When I posted last week about music seeming so much more valuable when you really had to pay for it I already knew the answer to the apparent puzzle, though I was genuinely puzzled in that moment. The value of any artistic experience lies in the quality of attention we bring to the experience. Read a poem badly and it will be a bad poem, for that bad reader. Watch a movie without really watching, listen to music without really listening, and the results will be, as they say, less than optimal.
A full response requires absorption, requires work. And I'm not implying that what I say applies only to what we might think of as 'great' art. Any work of the imagination offered to us will work at deeper levels when we offer it our depths.
But we're in a world that is busily being shallow.
No comments:
Post a Comment