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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 "The assumption of being an individual is our greatest limitation.''1"To make things, even to propose ideas, is intrinsically a hopeful act."2 Introduction 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."3 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.4 |
