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The power of art in the political age

2023-03-06T13:48:45.383Z


Looking for beauty when the world turns ugly. Sometimes I feel like I'm in a daily struggle not to become a superficial version of myself. The prime mover of superficialization is technology, the way it narrows your attention span and fills your day with tempting distractions. The second is the politicization of everything. Like many people, I spend too much time immersed in politics: the predictable partisan scandals, the analysis of the


Sometimes I feel like I'm in a daily struggle not to become a superficial version of myself.

The prime mover of superficialization is technology, the way it narrows your attention span and fills your day with

tempting distractions.

The second is the

politicization of everything.

Like many people, I spend too much time immersed in politics:

the predictable partisan scandals, the analysis of the electoral campaign, the Trump scandal of the day.

So I try to take countermeasures.

I flee to the arts.

I look for those experiences that we all have had as children:

getting so wrapped up in an adventure story that you refuse to let go of it to go to dinner;

letting yourself be carried away so exuberantly by a piece of music that you feel the primal passions beating inside you;

find yourself with a painting so beautiful that it seems that you have entered its alternative world.

The normal thing is to say that one has been lost in a book or a song, that one has lost the notion of space and time.

But it is more accurate to say that a work of art has silenced the complex voice of the ego that normally screams within us.

A work of art has served as a portal to a deeper realm of the mind.

It has opened up that hidden and semi-conscious realm within us from which emotions arise, where our moral feelings are found, those instant aesthetic reactions

that

make us feel disgust at cruelty and admiration at generosity.

The arts work on us at that deep level, the level that really matters.

If you give me someone who disagrees with me on all issues, but who has a good heart, who is capable of sympathizing with others, of participating in their sorrows, longings, and dreams, I want to be with that person all day. .

If you give me a person who agrees with me about everything, but has a cold and resentful heart, I want nothing to do with them.

In general, artists do not try to improve others;

they just want to create a perfect expression of their experience.

But his art has the potential to humanize whoever contemplates it.

How do you get it?

First of all, beauty prompts us to pay a certain kind of attention.

It startles you and encourages you to abandon the egocentric tendency to always impose your opinion on things.

It makes us stop, take a breath, and open up to receive what it offers us, often with a kind of childish awe and reverence.

It teaches you to see the world with more

patience, justice and humility.

In

"The Sovereignty of Good," novelist and philosopher

Iris Murdoch

writes that "

virtue

is the attempt to break through the veil of egotistical consciousness and join the world as it really is."

Second, works of art broaden your emotional repertoire.

When you read a poem or see a piece of sculpture, you have not learned a new fact, but you have had a new experience.

British philosopher Roger Scruton wrote:

"For the listener of Mozart's Jupiter symphony, the floodgates of human joy and creativity are opened;

Proust

's reader

is led through the enchanted world of childhood and made to understand the strange prophecy of our later sorrows that those days of joy contain.

These experiences provide us with a kind of emotional knowledge:

how to feel and how to express feelings, how to sympathize with someone who is grieving, how to share the satisfaction of a father who has seen his son grow.

Third, art teaches you to see the world through the eyes of another, often a person who sees more deeply than you do.

Of course, Pablo Picasso's

Guernica

is a political work of art, about an atrocity in the Spanish Civil War, but it does not documentally depict an exact scene from that war.

It goes further to offer us an experience of pure horror, the universal experience of suffering and the reality of human bloodlust that leads to it.

Of course, "The Invisible Man" is a political novel about racial injustice, but as

Ralph Ellison

later wrote, he was trying to write not just a novel of racial protest, but also a "dramatic study in comparative humanity that, in my opinion, , should be any self-respecting novel".

I drag myself to museums and things like that with the fear that, in a political and technological age, the arts have lost prominence in public life, that we don't seem to debate novels and artistic advances as we did in other times, that the worlds themselves artistic and literary have been dumbed down by insular groupthink, and this has contributed to the

dehumanization

of American culture.

But we can still stage our mini rebellions, kick our political addictions from time to time, and enjoy the free play of the mind, the non-dogmatic spirit, and the heightened, adrenaline-pumping states of consciousness that the best art continues to provide.

Earlier this year I visited the

Edward Hopper

exhibition at the Whitney a couple of times, and got to see New York through that man's eyes:

the spare rooms in the side streets and the isolated people inside.

I forget most of what I read, but those images remain vivid in my mind.

look too

The beginning of the ancient Roman Via Appia will remain a mystery for now.

A culture at the crossroads

Source: clarin

All news articles on 2023-03-06

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