God bless Jeanette Winterson

[ellenkushner]

Art is central to all our lives, not just the better-off and educated. . . I know that from my own story, and from the evidence of every child ever born — they all want to hear and to tell stories, to sing, to make music, to act out little dramas, to paint pictures, to make sculptures.

This is born in and we breed it out.

And then, when we have bred it out, we say that art is elitist, and at the same time we either fetishize art — the high prices, the jargon, the inaccessibility — or we ignore it.

The truth is, artist or not, we are all born on the creative continuum, and that is a heritage and a birthright of all of our lives.

-- Jeanette Winterson (author of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit), from an essay quoted in NYTimes Sunday Book Review, 12/19/08 (line spacing mine)

Comments

[middlemarching.livejournal.com]

I agree completely. <3 I'll have to read this book.

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

It's a terrific book - though it is not where the quote comes from.

[middlemarching.livejournal.com]

Noticed that after I'd posted the comment. ^^;

[girasole.livejournal.com]

I read that in NYT last week and thought I should make all my students (graduate students, mostly teachers and librarians) memorize it.

[czakbar.livejournal.com]

You can so tell she grew up hearing inspirational sermons and songs. She's a lovely thinker.

[rojomojo.livejournal.com]

Great thoughts, but we don't breed it out. We kill it with Kulture. The world doesn't care about art and the creative implulse, because you can't make money on it easily. I can remember feeling so encapsulated running a uranium-removal water plant for the DOD, that on my last day of work, I did my paperwork in red ink. (DOD standards were black ink only, not even blue.) Everything was regimented. I was glad the safety was, kind of. And treatment standards had to be!!!! "Hot" water had a whole different meaning when taking our uranium and radium children. Probably not the best to job to take after living for 15 years in a commune, but the pay was good.

I can understand why whimsy does not have a place in engineering. People's lives depend on no surprises, but it is a stoic and conservative field. WOW!

There are not many grants for people to do art, to keep us entertained and inspired at a very high level, but bankers get rather large bonuses. No wonder there are so many didactic, humorless, true believers out there.

rojo

[hoppytoad79.livejournal.com]

Exactly!

[ide-cyan.livejournal.com]

This is born in and we breed it out.

Unfortunate self-contradictory metaphor, though.