May be Art is a personality amplifier. If you have a great
personality Art makes it better. If you are as wicked as sin, through
Art you will become more so. A little like computers are productivity
amplifiers (but I don't know who said this first). If you are a time
waster... "there's an app for that!"
I've always thought that Art was never the picture on the wall, the
sculpture in the garden or the performance on the stage. It was the
personal experience you have when exposed to the Art phenomenon, what
ever it is. This makes the debate about what is good or bad art
irrelevant because it becomes personal and not societal. This seems to
fit with the personality amplifier idea too.
Thanks
Robert C
On 10/14/10 9:19 AM, Pamela McCorduck wrote:
1. Anyone who thinks that art of any kind makes you a better person
had better explain why concentration camp commandants could listen to
Bach at night--with great appreciation. (And, for all I know, read
Goethe and Schiller). Furthermore, surely museum guards, exposed to
art daily, must be among our better persons, right? Evidence?
No, literary art is the same: it is its own best excuse. To see how an
author spins a tale, presents a character, reveals a landscape, or how
a poet stops us short with a line that upends our thoughts, all these
using only the medium of words, the stuff in our mouths every day, is
simply to be made more sensitive to the act of observing. Good enough,
as far as I'm concerned. If it also helps you to understand human
nature a little better, in its contradictions and inexplicable
impulses, so much the better.
</snipped>
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