Art and culture should be more accessible

Does art really transform anyone's life? I wondered that as I read a thought-provoking article in The New York Times a couple days ago about the murder of a Muslim woman in Dresden, Germany, a city and country that place great importance on preserving art and culture. Barbaric things happen despite the existence of art and culture, but civilized society still depends on it. However, simply producing art is not enough. Art must be made accessible to all and not preserved for an elite few. I am not saying that this guy would not have stabbed a pregnant woman 18 times if he had been exposed to more art. He was an avowed racist who killed a Muslim woman. But he lived in a city filled with art and cultural experiences that could have opened his mind a little more. I wonder how accessible the art was to him; perhaps it was reserved for only a few who claimed to understand and appreciate it more than anyone else.

All of which gets back to the problem of reconciliation: What are the humanizing effects of culture?

Evidently, there are none.

To walk through Dresden’s museums, and past the young buskers fiddling Mozart on street corners, is to wonder whether this age-old question may have things backward. It presumes that we’re passive receivers acted on by the arts, which vouchsafe our salvation, moral and otherwise, so long as we remain in their presence. Arts promoters nowadays like to trumpet how culture helps business and tourism; how teaching painting and music in schools boosts test scores. They try to assign practical ends, dollar values and other hard numbers, never mind how dubious, to quantify what’s ultimately unquantifiable.

The lesson of Dresden, which this great city unfortunately seems doomed to repeat, is that culture is, to the contrary, impractical and fragile, helpless even. Residents of Dresden who believed, when the war was all but over, that their home had somehow been spared annihilation by its beauty were all the more traumatized when, in a matter of hours, bombs killed tens of thousands and obliterated centuries of humane and glorious architecture.

The truth is, we can stare as long as we want at that Raphael Madonna; or at Antonello da Messina’s “St. Sebastian,” now beside a Congo fetish sculpture in another room in the Gemäldegalerie; or at the shiny coffee sets, clocks and cups made of coral and mother-of-pearl and coconuts and diamonds culled from the four corners of the earth in the city’s New Green Vault, which contains the spoils of the most cultivated Saxon kings. But it won’t make sense of a senseless murder or help change the mind of a violent bigot.

What we can also do, though, is accept that while the arts won’t save us, we should save them anyway. Because the enemies of civilized society are always just outside the door.

The rest of the article here.

Image: Norbert Millauer/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images