November 26, 2024
This is the week of Thanksgiving, and I am giving thanks for Art with a capital A.
Art with a capital 'A' is more than just painting or drawing. When most people think of art today, they may include music, literature and poetry, and the performing arts including theater, dance, and film.
However, classical antiquity took an even broader view. In his Republic, Plato outlined the seven liberal arts as the essential fields of knowledge for a free, well-educated citizen to be able to take part in civic life. Those seven were divided into the arts of the word (the Trivium) which included rhetoric, grammar, and dialectic (or logic), but also the "arts" of numbers (the Quadrivium) which included astronomy, mathematics, geometry, and music.
Later, Renaissance scholars downplayed logic and added history, Greek, moral philosophy (ethics), and poetry.
Those categories changed over time, and modern liberal arts comprises four broad areas: arts, humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. You can dive really deep into this topic on my website. What is the Garden of (Your) Delights?
Regardless of the way you divide the topics or what you include, Art can not only educate but inspire and uplift. In essence, Art is taking the beauty you have received from the world and giving it back in your own way, passing it along to others who will receive and give.
In Mary Oliver's poem "Sometimes", she gives "Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it."
That, too, is Thanksgiving.
As Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said, “…one ought every day at least to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.”
Comments