As many of you, I enjoy reading the Christian Science Monitor. When Mom was still lucid, we subscribed to the newspaper. She would devour it and we spent many hours at the kitchen table drinking coffee and discussing the articles. Mom “got” the internet, she tried to blog with me, answered a few emails, learned to google — when in her late 80s — but CSM online or the NYTimes online never truly tripped her trigger. I confess, it took me some time to get used to holding the MacAir instead of folded huge sheets of newsprint. Newspapers can never be replaced. What journalists don’t seem to understand is that we need them. We must have true, trained professionals dispensing information. Much as we need AP photographers and not just you and me and YouTube. (If you don’t agree, take a few minutes to check the Boston Globe’s retrospective of Obama’s 167 days. Those kind of photos don’t come from a Sony Cybershot, ya’ll)
Today, I began to ponder art and its function in society. Much like journalists, we need real artists. The following is by Diane Cameron in the Christian Science Monitor (online, of course, is where I go now to read..)
In the United States, we don’t murder artists but we do have culturally specific weapons for killing their work: We lower their status, minimize their contributions, and we cut their funding. We also belittle artists by suggesting that their opinions are irrelevant. It doesn’t make sense.
We accord legitimacy to attorneys and professors, and we let business leaders posit their perspectives on current affairs, but we deny that respect to those who have the most highly developed skill in sorting through rhetoric and images. Consider: Was Picasso irrelevant? Tolstoy? Dostoyevsky? Solzhenitsyn?
*click on the Diane Cameron link and read the entire editorial. It’s damn spiffy.
