Recently, I was wandering through a vaulted museum hall, steel and concrete and glass packed with abstract sculptures that look vaguely like intestines, paintings resembling organized vomit, and lines of bored schoolchildren, and I realized this is what people think of when they think of “the arts.” That misconception makes it so much easier to attack them as dangerous, as garbage, or as an indulgence for the idle habits of a spoiled bourgeois.
When art programs are cut from schools, administrators and parents shrug, imagining the uselessness of training children to make collages or play the oboe. No one thinks we are engaging in “the arts” when we binge-watch Game of Thrones or fill our ears with a selection of favorite hip-hop tunes. But we are. When we talk of benefits as somehow being monetary or not, survival or not, we miss the point entirely. Without the arts, we are doomed to live on the surface only, at the most basic level of existence.
From the blown paint on the cave walls…
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