Art Is for Seeing Evil

- “Art exposes us to the universal experience of being a meaning-making animal in a universe where meanings falter. A good definition of art, it seems to me, might be the science of making meaning-making tools.”

For all its good intentions, art that tries to minister to its audience by showcasing moral aspirants and paragons or the abject victims of political oppression produces smug, tiresome works that are failures both as art and as agitprop. Artists and critics—their laurel bearers—should take heed.

Russell writes that “for hundreds of years, and on many matters of supreme importance, art had the edge over all other sources.” It gave out the truth about this world and the next one. It encapsulated history. It told us what people wiser than ourselves were thinking. It told the stories that everyone wanted to hear…answered the great riddles, fil

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My working definition of art is thus derived in part from both a moderate institutional theory that recognizes the important role that the museum space plays in determining meaning and mediating a history, tradition, and theory of what occurs in that space, and an ecological theory of art that affirms that in its making and viewing, art does someth

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This is why art matters: because it dredges our psychic depths in ways that even the artist may not understand. “The arts,” writes the Zen poet Gary Snyder, following Levi-Strauss, “are the wilderness areas of the imagination, surviving like national parks in the midst of civilized minds.” Strange things grow in the wilderness; unusual plants thriv... See more

art works better as a way of seeing than as a way of showing. The arts can document and sometimes pre-empt changes in how people view the world around them, pointing to multiple perspectives or clashes, deconstructing and reconstructing, taking people up to the cosmic or down to the microscopic. They can do this in compelling ways that reach large

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