What Are Some Ways That Art Affects & Reflects The World?
Images can change the way we think about cultures and about ourselves. They can create a new story, a new narrative in art history and in the world. She thinks that the power of images is to raise the question of how people understand themselves and each other.
*** Some Ways Art Effects Society and Culture ***
Art promotes communication between cultures— Art is a universal language that breaks cultural barriers and gives people respect for the beliefs and traditions of others. Using art can be an effective way of uniting individuals of contrasting cultures and improving their understanding of and communication with one another.
Art preserves history — Art is one of the single best preservers of history, which has a huge impact on culture and society, and it is also a great history teacher. Simply looking at art infuses respect for history into us, “and this art and history can influence the way that you see and appreciate the world, as well as how you see and appreciate past and present cultures from around the globe,” stated Social Justice Solutions.
Art changes people’s opinions — Can you remember a time when art changed your opinion about something? Perhaps it was as petty as your favorite color or as serious as your stance on moral or religious issues. Since it engages us emotionally, the messages of art tend to go right past our logical minds and into our hearts where decisions can be readily changed.
It preserves the feelings of a culture — Artists have a crazy ability to capture feelings, and art historians are keepers and preservers of those feelings. “Painting, sculpture, music, literature, and the other arts are often considered to be the repository of a society’s collective memory. Art preserves what fact-based historical records cannot: how it felt to exist in a particular place at a particular time,” stated a contributor to Paint and Party. This unique ability almost seems magical, but it’s as real as can be.
*** How Art Has The Power To Change The World ***
Most of us know the feeling of being moved by a work of art, whether it is a song, a play, a poem, a novel, a painting, or a Spatio-temporal experiment. When we are touched, we are moved; we are transported to a new place that is, nevertheless, strongly rooted in a physical experience, in our bodies. We become aware of a feeling that may not be unfamiliar to us but that we did not actively focus on before. This transformative experience is what art is constantly seeking.
Engaging with art is not simply a solitary event. The arts and culture represent one of the few areas in our society where people can come together to share an experience even if they see the world in radically different ways. The important thing is not that we agree about the experience that we share, but that we consider it worthwhile sharing an experience at all. In art and other forms of cultural expression, disagreement is accepted and embraced as an essential ingredient. In this sense, the community created by arts and culture is potentially a great source of inspiration for politicians and activists who work to transcend the polarising populism and stigmatization of other people, positions, and worldviews that is sadly so endemic in public discourse today.
Art also encourages us to cherish intuition, uncertainty, and creativity and to search constantly for new ideas; artists aim to break rules and find unorthodox ways of approaching contemporary issues.
We believe that art can change the world by bringing us together to share and discuss, a work of art can make us more tolerant of differences and of one another. The encounter with art – and with others over art – can help us identify with one another, expand our notions of we, and show us that individual engagement in the world has actual consequences. That’s why we hope that in the future, art will be invited to take part in discussions of social, political, and ecological issues even more than it is currently and that artists will be included when leaders at all levels, from the local to the global, consider solutions to the challenges that face us in the world today.