Culture Is Not a Luxury

Passageway to a new world / Pasted paper collage by RCS / 2017

Art can change lives and save lives.

In the New Now, in this historical moment, when nature has pushed the reset button on humanity, we gain comfort and joy from movies, books, music, TV shows, poetry, in every conceivable form.

The arts entertain us, calm us, enliven us, and touch the core of our being.

This has been true over the course of human history, and it’s especially true now.

All the artifacts, sculptures, architecture, paintings, poetry, plays, and music handed down to us through the centuries have told us what our global ancestors felt and thought about the world they observed. The history of humanity is known and understood only by the arts and artifacts left behind.

Art and Culture, Liberal Arts, Dramatic and Performing Arts—are studied in school at every level. The students who study these subjects have a higher degree of emotional intelligence. They were drawn toward the arts since the arts spoke to them, often at a young age. While the value of art and culture is reinforced by our most popular art forms of TV shows, music, and movies, how we each consider the role of art in our lives comes back to how they make us feel.

Do you love art? Of course you do. If a movie ever made you lose track of time and you became emotionally invested in the characters’ lives, you know the importance of art.  If a song fills you with joy or makes you weep, you were touched by the arts.

Art and Culture is what gets us through good times and bad. We seek out movies and music to remind us we aren’t alone, we are understood, and we’re part of collective humanity.

We want to share enjoyable experiences with the people we most want to be with.

Whether people relate storytelling on a TV show or the hit songs on Billboard’s Hot 100 to every form of art and culture through the ages doesn’t matter. What matters is that artists are still creating paintings, photographers are taking pictures, moviemakers are making movies, writers are writing novels, and songwriters are writing songs.

We see our lives and our perspective on life reflected back through our culture. In the United States, these culture-shifting moments include Lee Krasner working on a mural for the WPA arts program in the 1930s, Jackson Pollack dripping paint on a canvas in his Long Island studio in the 1950s, Robert Rauschenberg creating his Combines in the late 1950s and early 1960s in lower Manhattan, and Dustin Yellin encasing thousands of tiny images in polymer to create mini-monolithic digital-age collages in the 2010s. All these visual art creators represent the world they found themselves in, and made sense of it in their own way. And they each proved one thing: Art is a necessity for our culture and the world.

All art is interrelated. As are all artists. Musicians are called Artists. Actors are called Artists. Painters are called Artists. We call on Artists to take us out of ourselves, and bring us deeper into ourselves. It’s a massively wonderful mission, and every artist is up to it.

How many countless hours of inspiration which led to culture-shifting ideas and inventions came from watching a movie, listening to music, or viewing a work of art in a museum or a book? In the same way a doctor spends countless hours learning to be a doctor, an artist learns by countless hours of learning from creations from the past, and applying this knowledge to the cultural now. After learning what’s been done and mixing it with what’s inside of them, they get to bend the rules and create with total freedom in their chosen art form. Otherwise, what’s the fun?

Deciding whether a child should learn to be an artist or a doctor isn’t an either or decision. Every society must have both. Could we live without music or movies during this time period?

Art gives people ideas enabling them to grow past boundaries. Art is the dreamworld present in real-time and the reason why we can imagine a better world. Art breaks through online algorithms and changes the course of history.

Art touches every part of our lives and shapes us from the time we’re small children. Art provides much needed emotional intelligence, beauty, and thoughtfulness in a world driven mad by over-objectivity and precision for the sake of precision. To think the world can get along without creative aspirations and new creations in every form possible is to imagine a bland, uninteresting world no one should be forced to even think about, much less live in.

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