On Art and Free Thinking!

Greetings folks!

It's been a couple of months I couldn't write anything. But here I'm now. Today I will talk about art which inspires me in many ways. Bengali art and culture are the things that bear my true identity and self.

All art is quite useless! Oscar Wilde once wrote in his preface, The Picture of Dorian gray. Here, I want to draw your attention to the word quite. It indicates that declaring art as utterly useless was a step too far for our general notion of that thing. Art is something of an unnecessary necessity for us human beings.

Just imagine for a moment a world without art and culture, without music, without cinema, without dance, opera, literature, poetry. That world would surely be a very, very dull place, devoid of imagination. It is imagination that makes us inclined with the true whole self and we together can relate the subtlety of its universal appeal.

This subtle feature distinguishes us as human beings from other species. Nowadays more and more Artists are inspired by reality than by the formal properties of that reality as we know them, colors, shapes, beauty etc. We live in a complex world and I have some sort of idea that art for art's sake is insufficient. We have to look beyond.

Another significant art form which we call socially and politically engaged art. Artists working in that particular realm, use different media to express themselves, from traditional media like sculpture and painting to film, video, performance, and installation. The utmost purpose of these art forms is to deal with key questions such as democracy, civil and human rights, capitalism, the economy, migration and mobility. But today I must focus on the arts that represent a certain cultural significance and identity.

Art is in a sense, as it is about a person's views and freedom to act, freedom to express themselves. So art is always about taking a position without being controlled by any external agencies. There have been many subtle moments in history where art was put to the service of politics and society in a program in which the gap between the two was temporarily bridged. And here the culture and its own significance embargoes.

One can never predict the ways in which art will affect people, change people's minds, or influence their subsequent behavioral patterns. It's a super power that changes the world one perception at a time. And that is why art is very often seen as the spokesman of culture and native insights.

Art is about one person's expectation and their use of their own freedom to act it out. Art is optimistic because we know that the subtle perspective of art can change the world, even if that world exists on a tiny piece of paper, five by seven inches. Art is an act of shared communication, and it is in a small way saying, I make the world, I don't simply inherit it. In making this world, what does art do then? Art can change the way we think.

It can crack open attached opinions, and it challenges the given. It looks at the world with a critical over eye. It opens up horizons, but beyond those which are familiar to us can be cannot be seen. It challenges standardized or problematic views of the world. It exposes that which is often hidden under the carpet. It reaches further than the accepted and the known and beyond the inevitabilities that we have been told we cannot escape. Art functions as the conscience of society.

In a world driven by popular consensus, art advocates difference and gives voice to the other. It highlights important ideas, problems, and issues that are sidelined or silenced due to political or economic interests or another reason. Art functions as the barometer of society, as a moral and intellectual resistance.

Art doesn't change the world on a macro level; it isn’t the purpose. It changes the world on a micro level. In that sense, its importance cannot be measured. Art changes things in a very subtle way. It is a form of soft power. Artists themselves are a free floating intelligence independently operating united who are free of the normative thinking of their environment and are able to act independently of social or class realities.

Art thinks about the world in its current state, and it can re-imagine the world as it should be. More importantly, art is the last frontier of unregulated free expression, which is utterly an expression of liberty and free thinking.
Are you with or without inclined to it?

Thanks
©chrysanthemum

[P. S. All the art are done by my students and I thank them wholeheartedly.]