Website review: Artists are now taking the lead pol...
laodan discovered this in Arts
•1 reviews since May 20, 2007
arts
•guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2084194,00.ht...
People who like this website
StumbleUpon is the best way to discover great web sites, videos, photos, blogs and more - based on your interests.
Everything is submitted and rated by the community. Discover, share and review the best of the web!
Reviews of this website
laodan discovered 12 months ago- Artists are now taking the lead policiticans have failed to give in the Guardian by Madeleine Bunting
Artists now get lumbered with expectations that in other cultures might fall to shamans, preachers or prophets - or once fell to politicians. What inflates these expectations of artists is a frustrated desire for change, and an equally profound sense of confusion as to how to effect that change. Our understanding of how art can bring about certain key aspects of change has increased: it can transform reality by inspiring the imagination. At the same time, our disillusionment with the capacity of the political process to change behaviour has deepened. Art can never do the messy business of politics - the negotiation and compromise. There have been plenty of instances of highly political art in the past - Picasso's Guernica, for example - but the crisis of political engagement leaves a vacuum that people turn to art to fill. Art has never had such political expectations thrust upon it. Is that good for the planet and good for art - or good for neither because it reduces art to agitprop? Artists are now taking the lead policiticans have failed to give
Wow! Reading parts of this article I swear I sometimes thought I was reading my own words:"Artists now get lumbered with expectations that in other cultures might fall to shamans, preachers or prophets" But, it seems to me that, Bunting seems more interested to recuperate an idea, that perhaps is entering the air of our times, to advance her own vision of the short term needs for political action. I don't opposed art meddling in affairs touching us in the short term (politics). But I do believe that there are more urgent and more important matters where art can make a real difference. I mean that art in the 21st century has a central role to play in the reconfiguration of humanity's vision of reality and of itself. Art has to accompany knowledge and wisdom as it has done since the dawn of human culture and eventually it does also have a role to play today in the shaping of the post-modern wisdom that humanity is bound to share in the future. The most foundational question regarding the shaping of our future is about culture or to be more accurate about the knowledge out of which shall emerge a new paradigm about what is reality. It is by sharing a common worldview about that new paradigm that humanity will eventually find a way to escape the miseries and deadly side-effects that modernity has unleashed upon the principle of life. I believe that artists have to take a leading role in the shaping of such a post-modern wisdom and art shall then rejoin with its secular societal role that was the spreading of the visual signs of the knowledge of the day at the attention of their contemporaries... That's how artists could very well establish themselves as the shaman of post-modern times.
- Artists are now taking the lead policiticans have failed to give in the Guardian by Madeleine Bunting
