Friday, May 06, 2022
Revelatory essay collection asks, Are the Arts Essential?
Literary Arts | Pittsburgh | Pittsburgh City Paper: In an essay for Are the Arts Essential? (NYU Press), Ford Foundation President Darren Walker writes about how the impact of art cannot be quantified because “one cannot measure the impact of empathy or love.”
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You can argue all day whether or not you actually need an arts education but I feel like everyone has already come to the grand consensus that they are? Like, I don't know why we're still even discussing this, they've finally changed the acronym from STEM to STEAM for Christ's sake. They explicitly include the art's because we can all see the value in expression through any medium and obviously, people will need to express emotions and feel something once in a while. so even if they don't engage or create the art, people will still consume it whether they like it or not and that's just the end of it. Making art for arts sake is always a thing but you have to remember that once you make something, it's out there forever and the impact you make may either be big or small but nonetheless it's still there.
I don't think that it was really in question that the arts are absolutely essential in some way, shape or form to a majority of people, whether they realize it or not. If you ask someone what the arts means to them in some way, whether it be a book they just read, their favorite TV show, the play opening at the theater downtown, you are guaranteed to find something that means a lot to a person and has changed them in some way. Arts are essential to humanity and our shared experience.
Another thing that I don't think people realize is how much stories actually affect us as humans. Everything has a story, no matter how mundane or trivial it is, and the arts are special in that because the stories that come out of the arts are specifically crafted with themes and a message in mind. It's a story that can only be uniquely told in the medium it was made in, and there is strong value in that.
I think it’s so funny when people argue about whether or not the arts are “essential”. Whether or not the arts are essential, think about how common art is. No matter how “useless” art is, it will always be a central part of the human experience because we make SO MUCH of it. Art is the lens through which people understand the world and themselves. The article talks about how, In Eustis’ essay, he writes about a theater group that toured rural Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, and Minnesota with a production of Lynn Nottage’s play, Sweat. In their essay “Leading Institutional Change: New Thinking about Mission, Values, and Purpose,” Jesse Rosen, the CEO of the American League of Orchestras, and Metropolitan Museum of Art CEO Daniel Weiss write about the Louisiana Philharmonic, displaced by Hurricane Katrina, being forced to play small, intimate venues. It is just interesting because arts and theatre are EVERYWHERE.
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