Art Influences Culture or Culture Influences Art?

Culture Influences Art 

My friend and I had a long discussion about art and culture. We concluded that culture definietly influences art:  look at  pop art. Pop art is really only meaningful within the context of a commercialist culture. It reacts to commercialism and the repetitive, flashy marketing messages bombarding us in our culture.Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroes and Campbells soup can wouldn’t mean anything to a tribesman from Indonesia because he doesn’t know the cultural context that gives meaning to this art.

There are works of art that transcend culture, that stand outside of time and culture to speak to us on a basic human level.  The Mona Lisa.  A tribesman from Indonesia would be just as intrigued by her smile as a Renaissance man.  Mozart. Bach. Beethoven. Vivaldi. You can’t help but be fascinated no matter where or when you are from.

My friend and I decided that some works of art that transcend culture speak to us on a human level, not a cultural level. So culture influences some art and some art stands outside its culture.

Art Influences Culture

Is one of the roles of art within a culture to reflect back to us what we look like as a society and to show that maybe who we are could use some change?   

An artist’s main intent, we felt, is not so much to effect societal change, but to express an idea or concept or feeling. That idea, concept or feeling could be generated by the culture or by the state of being human.  These comments are important to a society. They are warnings: Hey, society, look at what you are doing as a collective. Is this truly the way you want to go? 

The effect of art seems not to directly cause major change within a society. That would be your Che’s. Instead, artists can reach people on an emotional level, fire up sentiment which then influences people to act.

First Up Against the Wall When the Revolution Comes
The rebels and the intellectuals and the artists.  Artists see societal change for what it is, they can predict outcomes, and they have “voices” to communicate what they see through the power of symbols, stories, and emotional connections. They are influential in that they help emotionally support societal movements and change.  They provide connections, cohesion, symbols, impetus, and emotional rationale for change.

What Should We Be Paying Attention to Now?

What are our artists saying today? What are the trends?

Time Manage Your Life

After reading Kai Nagata’s blog on why he quit his CTV reporting job, I got to thinking about people who make radical changes in the direction their life is going. For those of us older than Kai, it’s called mid-life crisis and I think it’s a healthy phase to go through.  It’s a time of re-evaluating where we are going and where we’d like to go. 

One thing Kai wrote that struck me, especially coming from a 24-year old, was “…on the long list of things I could be doing, television news is not the best use of my short life.”  Hmmm. It’s true. Our lives are short.  We should reflect on how we are spending our time on earth. We learn to manage our time at work.  Why not take it to a larger scale and learn to manage our time on earth?

Like many others, I participated in a time management training session at work. We were taught to identify our high priorities on the job and focus our energies there (see Quadrants 1, 2 in the table below). Smaller, distracting tasks (Quadrant 3) should just fill in the time around those larger priorities.  Activities in Quadrant 4 are the time-wasters and should be avoided altogether.

Why not apply those same principles to our lives? If we did, what would we be doing?  What to us are the most important activities in life? What are the things we would regret not doing when we die?  “I wish I had had the courage to live a life true to myself” is a common regret of people on their deathbeds.  If we can learn to identify what are our Quadrant 1’s in life and make sure we work on those things, our lives will be filled with activities that lead us towards fulfillment, not regret.

Our time management instructor used the illustration of the large rocks and small rocks in a jar to explain how you to change your priorities in order to spend time on what’s important. The jar is your time.  Important activities (Quadrant 1’s and 2’s) are big rocks. If you fill up your jar with sand and small rocks first (the unimportant activities), and wait to put in the big rocks into the jar later, you won’t be able to fit the big rocks into the jar. What’s important for you to accomplish won’t happen.

But, if you fill up your jar with big rocks first and then let the little rocks and the sand (unimportant activities) fill in the time around those big, important rocks, you will be able to accomplish the things that are really important because they will come first.  You will also get all the little things done because they will fill in around the big items.

If we apply that same concept to our lives, we should be filling our time on earth and focusing on those things that are important for us to achieve in life.  And we should let the smaller, distracting activities fill in around those priorities.

I had to think this through for myself. What are the most important things I want to accomplish in life? 

I came up with these for my own Quadrant 1’s: 

•   Take care of my loved ones
•  Live in a happy, loving, sharing relationship
•  Learn as much as I can
• Travel as much as I can 
•   Help others see their potential and run with it
•  Share knowledge, joy

It’s not really a bucket list, although that’s a great exercise as well.  It’s about prioritizing time. We only go around once: we should manage that time well and work on what’s truly significant to us. 

 

So…what are your big rocks?  What would you like to spend your time on earth doing? 

Gardening made E.Z.

If you are a non-gardener  (like me) and you’d like to give growing veggies a try, here’s what I’d suggest for easing into it.

Start with container gardening.  It’s easy, rewarding, and doesn’t involve knowing anything except that plants need water and sun.

•  Buy a bunch of pots (if you are on a budget, get them at yard sales).
• Buy some bags of potting soil.
•  Buy some little baby herbs like basil, rosemary, mint, chives (for Eastern Canada/U.S.) 
• Put the soil in the pots (it will make a mess) and then pop one baby herb plant into a hole you make in the soil of each pot.
•  Water.
•   Put in a sunny spot.  Watch that they don’t get too much sun (they will look wilty and unhealthy). Make sure you water them every other day or so.

Once you get the swing of that, you can also try planting seeds that say “patio garden” or “container garden” on them.  I’ve had success growing lettuce, carrots, green onion, Swiss chard, and chives from seed in pots.

You need to plant them in the spring after risk of frost at night is over (last weekend in May or so).

This is the point I’m at in my gardening.  Next year, I plan to get really serious with a raised bed garden and lots more lettuce, spinach, some zucchini, garlic and Swiss chard.

Benefits of even minimal gardening:

• Pride: You will find yourself pointing out to those at your table that the normal-looking salad was made from your own lettuce and baby Swiss chard (your tone will convey an expectation of praise and acclaim).

• Taste:  Lots more herbs!! You can add fresh herbs to dishes with wild abandon now.  I used to carefully ration my store-bought fresh basil.  Now I chop up handfuls because there’s lots and more coming. 

• Satisfaction: Feel connected to the land. It will make you feel wholesome to say in a casual way to your sous-chef (aka child), “Would you go out and pick me a little rosemary for the roasted potatoes?”

Anybody else with a new green thumb have ideas for container gardening or how to start out as a newbie gardener?

Speculations on the Future of the English Language

Linguistic speculations from my past

As a former linguistics student, language use and language variations fascinate me.  I remember arguing passionately with my best friend’s boyfriend in grad school about whether or not it was appropriate to teach Black English Vernacular (BEV) to second language learners who would be living and working in an area where the predominant variation of English was BEV.

His argument was that second language learners should always be taught standard academic English and afterwards they can try to learn non-standard variants.  My argument was that teaching someone standard English that makes them communicate inappropriately in their target language community (“Delighted to meet you” in da hood) won’t help them fit in or communicate well if they are immersed in an environment that uses a “non-standard” English variation.  

My position these days would be less the zealous linguistics student and more the moderate, experienced teacher. No more frothing at the mouth for teaching BEV.

Linguistic speculations today

Instead, my latest passion is for online variations of English.  There are all sorts of new and flexible ways to use spelling, punctuation, abbreviations, grammar, vocabulary, morphemes…. It’s a great new language playground out there!!   

I think online English brings out the rebel in me: I love seeing how everyone is breaking all the rules and getting away with it. w00t! e e cummings, it's ur new day! Rejoice in texting acronyms! (LOL—once I mashed the keyboard with my fist and sent the letter blob to a colleague who uses lots of texting acronyms—took him half an hour of searching to realize I’d just sent him random letters.) Gotta  love tweets (RT@someoneyouknow), throw in the pronouns  “i” and “u,” add a few “z” to wordz, publish “thru” defiantly in ur blog, and isn’t it gr8 2 use #s, 2? Even the emoticons bring me glee.

Purist writer colleagues shudder.  They point to the degradation of the language and bemoan the fate of the English language: everyone is writing like first graders or worse and getting away with it!  It is all so sick and wrong.

My theory on the future of the English language

Here’s what I say to calm them down.  I tell them that I think  we could potentially end up with two written variations of English:

1.  High English (formal, academic English with set rules and  guidelines for professional and international text) 
2. Low English (informal, “improper” but commonly accepted English with evolving and flexible rules for everyday communication)

The fact that my purist friends know the High English well would benefit them. They’d be in demand as fewer and fewer people would be able to write in High English, but it would be necessary for professional, international documents.

The Low English would not be accepted internationally nor yet standardized due the constant changes in its use.  It would only be used for casual, online communication where you don’t have to worry about conventions or rules—you just need to get your message across.

What do you think?

I’m open to other theories along these lines.  What do you think is going to happen to written English?  Will we ever see teachers accepting essays about “wat i did 4 summr vctn”?