Artworks are powerful conveyors of ideas and values. They demonstrate that cultural artifacts are one place where the rubber hits the road, as it were, with respect to how images and ideas relate. In these protests, art’s power to propound ideas and embody values is being used as a weapon to oppose certain events and ideas some find objectionable.
As human beings we have an extraordinary ability to think scientifically, to disassemble the world mathematically, to come out of ourselves and solve problems objectively. But we also have the concomitant subjective faculties of contemplation, appreciation, and reflection.
The problem with the LAO guide is that it destroys meritocracy in the orchestral repertoire, and places a heavy burden on artistic organizations to choose diversity over compositional merit.
The artistic and creative personae of a performer or composer is a manifestation of his entire life experience, everything that he has listened to, and his basic constitution, and his personality. Whereas in the hard or social sciences we care little about the person who discovers a truth, because it is “out there,” with the arts, we wish to know about the painter or composer, because it comes from “inside,” it is of “them.”
It was Andy Warhol, who through Pop Art transformed the wedded cults of celebrity and consumerism into icons for our national and international contemplation.
Thus past, present and future converge to create an artwork whose meaning is immediately accessible but whose spatial and semantic depth successfully merge to produce one of the greatest works of art ever created.
Music in the academy is at risk. The decline in its status, presence, and reach can be traced to the cultural shifts beginning in the 1960s. Western classical music—with its unassailable history of accomplishment and undeniable pedagogical, cultural, and spiritual significance—has fallen prey to the assault on standards and hierarchies embodied by the era’s ethos of: “Hey-hey, ho-ho, Western Civ. has got to go.”
Is it conceivable for such a deeply rooted art from an Asian culture to inform the spirituality of the American or European viewer? Quite possibly.
Through his partnership with Eliot Fisk, Beaser has made a major and lasting contribution to the solo guitar repertoire with numerous pieces including “Notes on a Southern Sky.” Placed after the “Concerto,” it might be considered a lengthy encore. The work was one of Beaser’s first to look at folk music, in this case, that of Venezuela.
Five hundred years after the artist’s death, Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper has continued to inspire both believers and non-believers alike. The artwork seems to have tapped into in our collective consciousness. How so?
A space for the Beautiful.