art is our most powerful and productive means of introspection, and also of outward expression. It is vital to our understanding of the world. We could not make sense of the world fully without art. In fact, we are currently lacking the proper quorum of artists and artworks to be making good sense of the world we are living in. We are neglecting the right side of the brain.
We are inordinately concerned with the functions of the left side (according to oversimplified popular psychology) and its linear reasoning. What happened to cultivating a child's creativity? What happened to art and artists having their proper place in schools? What happened to painting and sculpture and music class? What happened to the the band concert, the poetry reading, the school play? In so many of America's urban and rural public schools--and even some suburban ones--arts programs have been bearing the brunt of budget cuts for years. Deemed "non-essential" in comparison to the "core academic subjects," arts have largely gone by the wayside.
Larger culture mirrors--or determines, depending on your point of view--the school system's priorities: funding for the arts, for public television, public radio, the NEA, and all kinds of local art initiatives and organizations outside of schools are coming up short too. We raise our kids to seek their dreams, but at the same time insist that they be something respectable, something that makes decent money--a lawyer, a doctor, a white collar professional. A college-educated middle-class person who has children, pays taxes, and spends money they don't have. We don't raise artists, because so few artists can make a living doing their art, and in this "free market" society where everything is a commodity--including health care the and the quality of human life, which are both for sale to the highest bidders--we hope that our children grow up to be profitable adults. Hence, art is largely discouraged as a career choice--and subsequently, in the eyes of many, debunked as a valid way to spend one's time or express oneself.
Yet, somehow, we are ever vigilant in our quest to find the next great mathematician, scientist, or techno-geek who can propel our lifestyles forward another few decades before we even have time to know what hit us. We spend literally hundreds of millions on math and science initiatives in school, trying to develop more scientists and more "reasonable" thinkers. Don't get me wrong--I am in no way saying that science, math and technology aren't wonderful things, or that the require any less creativity or intelligence or ability of any kind than art. They, too, are worthy of funding and energy and enthusiasm as they are imparted to children in the educational process. They are, however, all united by their utilitarian nature, and the essential purposefulness of their products. They are more than aesthetic.
In the last two centuries, science and technology have brought us what seems like lightyears ahead of where we were just a second ago, historically speaking. Human flight, the automobile, the atomic bomb, medical technology, pharmaceuticals, cell phones, the Internet, e-mail, wireless, television...the list is long and impressive and frankly mind-blowing for such a short period of time. I can barely claim to grasp its significance myself, for we know so little now about how each of these developments will affect us in the long term. The impact of new technologies affects us socially, economically, politically, psychologically, culturally, and personally.
But we do not yet fully understand this. (As I type this, I am trying to understand the computer's need to guess which word I'm typing before I've finished it. Now when "technologies" pops up after the stroke of the h key, I will never know how the computer's predictions affect what I may or may not have meant to say. Is the computer aiding me, or leading me? Can I trust myself to know the difference? Am I just techno-paranoid?)
We need the arts to serve as the lens through which we understand our day to day experiences, and these days, those experiences increasingly revolve around or rely on a technology that is, at worst, a half a century old (television) and at best, a year old (iPhone). Either way, we're like Ariel, with our "gadgets and gizmos aplenty...whose-its and whats-its galore." '(That's right, I quoted The Little Mermaid. Suck on it.) We've got lots of great stuff, but it's nothing compared to the chance to understand what it is like to be a human. (That's right...the soon-to-be-famous Ariel Analogy continues. Ahem.) And that's what we need--a little more understanding of our own humanity, including the technologies that are impacting our lives in myriad and possibly dubious ways.
But we don't need a newspaper article, or a textbook, or an online encyclopedia, or a lecture about the impact of technologies on our life. We need poems and songs, paintings and dances, sculptures and screenplays, textiles and glassblowing and carving and pottery and animation. We need all these arts--even and especially those reliant on technology--to understand technology. And in order to generate the quality and quantity of art which the soul of this country--and the very survival of humanity--depends on, we need to raise up a generation of young artists alongside our young scientists and mathematicians. We need a balance between the left side and the right side of our collective brain. We need the small freeze in time art creates, the moment when we make meaning of something with all of our senses, with all of our selves, with our guts and our hearts and our heads. We need that heady pause, where time melts like Dali's clocks and space fragments like Picasso's staircase, where we connect and communicate with something greater than our selves: the human condition, expressed through art.
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