TRADITION can be confusing. Sometimes, it provides a connection to a rich past -- a sense of history and roots. Other times, it imposes limitations on us. It prevents us from pursuing various goals or activities just because they're not things we traditionally do. The lack of an arts community at the University falls into the latter category.
The University traditionally has not been known for the arts. It has been known, of course, for its Jeffersonian heritage, which is reflected in the disciplines that have traditionally been the strongest - history, government, economics and law, to name a few.
As the University sheds the burden of tradition and emerges as a modern institution of higher education, it must broaden itself and develop in new areas. One of those areas must be the arts if the University is to solidify itself as a top school.
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The Student Council Arts Committee is working to strengthen the arts presence at the University. It has created an artslovers majordomo list to publicize arts events around Grounds and has published calendar posters with similar information. It's also working on developing thelightbulb.org, a Web site designed as a resource to integrate creative efforts at the University and bring together groups that produce art as well as student audiences. The Committee also hopes to expand the ART$ Dollars program to make ART$ Dollars accepted at a greater variety of events and to develop a promotional video about arts on Grounds to show to incoming students during orientation.
The Committee sponsored the Arts Explosion, held last Sunday as an event designed to bring together student artists and publicize arts around Grounds. The evening performance illustrated the obstacles arts-related groups face. Student groups and performers presented an entertaining program that demonstrated the variety of talent that the University has to offer. They were only missing one thing: an audience. A substantial majority of the crowd was made up of groups that were presenting -- very few students came just for the pleasure of enjoying the performances.
This illustrates the problems the Arts Committee faces in trying to promote art at the University. Its efforts should be commended. But building an arts community can't be a purely top-down effort, involving only student leaders and administration. It has to involve the ground-up support of students as well. That's where you come in.
Why should students support art? Sure, it's entertaining, but so are a lot of things - athletics, Greek life, service organizations and television certainly appeal to lots of people. What's so special about the arts?
Of course, art can be entertaining. The pure pleasure it offers definitely makes it valuable. But art is important for reasons that transcend the superficial appearance that it exists merely to entertain.
Most fundamentally, art is valuable because it is capable of affecting us. That power to affect is more important now than ever, in an age in which we find ourselves desensitized to life and its subtleties. It takes a lot to evoke emotion these days. Murders, suicides, bombings, school violence, rapes scandals all have become so common that they blur together and pass us by. We don't notice anymore. In many ways, we are, as literary modernists argued, a society that no longer knows how to feel. That's a deficiency that art tries to address. Art's most basic job is to make us feel - to evoke emotion.
But art is crucial on a more intellectual level as well. The arts are the means by which we evaluate and hold onto the cultural past, assess the cultural present, and shape the cultural future.
Art poses and addresses deep questions about our identity, both as individuals and as a society. Who are we? How do we view ourselves? What do we value? What do we find beautiful? What makes us uncomfortable, and why? What do we think and feel, and how do we communicate those thoughts and feelings? How do we relate to each other?
There are two ingredients needed in order to make the University into a strong arts school: people to produce art and people to enjoy and support it. Right now, the former exceeds the latter. There's always room for improvement in the quality of artistic talent. But we have some tremendous student artists already. What we need is a student audience.
No one can make you enjoy art. No matter how hard the Arts Committee works, it can't force you to go to visual art exhibits, read students' creative writing, or to go watch performing arts groups act, dance, play or sing.
But it can send a message to students that art is both fun and important. It's beginning to do just that. The question is, will you listen?
(Bryan Maxwell is a Cavalier Daily associate editor.)
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