Want an example of how social interpretation (audience-produced meaning making that occurs in/through public settings and mechanisms) operates in the contemporary arts world? Check out the Audience Review portal at The Dance Enthusiast.com. The brainchild of former dancer and producer Christine Jowers, The Dance Enthusiast is a self-described “digital news site and arts service … [Read more...]
Archives for September 2014
Across to the Other Side
"What matters is not what happened but what people think happened." ~Harold Pinter The human mind is always busy translating symbols (whether man-made or natural) in the external world. The Latin word translatio expresses the process beautifully. It means, “to carry across.” The human mind is also always looking for opportunities to integrate those symbols into a higher-order unity, in … [Read more...]
How We Got Our ‘Making Sense Organ’
In Art and Intimacy, evolutionary anthropologist Ellen Dissanayake’s recent study of the relationship between art making and the “infancy of the human species,” she notes that meaning was first located in “what ‘felt right’—a full stomach, a safe environment, nearness of familiar others, or ways to acquire these.” Over a millennia of human evolution, the mind increasingly became a “making-sense … [Read more...]
What is this thing called meaning?
Autumn brings the urge to change up my rhetorical strategy a bit, so for the next month or so I’ll switch from writing self-contained essays on different topics to posting a series of quotes, ideas-for-thought, and short provocations exploring the concept of meaning-making in the arts. As readers of this blog know, my mission is to open up the meaning-making process to and for our … [Read more...]
Arts Democracy Now!
We are accustomed to describing the premiere of Le Sacre du Printemps as a riot. That’s what the history books say and that’s what Wikipedia says so there you have it. But another way of framing Sacre is to call it one of the last examples of more than 2500 years of audience-centered social interpretation in the Western arts tradition. That infamous uproar was not so much an aberration as it … [Read more...]