Art as An Agent of Change: Some Arguments

". . . as Picasso put it, art can be "the lie that makes us realize truth." The artist, as Howard Zinn wrote in "Artists in Time of War" in the wake of 9/11, "thinks, acts, performs music, and writes outside the framework that society has created." In doing so, "the artist is telling us what the world should be like, even if it isn't that way now." Powerful as that can be, Zinn believed that artists could and should go further. Citing Mark Twain, Langston Hughes, Bob Dylan and others, he argued for an art that not only transcends received wisdom and conventional thinking but also actually changes it."

"If art can alter the course of human history, it's a difficult case to prove. Has a symphony ever led to the overthrow of a repressive regime? Can a movie affect an outcome at the ballot box? Do novels make readers more compassionate and generous people? "Socially critical artistic creation," writes Paul von Blum in "The Critical Vision: A History of Social and Political Art in the United States," "has rarely resulted in direct and immediate political change."

"But that's not the standard that art should have to meet. Art doesn't stand on a street corner barking out its message. Its true medium is not paint or notes or words on a page. It speaks to us from and through the deepest wells of human consciousness, the source points of our thoughts and feelings, invoking our moral natures while acknowledging our dark recesses. It demands nothing of us - no direct social action, no contribution to a political party, no picketing on the streets. Instead it summons us, as nothing else does, to see ourselves and the world we share in the broadest possible way, to fully acknowledge our connectedness - to each other, to history and the future, to the beauties and terrors of a flawed and striving world.

The poet Wilfred Owen said that "all a poet can do today is warn." At one level, that's a concession of how limited and ineffectual art is. At another, it's a call to act - to listen and attend as closely as possible, to hear and see as fully as we can." -from an essay by freelance writer, Steven Winn.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/08/18/PK7F1KM95L.DTL&ao=2#ixzz1XfA9b5oL