Christmas day. I’ve been reading “The Gift” by Lewis Hyde. What a great book. the subtitle is “creativity and the artist and the modern world”. This book is inspiring me to take action. It really puts words to ideas and problems that I have lived with for a long time but never felt that I could adequately verbalize or explain. The part that I am reading now, the beginning, deals with issues of the value of things in society, including art. Many times when I have been working on a mural commission, someone will come up and say,” do you get paid to do that?” the implication is that art is a labor that different from other labors. Many artists, myself included, make their work with out the expectation of selling it and would make it whether or not they sold anything ever. The book talks about creativity and art as a gift and then looks at how gifts are different from commodities. Here is a quote that I liked. “…for it is when art acts as an agent of transformation that we may correctly speak of it as a gift.”
Anyway, back to the workshop to think about how, in specific terms, how art can act as an agent of transformation and change, inspiring us to action.
