Kenneth Baker, in the San Francisco Chronicle, lays out an argument for art serving the purpose of allowing us momentary subjectivity and reflection – a pause from the daily rush:
In Buddhist tradition “the stopping mind” refers to the tendency to fixate on things, ideas or experiences, and thus impede acceptance of the transitoriness of everything, ourselves included.
But that notion grew out of societies that never envisioned a high-tech, commerce-driven culture such as ours that prizes incessant motion and change both for their own sake and as fuel for the profit system.
Addicted to speed, we need help stopping: not in fear or paralysis, but in a mode that gives us pause to sort out what we see and feel. We need relief from our own glib knowingness, which lets us glide through the element of surprise in daily life.
Hence our need for the arts, especially the arts of our own time, which respond to our condition implicitly and sometimes explicitly.
I’m with him almost all the way. Then he drops this (emphasis mine):
The kind of interruption or stoppage I describe need not last long. It can do its work of aerating awareness in an instant or a cascade of instants. For this reason, the periodic laments we hear over the short spans of time people spend in front of individual artworks miss the point. The quality, not the duration of engagement, matters.
On the one hand, he claims art as a palliative cure to our fast-paced culture. On the other hand, he thinks we can gain this effect without spending more than a split second with a work. Well, Kenneth, which is it? Do we need to slow down, or not?
Dear readers, you know where I stand.
Success
