Profound creations within the artistic disciplines, like no other means of communication are capable, yield to the public the unique dispositions of our human condition. Throughout the history of art, paramount, canonical artists and movements have heralded cultural evolutions in which marked progressions to the welfare of humanity are observable.
As George Steiner affirms in his essay Real Presences, “The ‘purest’ work of art, the most abstemious from conceivable empirical instruction or appliance, is, by virtue of that very purity and abstention, a sharply political gesture, a value-statement of the most evident ethical import. We cannot touch on the experiencing of art in our personal and communal lives without touching, simultaneously, on moral issues of the most compelling and perplexing order… It is the capacity of the arts to make us, if not at home, at least alertly, answerably peregrine in the unhousedness of our human circumstance.” Steiner, George. Real Presences. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989, p. 140-144.
During the twentieth century, to the benefit of our country, distinct movements of realist art ushered in progressive reform to countless crises within its social arena. As a new century has commenced, I believe it is my sincere obligation to reflect on the history of our country, our faith, and those freedoms that we presume to be self-evident to equip myself with those means necessary to use art to protect the very foundations of our being that so many individuals have fought to ensconce.
