Recently in an art group blog I was participating in I asked the question "What is art for?" Now, this is a pretty big question, and it should require some pretty complex answers. Since I was asking it of artists who produce all the time (if you don't produce all the time, you're not an artist), I expected to get some pretty interesting answers. Here's some of the answers I got:
"Life! Art is for Life!"
"I can say forever what I think, but what I FEEL is what I know for sure! For me, Art is Life!"
"ART IS POWERFUL!"
"Art is the Eyes, Ears and Voice of Humanity"
These are nothing but empty, vapid platitudes. They mean absolutely nothing whatsoever.
Now consider for a moment the following quotes:
" I should not be here today. I was not born into money or status. I was born to a teenaged mom in Hawaii. My father left us when I was two. But my family gave me love, they gave me an education, and most of all, they gave me hope. Hope that in America, no dream is beyond our grasp if we reach for it and fight for it and work for it. Understand this. Hope is not blind optimism. Hope is not ignorance of the barriers and the challenges that stand between you and your dreams. I know how hard it will be to change America."
"We'll invest in you, you invest in your country, together America will move forward, that's what we dream of. That is our calling in this campaign. That's our calling, to reaffirm that fundamental belief, I am my brother's keeper; I am my sister's keeper; that belief that makes us one people and one nation. It's time to stand up and reach for what's possible, because together people who love their country can change it."
"Now, when I start talking like this, I have to say some people will tell you that I've got my head in the clouds; that I'm still offering false hopes; that I need a reality check; that I'm a hopemonger. But, you know, it's true, my own story tells me that in the United States of America, there's never been anything false about hope, at least not if you're willing to work for it; not if you're willing to struggle for it; not if you're willing to fight for it."
"When we instead join arm in arm and decide we are going to remake this country block by block, precinct by precinct, county by county, county -- state by state. That's what hope is. There's a moment in the life of every generation when that spirit has to come through if we are to make our mark on history. And this is our moment. This is our time."
Each of these are from a speech given by Barack Obama. You will please note that each one of them is full of empty, vapid platitudes. They mean absolutely nothing whatsoever.
But I think we can see exactly why it is Obama is doing so well. If artists who work on their art work every day can come up with little more than platitudes about the very thing they live and breathe, how many others think with and live by them? Is it any wonder, then, that so many are susceptible to them? Obama can say absolutely nothing for an hour. But he does it with parallelism, repetitions, rhythms, and patterns, so he's compelling. Proof of how powerful poetry is. Could you imagine what could happen if there were any substance to it?
3 comments:
That was the shortest lived artists group I have ever have taken part. May it rest in piece. There will be other groups.
University of Wisconsin physicist Marshall Onellion wrote a book called "Seeking Truth: Living with Doubt" about a three pronged approach to truth seeking that includes science, art (which identifies meaningful enduring images/sounds and thereby helps us understand something about ourselves) and what he calls 'mystical' religions (practices like meditation and even just introspection, and as opposed to fundamentalist religions which are inherently obstacles to truth seeking). with this in mind I think 'art is the eyes, ears, and voice of humanity' has real content to it, i.e. art can see things about us and tell us things about us.
as for Obama, yes his speeches are suffused with rhetoric, as a politician that's unavoidable, conservative politicians blather about god and patriotism quite meaninglessly all the time. but if you felt like finding real content in his speeches you could...you'd have to be interested in mining the deliberate ambiguity that is characteristic of political speech, though...and based on the laughable assumption that interdisciplinary thought supports religion (or that it exclusively supports capitalism) I don't suppose that you are interested. just don't make the mistake of thinking your claims are less a reflection of you than they are of your subject matter.
The line was given with nothing else connected to it. Without further exposition, I'm afraid that it means nothing, because it can mean almost anything.
And that's the problem with Obama. He never says anything in his speeches, so you can't peg him down on anything, and you can attach any meaning to anything he says you want. Please note I'm not here accusing Clinton of doing that. While she tries to avoid too many details, to avoid the problem of people hating her specifics, even if they like her rhetoric -- she's not typically dealing with platitudes to the same level and extent to which Obama has been doing.
I am personally of the opinion that true interdisciplinary thought (vs. multidisicplinary thought) does support free markets, as the free market system is the only one that most closely resembles natural systems, including (and especially) the way those systems emerge from the bottom up.
My interest is in truth, not ideology. I came to these conclusions through that search, and not starting with ideology.
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