Art is the practice of creating perceptible
forms expressive of human feelings.
Langer goes on to explain that she is talking about the feelings
which we all share as a culture, not just those of one person. Therefore, it might be a good idea to take a look at the term culture. After all, art is a large part of culture. Or is it that culture is a large part of art?
Culture
Culture has several meanings, such as that stuff that grows in the
bottom of a petrie dish in biology class. It can also refer to a large
group of people (sometimes entire nations, even several nations)
who share ideas and ways of doing things; for example, the Hopi
Indian culture, or the "drug" culture, or the culture created by everyone
who watches MTV. But, another sense of the word culture is the
one we use when we talk about those ideas and ways of doing things
that are shared by those groups of people.
To make these last two uses of the word culture a little clearer, let's
use this class as an example. As a group, we make up a subculture
which we could call the Sauk Valley educational culture. We all share
certain things- we all live in the Sauk Valley Community College district, we all come together at Sauk to learn, we all know where Northland Mall is and what Northwestern Steel and Wire is. These are all things we have in common and can use to, among other things, make conversation- they make up our culture. But more importantly, they are also all things thought of and/or made by humans. In other words, the Rock River is also something which we all know about, but because it is part of nature, the river itself is not a cultural thing the way the Mill is. But what we do with the river is part of our culture because human thought went into deciding what to do. Any activities we engage in on the river are cultural because they were created or invented by a person or a group of people. So the word culture can also be used to talk about the things humans do, build, talk about, think, or feel.
So, people belong to cultures-- that is, groups of people-- which can be
named: Americans, Midwesterners, Generation Xers, Baby Boomers.
But the thoughts, feelings, activities, objects, etc. that make these various groups different from each other make up that part of our lives which we also call culture. And it is this use of the word culture which we will be talking about the most in this course. We will be concentrating on this aspect of culture because it is through culture that we create our lives. That is, by being born into a certain culture, we automatically know certain things but not others, have certain experiences but not others, and have certain objects, technology, and stuff available to us but not others. But, most importantly, we also have choices about what kinds of cultural objects, experiences, and
thoughts we will make a part of our lives.
For example, as Americans, we have TV in common, especially in terms of how we get some of our information about the world. But that information may be slightly different depending upon whether you are
an MTV kind of person or whether you prefer Public Television. That is, someone who gets their ideas about life from watching "Bay Watch" or "MST 3000" is going to think the world works differently than someone who watches "Masterpiece Theatre" or the Discovery Channel, because we do get our ideas about what life is like from the cultural experience of TV. But we also get ideas from the cultural expressions called politics, religion, education, next door neighbor, and, of course, school. As the anthropologist Clifford Geertz points out-
Undirected by cultural patterns- organized systems of significant symbols [like politics, religion, education, or TV] - man's behavior would be virtually ungovernable, a mere chaos of pointless acts and exploding emotions, his experience virtually shapeless. Culture, the accumulated totality of such patterns, is not just an ornament of human existence but.......an essential condition for it (1973 46).
In other words, culture is all of the man-made ideas and things in our
"world" which help us to understand ourselves and what is going on.
It also helps us to organize our social groups and give us a sense of
belonging to a community. But- and here's the point- we also have the
power to shape our culture. After all, we invented it, so we should have the ability to make it into what ever we want it to be. Therefore, it also makes sense for us to know something about how culture works. That is where Art comes in. As Geertz explains it-
