Late Summer Anxiety

Visual Culture- The Importance of Art Students

Today feels like the adolescence of visual culture, when the global culture’s mindset hasn’t fully developed its frontal lobe and is gobbling new games, entertainments and social media with a mindless avidity that is warm clay for manipulation by perception managers. Whether through front groups to influence opinion around the world to controlling imagery in popular media, it to aims at promoting a particular look and attitude. The insistence on certain norms is great for capitalism because so few fit the norms. This requires products and expense of time and money. When the images are limited people think those are the only choices. This leaves a variety of gifts and capabilities untapped. Like the undeveloped adolescent brain people are swamped by the images, believing what they see with their own eyes and trying to modify themselves to fit the norm. These images aim at deep unconscious strivings and aversions that twist people to commercial purposes. Unrecognized emotion is their motherlode. The universality of the image is hardwired, seeing humans' homes on fire, violence and dead bodies, and fear is the automatic adjustment to the scene. Remedying this is the task of art. Understanding the power of visual imagery is the beginning of resistance. Art and beauty offer what attracts and stimulates. Art is where people have the opportunity to recognize their deepest emotions and the thoughts stirred by them. When people respond to art they are seeing something in themselves. Once it is seen and conscious awareness understands those levels a person has a choice where they didn’t before. The internet allows more artists to be available to everyone. Not just museum collections but current art people are posting that reflects what modern life is like. It’s a resource for learning about the self that doesn’t show. What is responded to is a mirror showing some part of inner life. Having a tool to witness personal depth strengthens connection with what revealed it, not just the artist but humanity for sharing that emotion. It isn’t fear but love that summons up what will help other people recognize more of their own uniqueness. Taking responsibility for what parts of the brain are grown and cultivated should include exposure to great art of all kinds. This is what the modern art school tries to do. Today’s art students are alive to so many levels of information it must be creating very complex brains who can integrate them with training in visual sensitivity. That combined with the exposure to art around the globe, particularly what has been overlookedby the mainstream, can build a more comprehensive perceptual consciousness. Art is part of an ecological consciousness enlarging our view of the whole. New generations of art students can help others see what’s true in our technological hall of mirrors. Art shows what it’s like to be alive now.