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Can art change the world?
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You can't go to The Louvre online and experience the Mona Lisa. You have to stand in front of it and listening to your ipod will never fully take the place of a concert in the park.
Art transforms the world through actions of people who are moved by it.



*musing more on this*

Art can also just be something to look at and enjoy, and in that sense it can change individual's worlds, and make them a little better.
But art in itself can't rescue us from barbarity. We have to do that ourselves.


http://www.npr.org/templates/story/st...
They don't have the text up yet, so you'll have to listen, but it's about whether or not the U.S. should have a Cabinet level cultural post and department. Thoughts?




I do think art can change the world. I agree with Leslie that the change is incremental and usually not fully penetrant. But I think literature is actually a great example. The literature of any given time period reflects the current cultural and social mores and taboos, as well as concerns and central matters of conflict. Anyone exposed to these issues is forced to consider them and form an opinion. That's a frist step toward change, at the very least. I think a similar argument could be made about all art forms, but literature may get its points across more directly than most.
So I think art is extremely important and I think it would be fantastic if the government were able to promote it, but I'm afraid of what else the government might do to it. I think that any administration with control over any given aspect of life in the country over which it presides will inevitably feel a sense of obligation to act as a guide in that arena, regardless of its initial intentions.

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Behind wanting to own the painting and hang it where we could regularly study it might be the hope that through continued exposure to it, its qualities would come to assume a greater hold on us. Passing it on the stairs last thing at night or in the morning on our way to work would have the effect of a magnet which could pull to the surface submerged filaments of our characters. The painting would act as a guardian of a mood.
Second, the latest issue of Esquire (the one with Obama on the cover) has an interview with Stephen Sodenbergh in which he talks mostly of his new Che movies. This exchange takes place in the interviews:
Esquire: Don’t you think art makes the world a better place?
Sodenbergh: What tragedy has it kept from happening? Tell that to the 13-year-old girl from Somalia who got stoned to death last week after being raped by three men and then convicted of adultery, buried up to her head, and stoned in front of a crowd of 1,000 people. If the collected works of Shakespeare can’t keep that from happening, then what is it worth? Honestly?
So what do you think? Can art transform the world? Can it make a difference, both individually, and by extension, socially? How can we measure its impact, if at all? What evidence exists, one way or the other?