Creeping Meatball



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September 26, 2008

Comments

Art doesn't teach, it shows. Agit-prop teaches. But art can show the best in human nature, and by doing so, it can bolster our audience's courage, hope, faith in a better future. We come in touch with possibility. You're right: "Our entertainment symbolizes our dreams and nightmares, which can easily be analyzed and decoded." Our entertainment also can influence our dreams and nightmares.

I have NEVER been a big fan of agit-prop, so whatever it does, I don't want any part of it. ;)

I would argue that cultural relevance is, by it's very nature, directly tied to a choice by the artist to navigate in the same current which their audience swims - upstream, downstream, cross-current - those are up to the individual. Standing on shore as an artist, however, while others attempt to swim, float, or just keep from drowning is relevant to no one but the author and is narcisistic.

While I don't often comment on your posts Laura (this is my first, actually), I read them with interest. Cultural relevance, especially in America, among artists, is often seen as "selling out." One only needs to look at others who have "swam" in the currents of their audience before - Brecht, Boal, Ibsen, Shakespeare, etc. - to see that it is the very combination of the work they produced, for their unique audience, at their unique moment in history that makes it meaningful and gave it "wings" to last beyond it's time.

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