Why We Need to Support the Arts

A message from our Westport editor:

As the editor of an online news service that covers, among other things, local arts and culture, I have a professional interest in the seemingly endless stream of events that flows from Fairfield County's creative community. Plays and performances, concerts and recitals, openings and exhibits, lectures and readings. From the Ridgefield Playhouse to the Levitt Pavilion, from Theatre Artists Workshop to Toquet Hall, there is always something happening around here, always a live event to take you out of yourself for an hour or two and immerse you in the world of a creator's imagination. 

I also have a personal predisposition towards the arts: My family includes two published authors, a professional actor, a former editor of a national online arts, culture, and style magazine, and a manager of corporate engagement at an education non-profit. I enjoyed a culturally rich childhood during which my mother, a former board member of Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, introduced me to modern painting and sculpture, took me to classical music concerts (Chicago Symphony, Beaux Arts Trio), treated me to theater weekends on Broadway and summer trips to the great museums of Europe, and fostered a life-long love of all forms of artistic expression. My late father was also a patron of the arts in Chicago, where I grew up, and had a literary lecture established in his memory at the Jewish Community Centers that brought Saul Bellow (whom I introduced), Cynthia Ozick, Alfred Kazin, and Harold Brodkey, among others, to the podium. This heritage of culture surely influenced me to take up my own pursuits of writing and photography.

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I sometimes worry that as a community---or nation for that matter---privileged to enjoy so many amazing artistic offerings, we take our riches for granted and don't think much about why it's crucial to support the arts by contributing our presence (attending), our funds (donating), our involvement (volunteering), and our engagement (creating, performing, and participating to the degree we are able). So I decided to write this piece about what I believe the arts do for us and why I consider it so important to invest in maintaining a thriving local arts scene.

1. The Arts Inspire. Most of what we do on a day-to-day basis doesn't appeal to our better nature. We come away from work, parenting, and many social interactions drained, dragging, even depressed. We go through the motions, and we often tire and burn out from the stress and drudgery. What happens when we attend a live performance---a play, a concert, a spoken-word storytelling event, an author's reading at the bookstore? We leave feeling energized, dosed with a shot of imagination. The artist has given us a front-row seat in the center of his cerebral cortex and shown us that, even for a short while, life needn't be dull, ordinary, or routine. Even seeing a movie or reading a book causes us to think about the world in a way we most likely hadn't before, because we've experienced something original, something born in another person's mind. When we leave a performance venue buzzing, it's because we've caught the bug. The arts inspire us to dream our own dreams.

2. The Arts Celebrate. We live in a cynical world in which the mainstream media lifts its profits by putting people down. Stories have angles, and angles form sharp points. We call out mistakes and missteps, blast bloopers all over the Internet, and show no mercy for the fallen. But the arts, the arts celebrate talent and achievement along with the full range and complexity of the human condition. The arts---and in particular live performance---promote our triumphs with humility and acknowledge our fragility, our fallibility, our imperfections with grace.

3. The Arts Value Collaboration. Every artistic effort, every shred of creative output, is the result of collaboration and cooperation on some level. No work is created in a vacuum. No performance is put on alone. The model who poses for the painter collaborates on the portrait. The actor in the one-man show relies on the stage hands for sound and light. And any performer, of course, collaborates with the creator of the work to bring it to life and share it with an audience. Even writers, who often lead solitary lives while working, need the people they see at the coffee shop, the mall, the dentist's office, wherever, to draw from as material.

Most important, though, the arts have an impact on people. They shift the way we see things and open us up to new ways of thinking. They shape our philosophy, shatter our illusions, and shepherd us on life's journey. They reflect the times we live in while also presenting an ideal we aspire to reach or an idyll to which we wish to return. The arts touch lives and leave them altered, enhanced, and illuminated. The arts brighten, and a world without them would be desperately dark. This is why we must support the arts.

R
Submitted by Redding, CT

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