Pay It Forward To The Arts

Are the Arts really that important to our community and why should we care to even give a dollar? Our State Representive, Steve King, stated that National Endowment for the Arts is a "Pet Project" and should be removed from any stimulus spending. I strongly disagree. I see the arts under funded and mostly ignored in our government funded school systems. I believe American culture has sold out to the multi-billion dollar industry of pop culture and Made In China products. If we lose the arts in our community we lose much more than just pretty paintings and romantic plays.

Poets, artists, playwrights, and composers are often sources of truth, order, harmony, and meaning. Artists can unlock our imagination and stir us to pause, think, and reflect. Take a moment to comprehend the results when we are educated and tested to think alike. Or if our culture believed more in the message from a television commercial on McDonalds than taking the time to understand a local artist's perspective of their environment or human condition. We should take the artists and art venues out of the shadows and present them into the light. Their talents could awaken our souls and inspired us into a purposeful journey.

Artists raise questions and compel us to think. I believe the best of musicians, for example, have a certain power of observation that can be a remarkable force for good -- and at the very least can jolt us out of complacency. Some may think of artists as disruption to the order of things. Since they often disturb the peace, they stir passions, they force us to see things differently and they sometimes expose or emphasize nonnegotiable truths at times when we may have lost our way.

Composing music, writing a play, painting a painting, or writing a poem forces us to think in alternative ways, to hold different assumptions and to entertain different and often more instructive ways of making connections and ways of looking at things.

Imagination and a sense of discovery are often as important as knowledge. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was a eighteenth century philosopher, writer, and composer, once said that "the world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless." Creating is a form of play. It is a sensing of the possibilities; it is a free speculation, a learning to be ourselves. "Painting," said Picasso, "is just another way of keeping a diary."

Being able to think in different ways and to sense the possibilities may inspire the economist, physicist, and political scientist to see interconnections and hypothesize about variables in ways they may not have considered. The arts can free us to think and dream and sense, and this often proves invaluable.

So with all of this I ask you to consider paying it forward to the arts. Since the arts are always providing a payment back to you. I feel in the lakes area we get this importance. As I have stated, that here at the lakes we are rich in life because we understand and appreciate the diversity of a creative economy.

So with all this stirring in your mind, please consider the June 6th fundraiser at The Pearson Lakes Arts Center in the next few weeks. : )