Looking Back

 

Source: Pixabay

We've finally reached the end of the Semester, and it's been quite the ride.  Overall, this entire year has just been a whirlwind of one major event right after another.  Looking back at the beginning of the course, we were posed with some core questions.  What is art?  What is the purpose of art?  What art is worth archiving?  I don't think my answer to those first few questions has changed.  I still think art is simply an expression of emotion and that it's purpose is to help people convey and cope with what is happening in their lives or the wider world.  As for the last question, I, probably not so skillfully, avoided addressing it at the beginning of the course.  I had no idea how to begin to answer that one.  Fourteen weeks later, and I still don't think I quite have an answer for it.  I think what art is worth archiving depends on the issues that a person cares about and the forms of art they appreciate most.  I remember being told in history classes that you can never know what a time period will be defined by until so many years after the fact because time periods are defined by the legacies they leave.  Which events get put in history textbooks is determined by which ones had significant impacts decades later, others are just forgotten.  We won't be able to know which events are which until that happens.  With so many different crises occurring at the same time, everything feels significant.  However, when future generations look back on this year, some of those crises will drown out other.  I'm probably overthinking the question because it feels like every piece of art is significant, but archiving everything just isn't plausible and, realistically, some will have greater impact and be more important than others to the majority of people.  I still don't have an answer to that question, but I do now have a more eloquent way of explaining why I don't have an answer.

Another thing that was asked of us at the beginning of the semester was for us to write our own personal goals.  I actually wrote a little about them last week, although I didn't explicitly state that they were the goals that I had set.  I think that I definitely did improve on the skills I decided to focus on, but not nearly as much as I had wanted to.  For example, I am definitely still procrastinating, but not as much as I used to.  The voice in my head going "It's okay, you'll still have time to get it done later," is a little quieter and the voice going, "No.  Get start getting it done now," is a little louder.  This is definitely better than nothing, I'll just have to keep working on it.

As a whole, this course was definitely interesting.  A lot of the concepts were things that I've been told before, but never actually got to explore.  Art and History have always remarked about the relationship between art and cultural movements, but never took the time to show those deep connections, and definitely not with current cultural movements.  I'm really grateful that I got to take this course and explore that connection for myself.