Art should not be left to your senses only: you see and you feel an emotional response, you feel well or maybe unwell. The object of your vision is nice or ugly or provocative or… and you react to it. Should you put words to it, intellectualize it? Should you try to conceptualize it, set it into context and make it somehow useful. Your mind is stimulated, you are led into creative processes.
Is the experience of art an individual experience for you alone or can the experience be had in a group of several people or even in a large crowd?
Art can maybe be turned into a useful tool for the development of persons or society, to enhance our lives or improve the way we live. So artists should be challenged to to explain what they are up to, what they intend the outcome of their art to be.
Illusionists use the concepts of the staging, the performance and the effect. May be artists should consider their art as the creation of an illusion and follow it through to as to what effect it is intended to have on individuals, groups or society. On a long term basis we therefore we can see art as a cultural activity in the process of shaping our society – no less! In this way we raise the ambition and improve the effect of art through intellectual/creative activity.
The question of how to commercialize art is also an important one: should individuals, companies, institutions pay up or should art be common pool resource to be shared and paid for by the community.
Art is seldom considered important enough to be elevated to societal importance. Artists should therefore elevate their ambition, strive for effect through staging, performance, economic grounding and ultimately influence and effect on society.
So what can art do for us: show us beauty, form, color, relationships, context, themes, composition … but ultimately and more important be critical of shortfalls, wrongdoings or harmful action in society. It can point the way towards a better, more inclusive and fair society.
Art can thus be seen part of a total cultural and economic system as a force for development. Artists must enlarge their role – they must be teachers, critics, conceptualizers, political persons, designers and strive for effect.
So artists – let us hear from you – let us begin to see the effect of your work.