After reading some of these essays, I realized that I could have expanded on some topics and gone into more detail because my paper was pretty short. I also think that I was really all over the place with my thoughts and I should organize them more and make sure that my paragraphs are staying on the topics that were discussed in my thesis statement.

For my brainstorm, I compared Rhys Southan’s “Is Art a Waste of Time?” to Benjamin Zander’s TED Talk “The transformative Power of Classical Music”

I definitely believe that any form of art is not a waste of time. I personally think that it is important to have art in our everyday lives to stay sane. I can’t imagine a world without music, books and movies, or any other form of art because they have such a significant impact on an individual and a society. One of the quotes I found from “Is Art a Waste of Time?” is a typical question asked by an EA: “Is your self-expression more important than human lives and suffering?” This question bothered me in many ways. Art, in my opinion, is not just for self expression.  In a musical sense, Benjamin Zander explains “it’s the music that generates the emotions that releases the human experience.” Art in the form of music can help with a person’s emotional wellbeing and it is a way to form connections with others who share the same likings. It can help someone who is maybe suffering in a different way than a person who is living in an impoverished area. With that said, I have concluded that art in every form is a very powerful concept that is needed in humanity.

I chose to listen to  the conductor Benjamin Zander’s “How Does Music Transform Us?” and found it very interesting. His TED Talk was all about trying to explain to the audience that everyone loves classical music, they just don’t know it yet. One of the first points he emphasized was that nobody is tone deaf; an example he used was “You couldn’t tell the difference between somebody from Texas and somebody from Rome.” He’s not wrong; people have the ability to read emotions through the tone of their voice, which was another example that Benjamin used. I personally agree with everything that was said in this TED Talk. Music is a very emotional thing that is used for artists to express themselves and make others feel what they are feeling. Its a way that we can relate to each other as well. As Zander explains it: “there’s something emotive about music that pulls us in, that kind of preys on our emotions.” The emotional experience of music, especially classical music, is the power that this art gives.

When I read Southan’s “Is it OK to Make Art?” a second time, I noticed a few more details that I missed the first time around. After our class discussion on Tuesday, I picked up on some of the things that I wasn’t looking for the first time I read the text. One thing I read was that Southan does seem to agree with the EA’s belief that art doesn’t have much power to change the world for better when he said, “I started to feel like they might have a point.”  I originally thought that he was leaning toward the idea that the “world would be unlivable without art”, but now I can see that he is a little more conflicted and can see both sides of the argument. I reacted the same when I read this text again, maybe feeling even more frustrated than before because I had a better understanding and I already didn’t agree with the EA’s. Decoding the text helped me understand a passage better because I would look up the words that I didn’t know or had and idea of what they meant to get a deeper perceptive of the word. I used https://www.dictionary.com to look up the definitions of the words. If I hadn’t done this, then I would keep getting lost as to what was being said, especially if the words I didn’t know came up multiple times.

“Is it OK to make art?” by Rhys Southan: Follow the Thread

One of the biggest things I read that stood out to me was when the author mentioned  one of the EA’s views: “Any break we take from working to reduce suffering throughout the world is like having a leisurely nap beside a lake where thousands of children are screaming for our help.” I thought this was a very powerful sentence, however, I don’t believe that good deeds are all we live for. The EA goal is doing as much good as you possibly can with your life, and while that sounds like a pretty solid way of life, I think the EA’s take it a step too far.

Going off of that, I began to feel frustrated reading page four of the article because of the EA’s beliefs. Yes, “EA’s want to reduce suffering and increase lifespan and happiness” but they are also saying that art is useless and that if you are an artist you should give up what you love because your ideas aren’t lucrative and are irrelevant. It is also argued by the EA’s that the supply of artists is plentiful, so they are easily replaceable anyway. What frustrated me the most was how the EA’s believe that “the only good that counts is what you accomplish over and above what the next person would have done in your place.” This tells me that they are not doing their good deeds to genuinely help people, but in fact are doing this as a competition with one another to see who can be the ‘better person’ in the end. It shows that they aren’t doing these things for the wellbeing of others.