ၜ Humans have an innate, subconscious need to make their deepest selves visible to others (~ to "Society"). This is projection, which ranges from the harmless (e.g., posture mirroring as a means of expressing similarity to the group) to the malicious (psychological projection, i.e., viewing others through the lens of one's own Shadow.)

ၜ All Art is projection, from Munch's angst in The Scream, to Cleever alcoholic guilt in The Swimmer, to Michelangelo's grief in the Madonna della Pietò.

ၜ It's a cliche to say that all first novels are autobiography. But all novels are unconsciously autobiographical to some degree. Authors merely get better at disguising themselves from themselves.

ၜ This replication of ourselves as Art, to the extent that it fills a need, is usually healthy and, like writing, often therapeutic to a great degree. It's no surprise that "Art therapy" is effective for people in general. The questions that naturally follow include: Is Art also therapeutic for the viewer, the reader, the audience, and ultimately, Society? Does Art reflect zeitgeist? Can Art be harmful?

ၜ I speak as a novelist, playwright, poet, lover of psychology, and occasional actor, artist, and screenwriter. Since much of Art springs from the so-called "Unconscious," my thoughts on the region of the latter responsible for creativity may be relevant or perhaps otherwise of interest. I call that region "The Guardienne," reflecting its primary function. I consider it autonomous and sentient, but without conscience.

Preprint The Guardienne and Creativity

Thanks for your insights and the link to your essay, Geoffrey. I will read it. Please feel free to post art here, as well. I see your are a visual artist.

Yes, I design my own book covers and dabble in various media. I also design puzzles and study the most difficult puzzle of all.

Very fine work on the reflections, Geoffrey. Thanks for showing this.

Thank you, Gloria. These 26 puzzle pieces can be assembled into 27 different shapes, some easy, some extreme.

Todas las poblaciones tiene su arte, así tenemos el arte Griego, El Romano, El etrusco etc. Lo importante es establecer las característica del arte de la población que deseas estudiar. Con gusto te puedo ayudar.

Так, зараз це особливо відчутно в українському суспільстві та в українському мистецтві, частна якого до повномасштабного вторгнення Росії в Україну не гребувала російськими мистецькми контактами, проєктами, грантами та поширенням російських наративів. Зараз ті митці, які це робили, майже всі повтікали в Європу, мало хто з них захищає свою країну зі зброєю, навіть якщо це молоді та здорові чоловіки. Проте за кордоном вони тепер раптом такі проукраїнські...

Art & society remain the companion of each other.Society consists of members of different contributed action joining with the art ,language , & in case sometime the interest of nature . It is in this line the performance & the creation of art remain directly connected with the society .

It is the art only beautify the nature & environment of the society for every nature of human beings for every part of the nation .

It is in this line some years back I have expressed my views regarding the subject ''Art in the nature of divinity which I submit herewith for your kind information '' Arts joining with the spirituality may contribute a pleasurable environment for his working to the people of the society & also far away with his creation for the surrounding areas of distance.

This is my personal opinion

Art itself is a Social phenomenon. It is being created by human beings who are socially conditioned and who live in society. Art reflects the social condition and culture of that particular time when it was created.

Dear Olena Vondareva,

I translated your post. Good luck to those working for human rights and an end to war and enforced "binary thinking." S. I. Hayakawa's semantic text Language in Thought and Action shows how "two-valued thought" works. This kind of group thinking generates "buzz words." He gives many examples of how to become non-Aristotelian and two-valued. This process goes better and worse and in some localities it cannot take root, or not yet.

One of the greatest crises of meaning is recognition of each other's cultures (whatever--management and labor, one country and its neighbors, women and men, dogs and cats, one religion and another) is most important. With lessened tensions we hopefully will see new opportunities for all of Eastern Europe. Nobody silencing anybody or any side. This may be a kind of "Just imagine" but that is what art is.

I grew up in a steel mill town and used what was around as my aesthetic. Maybe was the first to do "industrial folk art." That is an oxymoron because "folk" are supposed to be rural and rustic. We in our steel mill town often could relate to science and technology. We didn't look back at Medieval fantasy like the people in The Society for Creative Anachronism did. We tended to look forward and read science fiction writers like Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clark. Now they are many more racially diverse writers of science fiction and also gender non-binary.

From my East Chicago digital art series, where you live and in what micro-culture tends to help to define how you view the cosmos and where you fit into the cosmos. It is a challenging puzzle we spend our lives attempting to answer.

NOTE: I will try to be better and answer you faster!

From my East Chicago--digital art series. There are more, but I don't want to bore you. We from industrial towns use our surroundings as our material. It wells up from unconscious layers of our minds just as more rustic imagery comes to those who live in the countryside. (I did have trees around where I lived, but the industrial landscape was always present.) We are not better or worse than rural artists, just a different aesthetic that comes to our minds from our surroundings. I also gave surreal voice to some buildings on Main Street in East Chicago. We saw the Japanese film GODZILLA at the Garden Theater in East Chicago when it came out. GODZILLA was a product of the Japanese culture after Hiroshima. Some of us in the US learned about all that and we hope that atomic weapons are never again used. My point is that every locality has a background that imprints its artists.

Does this make sense to anybody?

1) "Girl and Her Mars"

2) "Planet Vulcan to the Galaxies"

3) "Garden Theater's BIG Patron"

Дякую, шановна Глорія

Dear Olena,

Tell students never to stop dreaming. It is so important.

Шановна пані Глоріє, наші студенти вміють не тільки мріяти. Багато хто зараз на фронті захищає Україну. Маємо вже кількох загиблих, на жаль.

My friend's friend paints beautiful pictures of local scenes and then has exhibitions and sells her work as birthday cards, etc.

We go to her exhibitions when she comes to our town and stock up on cards.

They are always lovely social occasions; you see the same, like minded people as in the past, and it is always pleasant conversation.

Yes, Dr Gloria Lee Mcmillan, I definitely see a connection.

Thanks, Mary Wilson, being attuned to the lovely in life has both costs and benefits depending up the needs of the artist and of the viewer. For those with serious health issues, perhaps, this rosy lens is the best lens on life.

For others in economic, physical, or gender constrained circumstances, they would chafe at such a border being placed around how their art might connect to society. It is the right of any person doing art to decided what kind of style and themes to choose. Many people choose to make original artistic work challenging limitations that were laid upon them at birth or later.

ART and SOCIETY connect in several ways and are as varied as the artists, are they not?

Dear Art ands Society Readers,

This is from the Planet Zoom Players:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcQMqRwuJDs

WORLD PREMIERE of the war / peace /colonialism play

“The Crystal Egg!” 7PM Sun July 30Pacific

The famed science fiction writer H. G. Wells had a nightmare (of colonialism) after his brother had read and told Wells that the last indigenous Tasmanian had died. Must contacts among different beings always be exploitive? Must wars always happen over differences? This PRECURSOR play “The Crystal Egg” is more open-ended and challenging than the later War of the Worlds. Don’t miss “The Crystal Egg” because TWO WILPF members are involved in this play and four WILPF members are in our Planet Zoom Players.

“We men, the creatures who inhabit this earth, must be to them [the Martians] at least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us. […] And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and dodo, but upon its own "inferior" races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?” -H. G. Wells

My cartoon series Adventures in Rat Lab Land is rather a comment on society as well as science. I have been sharing these cartoons over at how does ART connect to SCIENCE? discussion but I also have noticed that once start this series seems to be growing a social network of its own (!) bring in character from various films and cultural places.

ORIGIN STORY: I was accidentally thrown into 3rd year Rat Lab experiential psychology class when entering college as an English majoring freshman. Like Peter Parker who became Spiderman due to an accident, I discovered that I could think like a lab rat, at least a cartoon lab rat. So sometimes I see something and it inspires one of this cartoon series. You can see how sociological my rats are and they do relate to society.

I was just inspired by the horror film about a super smartie little rat named BEN (came out in 1971) that was on the Movie Channel last night. This cartoon lab rat family have adopted Elsa Lanchester, the actor who played The Bride of Frankenstein in the 1935 Universal film of that name. I am beginning to feel like this is a strange little Duckburg (Disney's Donald Duck characters' town) where creatures may come and go. You can't watch BEN without doing a Lab Rat Land cartoon.

Dear Readers of this question about The Arts and Society,

Just to keep things going, wherever you are, what theatre works represent the most interesting view of society?

I think we have some good examples in the US, but tell me yours, please.

Give us photos of this artwork, play, or performance, if you wish.

I think art is always connected to society in some way. That's unavoidable. Where art can go wrong - and cease being art - is when it strays into ideology and tries to teach/persuade that one is better than another.

Dear Derek Allan,

Many in the field of Art Studies think that art always has an ideology. Those most insistent that it does not have one political stance that forms their worldview There are many documents regarding this issue of the inability of any claim to "non-ideological" art to prove that claiming to have no political agenda is not--in itself--a political agenda.

The question is more about allowing differing political agendas in art to co-exist. As a general rule, art that claims not to have an agenda does claim to be pure in form and thus superior to that art 'tainted' by politics; since these are all rhetorical constructs, which is to say, what is 'pure' or 'impure,' then this is a rhetorical non-starter in that neither side agrees to accept the other's type of evidence (see Lyotard's _The Differend_.)

AI and its binaries are much like the titles given to some purely abstract formalist music, yet people are terrified of the 'inhuman' in machine learning while these same people approve of purely mechanical/mathematically-driven music sporting no 'programmatic' title and using only numeric designations.

There is grounds for humor here. Art cures hardening of the categories, doesn't it?

Hi Gloria, No, I'm sorry, I think the "all art has a political agenda" idea is misleading. It can only sound plausible if a work of art is given a narrow interpretation. ("The Merchant of Venice is an antisemitic play because it makes us dislike Shylock" - that kind of silliness). Politics can easily crush the life out of art. That doesn't mean that "political subjects" are off limits. There are some great works that have their political moments - e.g. Dostoevsky's "The Possessed".

I agree that you have valid grounds for your own position, as is normal in rhetoric. But other positions also have valid evidence. as I said, what leads to insoluble conflict is when one of more sides in a contentious issue refuse to accept the validity of the other side's TYPE of evidence. In this instance, that would be prioritizing the rational basis for one's own research and documented opinion and discounting the validity of somebody else's.

No matter what the position, the inability of being able to accept the worth of parallax views from other points on the intellectual compass leads to creating at least an edge on legitimacy for one strand of philosophy or documented belief, worldview, etc.

Glad for your input and please (if time permits) read Jean-Francois Lyotard's The Differend, which deals with just this problem. of contending speakers on a controversy not accepting each other's type of evidence.

Art, as always, cures hardening of the categories.

Hi Gloria

Thanks for your reply. I'm not sure what you mean by not accepting a "TYPE" of evidence. What did you have in mind by TYPE?

Generally speaking, I don't see any problem with accepting one "worldview" and rejecting another. Fascism, for example is, in my view, entirely worthy of rejection. So is the political philosophy that Putin would foist on the world if given half a chance (which is quite close to Fascism).

Lyotard is not one of my preferred writers. Indeed, he once confessed that one of his books (I forget which) was simply made up on the run and makes little sense (or words to that effect).

Hello Derek,

This is what I was referring to specifically. Other examples abound in Creationist and Evolutionist rhetorical dialogues.

The type of documentation is its genre. The genre of documentation for a claim. Lyotard in his text The Differend uses the irresolvable conflict between Holocaust survivors and revisionist historians.

Hi Gloria, I'm sorry, I don't for one second think that the difference between Holocaust history and revisionist thinking (if you mean Holocaust denial) is just a matter of different "rhetorics". If that's what Lyotard thinks, then he gets a huge black mark in my book.

art expresses important societal issues, especially those that the individual is unable to reveal, whether for fear of society or government punishment, these were the reasons for its creation in the beginning, it also expresses the social and cultural progress of countries.

Dear Colleague Derek,

I can understand your rhetorical position about Lyotard. Things are not separately "rhetorical" or more "real" in some polar and opposed way, but full of degrees, intertwined and non-binary in a way. Rhetoric and language create much of what we know of as "reality" in the form of intangible abstractions. S. I Hayakawa and others in Semantics have posited that language stimuli elicit a fully somatic response. "There are words that make me clench my fists," says Hayakawa. How do we keep from being swept up and made to feel this anger from high level abstract words being thrown into the room? This is outlined in _Language in Action_ (1940) by Hayakawa.

I think you might find Chapter 11: Two-valued Thinking of interest.

LINK: https://pure.mpg.de/rest/items/item_2346245_4/component/file_2453260/content

Make sense?

Just to clarify my position a little. I agree that works of art can contain political points of view. For example, Picasso's Guernica, Camus' La Peste and Ionesco's Le Roi se meurt. But I think art is rarely political at its heart. And if it tries to be, it is on very tricky ground and will probably fail (as a work of art).

You have a valid position on art. I would look at the problem of how art and society connect by cubing it. As in Cubism.

There may be more than one dimension going on, so the spectrum between art and society viewed through the lens offered by say, Kant, gives one definition and emotionally-invested will come out as one hue on a spectrum.

The emotional investment in a strongly-held abtraction like aesthetics is overlooked but central. S. I Hayakawa's Language in Action explains how "jerked about" we can be by high level abtsractions that are often invisible yet crucial, because that the reader's choice of a foundational art theorist ties to that reader's self-construct in society. This relates to Reader Response Theory that the viewer, in case of visual art culture, is not a tabula rasa applying objective criteria but brings every subconscious and conscious life history to each visual or written text!

Continuing a list or possible Viewer Responses to artistic stimuli: Looking at art from another theorist than Kant provides a different color lens. Art viewed through the "Matthew Arnold Lens" (Culture and Anarchy that gave us the concept "sweetness and light"),causes us to see something else, another hue and a different mix of art and politics.

Marx, another hue. Marcuse (The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward A Critique of Marxist Aesthetics), another. Georg Simmel (Fashion) another. Laura Mulvey (The Male Gaze) yet another dimension giving a differently weighed mix or contact zone between art and society.

All are existing and holding some emotional and intellectual resonance in their own hue and own aspect of the issue or dimension on the issue of art and society.

Does this help?

Thank you, Gloria. I imagine some of these thinkers disagree with others? For example, I can't really imagine Arnold and Marx getting along.

I agree that all kinds of thinkers disagree and we even have lively debates here at RG. It would be good to offload some of the "my way is the only right way" to a more cubist way of looking at complex situations. That will open a window for negotiation and dialogue.

Agree. On the other hand, I think there might come a time when one (anyone) begins to think that certain positions are definitely to be preferred to others.

After all, Marx, Arnold and many other prominent thinkers had clearly formed their opinions (which of course we may disagree with). They weren't saying "I think this and you think the opposite and perhaps we're both right." Marx was hardly going to be talked out of his determinism for example. And certainly not for ideas about "sweetness and light". Cubism not withstanding.

Talking past each other on different planes is sometimes taken for disagreement on the same plane, isn't it? Reducing a 3D figure to a 2D plane is a kind of sample of what happens when people talk past each other. That is where Cubism helps.

Well I'm not sure how one translates cubism into types of argument. In any case, cubism itself is interpreted in different ways...

But both Marx and Arnold were pretty intelligent and I suspect that if one put them in a room together, each would zero in on the weak points of the other. Marx would make short work of "sweetness and light" and Arnold would take strong exception to Marx's determinism.

It takes reflection to translate a visual art concept into rhetorical situations of great complexity. Can we sit with this idea awhile and see?

No problem. But tell me why why to you emphasise cubism? There are lots of other artistic movements. (I'm not sure, I should add, that the popular idea that cubism is intended to show different sides of an object is correct. Who first claimed that, I wonder?)

Dear Colleague Derek,

I find it useful to hold in mind's eye the Cubist spatial relationships that can make a visual model for getting from the old two-valued way of dealing with issues in aesthetics that have been traditionally (forensically) framed as either or.

Using an either-or framework implies a simple situation where all sides inhabit the same perceptual space and sense of time, where framing of events, time ranges and (hotly contested) start-stop points, texts, and people are agreed upon.,unlike any real forensic rhetorical situation where the two-values are famed in ways hotly debated.

A Cubist visualization model shows that not only are there two "sides" but many as in a polyhedron. Each "face" of the polyhedron has its own dimension and internal consistency, yet when forced into a two-sided forensic framework there becomes a caricatured image of the other's POV because ripped from its own "aspect" and space-time.

To force an either-or many times just leaves the contending rhetorical actors wondering why--oh why--they seem to be talking past each other. Why do they feel compelled to deny the validity not only of a differing POV's evidence but, even more broadly, type of evidence in judging aesthetics? Why this passion?

I don't know who first claimed that Cubism simultaneously showed various sides of space in 2-D or in 3-D. Maybe we can get somebody to tll us?

Make sense?

Glo

Hi Gloria

The passion doesn't really bother me. In fact I almost welcome it, as long as it is within bounds and stays courteous. It's true, as you say, that art and aesthetics can arouse passions in argument. No sure why. Though I do find explanations of art that seem to trivialize it quite annoying - for example, the popular idea that art exists simply to give us something called "aesthetic pleasure." If that were really true, I doubt if I would be interested.

Dear Colleague Derek,

How do you think ART CONNECTS TO SOCIETY? This has been all from my end of the conversation. For balance, could we hear from you? Thanks for your reply above.

Hi Gloria

That’s not the sort of question I ask myself about art. It’s too broad, begs too many questions, and is open to too many possible answers. I would begin with the question: What is art? That might help answer the others.

Hi Colleague Derek,

"What is Art?" has its own RG Question slot. So, if that is of interest, it is already there and that RG Question is getting lots of pictures posted. Rather inductive, like building a forest by posting a tree, a tree,a tree, etc.

We want to follow the idea here that art relates to society. And how that might happen or evolve.

Sure we cannot tempt you to say something about this?

Hi Gloria

You write: "We want to follow the idea here that art relates to society."

Well my advice is (1) first work out what you think art is; (2) sort out if you are talking about a systematic relationship or something ad hoc; (3) decide if you mean "society" at a point in time or diachronically (i.e. history).

But (1) is the crucial one.

Dear Colleague Derek,

What do you think art is/ I will contribute if you do. We cna start with that and what others (I hope) say what they think art is, as well.

I'll pass on that Gloria. Too big a topic for an RG list.

You you interested in sharing why you think why is is not useful to respectfully compare our differing definitions of art here in this Q at RG?

I'm interested in sharing opinions on various aspects of art but not in answering a question as large as "What is art?". It's too big for a list like this. Though that doesn't prevent you from giving your definition if you wish.