| Description |
As an undergraduate student, I was consistently taught that art was anything that was in a museum or gallery. Art was a commodity to be bought and sold, and while the artist could derive pleasure from the making of it, art was in the end purely aesthetic and unattached to the mundane task of daily living. Such modernist paradigms formed much of my initial understanding of art and its purpose. History, however, teaches us that art can have a more communal role. Practices such as rites and rituals, architecture, and dance "united the practical, the social, and the educative in an integrated whole having esthetic form. They introduced social values into experience in the way that was most impressive. They connected things that were overtly important and overtly done with the substantial life of the community.'' Art wasn't merely decorative it connected individuals to their communities. Modernist practices shifted art's influence, however, from something that connected people to each other, to symbols of separateness and wealth. Objects that were once valid and significant because of their place in the life of a community were removed from common experience, and became insignia of taste and of special culture. "Art for art's sake" meant isolation for the sake of aesthetic purity. Major revisions have been made in the last century to this credo, but the art world still seems to run under its influence. University art programs tend to espouse that in order to "make it" as artists, emerging practitioners take the gallery route, which seems to further promote art's isolated position within society. I began the MFA in Community-Based Art Education program specifically because I wanted to understand how to make art in another mode - art that connected individuals in some way, that spoke to topics beyond the borders of the art world, that was useful to the causes that were important to me. I wanted to understand both what made art valuable beyond its price tag, and why art was a significant part of society. |
