Art Is Not a Mirror Reflecting Society but a Hammer to Shape It

Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the force to force the moment to its crisis?
Merely though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly baldheaded) brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet–and here's no keen matter;
I take seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I take seen the eternal Footman hold my glaze, and snicker,
And in curt, I was afraid.

– from The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, T.Southward. Eliot

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On one side, nosotros have the ubiquitous cultural and ethical prompts of news media, institutional pedagogy, religious dogma. To counter that we have fine art. It'southward a battle, i which seems loaded confronting the petty guy.

Research published this week by Ohio State University throws some interesting data into a friction between the demands of social club and the responsibilities of art that has, as far equally we can tell, been grating forth for every bit long every bit at that place have been human beings around to be chafed by information technology. Structural anthropologists of the Levi-Strauss tradition notice the differing functions of priest and shaman, holding that the onetime's role is an in-community mediator betwixt temporal and divine power; the latter as an exterior forcefulness, singled-out from the customs information technology serves and by necessity excluded from information technology.

Mail service-structuralist fine art critics, writers, and other folk with too much time and nagging minds have long since shoehorned those characteristics of shaman and priest to fit the prevailing characteristics of their society and time. That art and artists should in some mode mirror the role of excluded shaman is, in some form or other, in some vocabulary or other, a recurrent proposition. But then we have the more muscular ideology of, amongs others, Bertolt Brecht: 'Fine art is not a mirror to hold upwardly to society, merely a hammer with which to shape information technology.'

The Ohio State inquiry though, develops the bespeak that, while reading a fictional story, readers found themselves: 'feeling the emotions, thoughts, behavior and internal responses of one of the characters as if they were their own'. So far, so normal. What they found that was of genuine interest, and of direct relevance to the whole puzzler of whether fine art should merely reflect society or influence it, was that the miracle of identifying with a fictional character – termed 'feel-taking', could influence the subsequent behaviour of the readers.

Readers who identified with a character who overcame difficulties in guild to vote, were more than likely to vote in a real election which occurred days subsequently the study. Readers showed more favourable attitudes towards those of unlike racial groups or sexual orientation later on identifying with characters of those groups.

it happened more than oft when the subjects read in a cubicle with a mirror

"Feel-taking changes us by allowing us to merge our own lives with those of the characters we read about, which tin lead to skillful outcomes," said Geoff Kaufman, who led the study as a graduate student at Ohio State. "Feel-taking doesn't happen all the time. It simply occurs when people are able, in a sense, to forget about themselves and their own self-concept and self-identity while reading". Interestingly, information technology happened more than oftentimes when the subjects read in a cubicle with a mirror (so do please avoid reading slash-fiction in your bathroom).

In ane experiment, 70 male, heterosexual higher students read a story about a solar day in the life of another student. There were three versions – one in which the character was revealed to be gay early in the story, i in which the student was identified as gay tardily in the story, and i in which the grapheme was heterosexual. The precis of the study is revealing:

'Those who read the gay-late narrative reported significantly more favorable attitudes toward homosexuals after reading the story than did readers of both the gay-early narrative and the heterosexual narrative.

Those who read the gay-late narrative besides relied less on stereotypes of homosexuals – they rated the gay character as less feminine and less emotional than did the readers of the gay-early story.

If people identified with the character before they knew he was gay, if they went through experience-taking, they had more positive views – the readers accustomed that this character was like them."

How long the effects of the identification lasted wasn't addressed in the study. Similar results were recorded when the protagonist of the narrative was portrayed equally black.

One pregnant feature of the written report results, and the primary reason why this news story appears in an arts-focused publication like Trebuchet, is that the creative aspect of the narrative given to the participants was significant to the consequence. Kaufman'southward research points out that experience-taking is different from perspective-taking, where people try to understand what another person is going though in a particular situation – merely without losing sight of their own identity. It works for fine art, non news.

And that is significant. Because although the quantity of news media nosotros experience far outweighs our feel of artistic expression, the latter seems more than capable of influencing our attitudes. Or to put it in the idiom of the artist – of touching our souls.

Sources:
Ohio State University
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

The aim of fine art is to represent non the outward appearance of things, but their in significance. – Aristotle

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Source: https://www.trebuchet-magazine.com/art-a-mirror-to-reflect-society-or-a-hammer-to-shape-it/

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