"What Does Art Do": Blog Post #2

What role does art serve in society? Why is the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) always threatened with losing funding? Why are the arts often the first to go when making spending cuts in schools?

Installation view of Pamela Council: Bury Me Loose at Denny Dimin Gallery, New York (all images courtesy the artist and Denny Dimin Gallery)

Art serves many significant roles in our society. Art has a great influence on our souls and emotions, which shape our moral values. It reflects the development and evolution of a person and humanity. Art also provides us insight into events, beliefs, and benefits at specific moments in time. In Ksenia M. Soboleva's article "Pamela Council Looks to Black Vernacular Culture to Expose Social Inequality," Soboleva mentions works of art "to expose systems of power and inequality in a society in which even death carries a high price tag." After reading the article, what I was impressed with most was the "BLAXIDERMY"–the term that combined "taxidermy" and "blaxploitation"– at the core of each work in the exhibition. "BLAXIDERMY" allusion to "culture's obsession with Black death, adornment, and performativity" which "Evoking the body while never directly representing it." Unequal treatment of people of color is a controversial issue and still happening in American society nowadays. Even though the artist didn't directly provide a representation of people of color, his work of art shows the empathy of the deaths of people of color and brings awareness of all the terrible things that happen in their life. Art plays an important role in our society as it simply creates a mood, expresses one's mood, and finds sympathy from others.

However, many people now seem misunderstood and underestimate the importance of art in our society. For instance, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is always threatened with losing funding, and the arts were often the first to go when making spending cuts in schools. People don't want to raise funds for the National Endowment for the Arts because they don't think it is worth their money, and arts were often the first to go when making spending cuts in schools because people don't think it helps to make students succeed later on in their life. Nevertheless, in the article "Artists and children collaborate to remake unearthed finds" by Kyle Kirkpatrick, she mentions that "The objects and drawings that the children created… allowed them to begin to unlock and think about the histories of the objects that they had found, as well as think of possible futures." Art is the act of creativity that has influenced people to make people want to work, explore, and study. For children, arts will help them develop aesthetic awareness and feel the beauty in art, life, and nature. In addition, arts also help children become more confident, know how to explore, discover, promote self-expression, develop their ability to think about images and creativity. I was angered and surprised that the arts are often the first to go when making spending cuts in schools, and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is always threatened with losing funding. When a work of art appears, people will stand under many different angles to evaluate and criticize it. If people, especially the young generation, do not have basic knowledge and are thoughtless to art because of a lack of education from a young age, how can they understand the meaning of art in their lives?

Work Cited

Kirkpatrick, Kyle. "Artists and children collaborate to remake unearthed finds." Environmental

Education, vol. 114, spring 2017, p. 19. Gale General OneFile,

link.gale.com/apps/doc/A660137824/ITOF?u=lausdnet&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=363d

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“Pamela Council Looks to Black Vernacular Culture to Expose Social Inequality.” Hyperallergic,

Ksenia M. Soboleva, 18 Oct. 2021,

https://hyperallergic.com/683798/pamela-council-bury-me-loose/.

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