The
Arts at Issue
The Arts differentiate us from all other species.
Art makes mankind what we are; the speaker; the communicator. Every musical
note; every mark of our brushes, pens and pencils; every scrape and cut of
our chisels and knives; every rhythmic sway of our bodies, all the words we
string together as poems and stories; and every building we build and tool
we fashion and article of clothing we make for ourselves are ways we express
ourselves to each other and to our selves.
We do our art be cause we want to. It just pours out of us.
There is art in almost every thing we say and do.
What art is good and what art is not good is up to those who
are experiencing it. There are those who believe that art should be judged
according to established standards. There are those who believe that the community,
our governments, should encourage artists to produce art and should foster
the teaching of art according to those standards.
There are others who believe that art will come from people
naturally as we express ourselves in various ways for our own enjoyment and
in order to foster the continued recognition expressed by those around us
who may compliment our artistic efforts in various ways, which can include
compensation for the art we make for them to enjoy.
The motivated untrained artist will succeed and continue in
spite of being rejected by the establishment and the art schools will attract
others and shape them into the artists in demand at any particular point in
time. The untrained artist is often seen as a kind of insult to the schools
and teachers who preach and practice according to the established and accepted
rules. The schools and their organizations are seen as impediments to natural
artists who just want to do their art without having to conform to the norms
of others.
It is my experience that the degree of self-assuredness inside
each person will make them either followers or leaders. The schools will be
more comfortable for the followers. The leaders will suffer in the schools
until they lead themselves away and work on their own. The system currently
in place in our country puts a greater emphasis on developing followers than
leaders both in the arts and in all other areas of study, which I see as different
forms of artistic expression. If you feel that we should be raising and training
our youth to be followers, then you may want to stop reading right now.
I believe that it would be better if we enabled our children
to develop their natural leadership talents rather than to break their spirits
and turn them into automatons mimicking the currently established standards
of artistic perfection. Leaders can follow when they choose to follow. But
you can never learn to be a leader until you learn how to lead yourself. (Was
it General Patton who said that?) The arts are how we first learn to say what
it is we have in side of us; what we feel and think about things around us.
I would move towards the revamping of our art programs at
every level to refocus the emphasis on the artist and what he or she is trying
to express and to use the teaching of technique as a means of helping the
artist, in their efforts, to do so. The only people who will be unhappy about
this approach are those currently in charge and control of the arts establishments
and their supporters who prefer being told what is good and what is not instead
of going with their inner feelings about such things if, in deed, they have
any of those feeling left inside of them.
Further, in my effort to set things right, by which I mean
to put things back on a far more natural course, I would bring the Olympic
Games back into the guidelines of those who started the original games and
not the modern version in which has been omitted the arts, which had been
part and parcel of the celebration. I would have countries produce all manor
of live performance art and include it as events along with the athletic events.
I would limit the athletic events to those reflecting the words that I believe
were inscribed above the entrance of the original Olympic stadium, "Stronger,
Higher, Faster." I would include the Modern Pentathlon and Fencing in
its various forms and eliminate any sports that rely on outside judges to
determine the winner, such as diving, figure skating, ice dancing, tennis,
and all of the team sports, such as, baseball, basketball, tennis and hockey.
Such sports as baseball and tennis are fine for what they
and as they are and as crowd-pleasers, but they cloud the main focus of the
Olympic experience and dilute the importance of the experience for both the
participants and those who are privileged to observe; that is to show up at
a particular time and place an, using only one's entire being, to out perform
everyone else who has similarly come forward to do so.
