 awful lot like Sunday or Tuesday or any other day. Really glad to see you. Thank you for being here. This is the second in our series of philosophy discussions on life during the COVID-19 pandemic. And we might have some people joining us a little later. And as you know, we're recording these for long month public media. Let me see, we are, who are we? We are Great Havens Philosophy, G-R-E-Y, Havens Philosophy. We are a P for C, nonprofit in Longmont, Colorado. Well, obviously it's Longmont, Colorado. We're recording this for long month public media. But what P for C stands for is philosophy for children and communities. So we teach thinking that is creative and critical and collaborative and caring of the foresees. And we teach thinking of that kind through talking about the big ideas of philosophy with people. And we start with kids as young as three. Actually, we're doing online now. Every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m., we're doing our books and big ideas story times for preschool and early elementary. We have Harry Potter and philosophy groups for kids and teens. We have a Saturday philosophy group called Great Havens YA. And we mostly read science fiction and fantasy stories and talk about the ideas in them because science fiction is great, great, great when it comes to discussing philosophical ideas. And we have discussions like this on current affairs and our lives. And one of the things that makes a philosophy question a good philosophy question is that it is... Now we talked about the foresees. Now I'll talk to you about the threesies. So one is that it's common. So it's a common language that anybody can understand. And then it has to be contestable. So if everybody just nods and says, yes, I agree. Like, how much does my little vice admiral hold a bobble headway? Like, there's one answer to that. So that's not a good philosophy question. And then the other one that I think we are really getting at the heart of, I hope we are with this series is that it should be central, which means that it should be central to the lives of the people in the discussion. So that's why we're doing this series on life during the social isolation that we're all practicing, this voluntary quarantine that we're all practicing to keep each other safe. It's also so that we can look at this moment in history and think about the big questions and help each other to find meaning while it's happening rather than 20 years from now. So having said that, is everybody ready to start? Okay, so I am not entirely sure if the names that you have on the screen actually appear in the recording. So since we're a small group, does everybody want to introduce yourselves? I think I forgot to introduce myself. I'm Kelly Kelling, I'm the executive director of Greyhaven's philosophy. And let's start, I can't actually point at who's starting because it just looks like I'm pointing at the camera. So how about our family? Hello. I'm Alec, I'm a volunteer with Greyhaven. I'm Debbie. And I'm John. They're my parents. How about the stunning redhead? Hi, I'm Ivona and I am a long-term Greyhaven's fam so to the point that I sit on the board of Greyhaven's. You're the ultimate fan, that's wonderful. And the stunning brunette. Hi, I'm Rebecca. I'm a volunteer with Greyhaven's and also a big Greyhaven's fan and a huge nerd. And I love geek philosophy. And that's what Greyhaven's is. It's my favorite thing. It's my favorite thing too. Geek philosophy is what we call our facilitation method, but we call it geek philosophy also because we use a lot of pop culture and science fiction and fantasy and things that are very accessible to people to have philosophy discussion. So last time when we did our COVID-19 discussion, we talked about everything from, gosh, what did we talk about? From education to the nature of time and everything seemed to sort of connect by the end of the discussion, which is a beautiful thing that can happen. And something that we've been wanting to talk about in terms of our lives now is our relationship with the arts while we're all staying at home and with nature and with our community. And it so happens that I read a short story recently. It's called, I guess it's long enough to be a novella, but it's called Wind Will Rove and it's by Sarah Pinsker. And I loved it so much that now we're reading it in our Saturday team group for discussion. And I was just researching the story today because I wanna pick up her anthology. I found it in the best science fiction of the year for 2017 I think is what it was. But I just loved it so much that I was looking up her anthology and I discovered that she also has written a book that is available on Amazon Kindle that is about a time after a global pandemic when public gatherings have been made illegal and how that affects people and especially people who find their life meaning in music and performance. And this story, Wind Will Rove is about a generational starship. So this people on earth, they identify a planet but they know that it's gonna take, it's gonna be their children's, children's, children's children who arrive there. So they know that they're gonna spend their life and generations on board this starship to get to a planet that they hope is going to be uninhabited when they get there. And with that spoiling too much, it's about our relationship to the history and culture. It just said my internet connection is unstable. So did I freeze? Okay, so I'll just say it again. It's really about our relationship to our history and our culture, human history and human culture when we're separated from everything that we know. And in a way, it's almost like we're all in our own individual starships right now heading into an uncertain future. So I'm just gonna read a couple paragraphs from the beginning of the story. And it's about deck four which is the recreation deck on board, one of the recreation decks on board the starship and they call it the four-deck wreck. Okay, I have to take my glasses off if I'm gonna do this. The four-deck wreck has the best acoustics of any room on the ship. There's a nearly identical space on every deck but the others don't sound as good. The wrecks were designed for gatherings but no acoustic engineer was ever consulted and there's nobody on board with that specialty now. The fact that one room might sound good and another less so wasn't important in the grander scheme. It should have been. In the practical, the day-to-day, it matters. It matters to us. Choirs perform there and vans. It serves on various days and nights as home to a Unitarian church, a Kappa, I think it's pronounced Kappa-era, Hada, a reconstructionist synagogue, a mosque, a Quaker meeting house, a half-dozen different African dance groups and a Shakespearean theater. Everyone clinging on to whatever they hope to save. The room is scheduled for weeks and months and years to come. The weeks and months and years are all arbitrary designations this far from Earth. Okay. So what do you think? What do you think about that idea that having a place for religion and art and culture matters even in terms of the practical and the day-to-day? Even for people who are very focused on survival? I think it's even more important because they're focused on survival. I mean, that makes it that much more precious. It seems to me. What is it about it that it becomes more precious? Because it's rare in that setting. If 90% of every day is about survival, you don't have a whole lot of time to spare for arts and culture, that makes them rare and precious because you have to make it count. You don't get that much of it. And it's the sort of thing that makes the survival worthwhile because without that jewel of something to retain your humanity and celebrate all the wonderful things about humanity and culture, then there's no point in surviving without that. Other thoughts? Everybody's nodding. Yeah, I was just gonna... Yeah, you see it reflected in our culture in that when the schools get low on money, the first thing they start to toss out is arts and music. And it's really kind of horrible. It's so important. It's definitely important in my life. Yeah. Yeah, mine too. Yvonne? Yeah, as soon as Rebecca said that very aptly, well, I was also thinking why bother surviving? Like why would you wanna survive? And we do live for these creative outlets. And that's why we wanna survive too. If we just survived to live in misery, I don't think we would try that one. That's a bold statement and that both of you have made. Like why bother surviving? And I'm assuming that you mean that as individuals and as a species? Like what's it all for? I mean more the bigger picture, like as a society, you have to have cultural things that hold you together and celebrate the good things about life and those give the meaning of the society. They give meaning to the whole group, not just the individual. Yeah, and also it is very motivational. If we just had the bare minimum for our, you know, for our joy, I think we would be very much poorer at surviving. Even with very scant resources, groups of people go to what brings them joy and they create. So it really is practical. Yeah. Yeah, there's a quote from Emily St. John's novel, Station 11, which is kind of a similar premise to the short story we read. But it's the quote of survival is not enough. And so because they're not novel, they're traveling as a theater troupe after this also pandemic world and just performing Shakespeare. And it's one of those novels that really illustrates how important art and stories are to just, I don't know, humanity. I don't know why I didn't think of reading a passage from that novel. I'm smiling because I love that book so much. And one of the reasons I love it is it's that one of the few post-apocalyptic works of fiction, post-apocalyptic fiction, that doesn't just focus on survival, that really does focus on arts and literature and theater. Yeah. Are there thoughts? I was thinking that it's also like the arts is like just a different way of speaking to each other. And so, you know, something that's not just day-to-day words, like something deeper than that. So even something like dance or just singing together. I mean, I just think, you know, you reach some other kind of level that you don't get from just the day-to-day or just the survival, if it is just survival kind of thing. So I don't know, I just feel like that is what makes it precious because it speaks to each other on just sort of a deeper level a lot of times. Something beyond the mundane. Yeah. Why do we like art that's tragic then? If it's about joy, why do we like tragic paintings and tragic plays and sad novels and sad movies? I think because it explains something to us about our life, you know, sometimes you need to see it like as a play or as a movie because like something that you can't express yourself or something that you're struggling with. Sometimes if you can just see it in a story, you're like, oh, that's what's going on. It may seem unexplainable, but yeah. Yeah. As soon as you know somebody else is feeling the exact same thing, you know, it brings us together. It's humanity across cultures and... Yeah, I agree with that. It's very, these are universal. I mean, to some extent, universal experiences, suffering, loss, grief, fear, all these things. And I also think it can be very cathartic to see those kind of stories. It gives you permission to feel the feelings that maybe you've been afraid to deal with about something in your own life. But if you're what, you know, you don't wanna talk about it. You're afraid to open that box that you put those feelings into. But you can go watch a play or a movie that has a theme that brings up those feelings for you. And that's an acceptable place to cry it out. That's an acceptable place to explore those feelings a little bit in a safe way because it's not literally real, but it taps into something real inside you in a way that is more accessible, I think, for some people in some situations. Yeah, I think art is an outlet for all human emotion when we connect with it, brings joy even if the emotion isn't joy. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah. Yes, just on an intuitive level, that makes sense for me. Yeah. And it also makes sense to me when I'm thinking about beauty. So like art doesn't have to be pretty to be beautiful. In fact, it can be quite ugly, or at least that strikes me as true. Or unsettling, like visual unsettling can be very joyful because it's interesting, maybe. Anything that sparks our passion. So what makes something, oh, sorry. I was just agreeing. If it makes you feel something, it's effective and you respond to it and that is a good thing. That is something we value. And aside from something that makes us feel something and something that is sort of, like you were saying Deb, it's like a language that we can use to speak to each other beyond the everyday, beyond our mundane experiences. What is it that actually makes something art as opposed to something that's not art? Can a commercial be art? Can, you know, I'm noticing all these commercials lately, like how quickly all of these companies have come up with these COVID-19 commercials or social distancing commercials. And then I realized that there's just this formula. It is some sentimental music and some pictures of their workers and maybe like a landscape. And it's just all sort of the same and like we're all in this together. And it strikes me that that doesn't strike me as very artistic. But is it just because I'm being a snob? What is it that makes something art? I think it captures a spark of human expression and creativity. So there are commercials that I would consider art that are well written, composed, filmed, directed, performed that express something unique that people relate to and they're not formulaic like what you're describing, but sometimes they can be very good. Those are rare, but it can happen. But I think almost anything that expresses human creativity or emotion could in some, to some extent, be considered art. And I don't think it has to be, you know, necessarily a masterful skill at the medium. You know, coloring is not high art, but I can certainly put a lot of effort and creative expression into it. And how I do it is different from how you would do it. That makes it unique. And I think there's some artistic elements to that. It's not, you know, the same as if I drew something freehand, I think, because there will be more of me in it. But I think that's what it comes down to is, is there a piece of you in it? Because I was thinking how there, a lot of commercials contain art, they just don't become art in themselves because there's, even things for just like, if it's like soda commercials, the way they design like the graphics on their cans and how they show it in the commercial, that's all versions of graphic design. And how in food commercials, there's an entire artistry they use to make food look more attractive. And it's an entire structuring building on that. And I don't know if it's entirely like, yeah, a high art, but it's a version of artistic form, I feel. I just don't think it's one that necessarily, like, you know, I don't necessarily feel something, but maybe I do, because, you know, they make the food look good and that I feel hungry or bored. That's a feeling. That's what that art is all about. Yeah, it's just, people, which most art is, and the best ones are the ones that touch a whole lot of people in a completely ironic manner that they did not intend at all, which I think a lot of us are doing right now with these commercials you were talking about, Kelly. I think there's just millions of people at home that don't even start with me on that. Yeah, I hear you. I'm like, yeah, Amazon. Yeah, Amazon here. Thanks for calling your employees hero, but it's heroes, but how about giving them some hand sanitizer? Exactly. I'm really interested though that I keep, I'm hearing different words that I'd like to, different phrases that I'd like to examine, which if this is your second or third time seeing us do one of these people see discussions, you might be getting the idea that we do this a lot. We say, what do we really mean by that? And I'm hearing like, I heard this phrase high art a few times, like high art, and then design. Alex, you're mentioning design. And I totally was nodding my head when you said that because I'm a fontique. Like I love different fonts, like typing fonts and there's so many things where design really matters, but is that the same, is design the same as art? So like high art, low art, design, crafts, are those all related? How do those, how do those terms fit together or not? I always, I always equate with emotion. And fonts are no different. You pick a font for what you want to, part of what you want to express with what you were saying. You don't use comic sans in a funeral announcement, right? That's not how it works. But it's all about, you can reach on emotion you weren't intending, but that's what art is all about is to either expressing emotion and trying to bring it out from somebody else. And so that just, to me, it makes it a huge, it really broadens the definition of what art is. And I'm okay with that, yeah. I've heard it mentioned that there are like these two segments, two art. First from the creator, that there must be a creative process no matter how simple. If you just go on autopilot and just do something, it's not a creative process, but if there is a creative process, then it's art, some kind of art from the source and then the receiver. So the receiver can see it as art or not. And sometimes the receiver can see something that wasn't intended as art at all from the creator, but the receiver perceives it as art, so they make it art. That actually, sorry, I'm getting distracted because I think we have some people coming in a little later, as I mentioned, but that raises a really important question, is art something that's in the eye of the beholder? If I see my vice admiral hold out bobblehead as art, but you just see it as a toy, is one of us right? Most of us. No, of course it is. Most are right. Oh, why, say more. Yeah. Well, the receiver can also be the artist. If we have a hundred million mass created things, and there was not much of a product, they've been very distant from the original process if there ever was one. And somebody perceives it as something that fills them with joy and meaning and they define this meaning, then perhaps the artist is the receiver. That makes a lot of sense, actually, because there's found art and found poetry. So found poetry might be something like a recipe or something that was on a sign. Somebody years ago during the George W. Bush administration made found poetry out of the speeches of Donald Rumsfeld, which I thought was hilarious and also sort of poignant. Yeah, so what do you think about that? Does that mean then that there's nothing that you can objectively say, like this is art, there's a certain kind of quality or there's a certain function that art should fulfill? Or is it, I know it when I see it? I think it's, for me, very post-modern. And I'm gonna explain that real brief, that's a big word that everybody has different opinions on. But if there is a process, if you have something that not many would see as art, but the receiver sees it as art, then there is a process in the receiver which the receiver can define. And thus it is art. And the same on the other end, there's somebody creating something, maybe I think it's utter crap, but there's a process. They had a vision, you know? So it's not that everything is art or nothing is art, it's just very contextual, I think. What do you think? For me. It's contextual for you. And it might be contextual in a different way for somebody else. Yes. Yeah, okay. I'm thinking sometimes in museums they'll have a piece that's like a toilet and basically that's it or something like that. And I know people get all open arms about it and like, oh, that's not art. But I always look at it and think like, somebody bought this up, they put it together, they brought it there, they placed it, and they had some kind of intention behind it. They picked a toilet. They picked a particular kind of toilet. And somebody designed that toilet. They designed that toilet. Every square inch of it, yeah. So yeah, I have a really broad, I guess, interpretation too, but I know other people would totally disagree with that. I might just call it bad art because I'm not sure if it's supposed to actually, I just not sure if that kind of thing is supposed to actually say anything. And I think that's where I kind of think it's like bad art because it's not really saying anything in particular, at least to me. Yeah, I was gonna say, maybe it does to somebody though. Boy. Do you know that Fountain is probably one of the most famous pieces of found art? And it's a urinal that was turned on its side and signed Armut, which is a made-up name, not the name of the artist. And it was turned down from an exhibition, but then it was photographed and it ended up becoming famous. And a group of artists and art dealers and curators people in the art world. I read about this in The Guardian, the British newspaper, so I don't remember the size of the survey or who exactly was surveyed if it was in more than one country, but this group of very important people in the art world named that the most important work of art of the 20th century. Yeah, yeah, I wonder what you think of that. And I'm also interested in what you said, Alex, about bad art. But do you think that there is a, is there a problem with saying what is and what is not art? I think it's, if you say there's like, things are not art or art art, then I think a lot of times that it starts to be like, that comes from like experts who are, you know, artist experts then who get to say what is and isn't. And I think it just takes like, sort of the everyday people out of the equation. And I really feel like everyday people, everybody's doing art usually in some form or another. And so I guess that's where I would, that would be, I wouldn't like it so much just because I feel like, like those people that said that was art, you know, the artist experts, you know, decide this is the art of the 20th century. It's like, okay, I mean, that's fine, but if it doesn't speak to any, you know, sort of everybody or for a lot of people. There's no universality to it. Yeah, then is it or isn't it? It's a really interesting, because I did read a post, you know, talking about just how Fox in the idea of art has become that it's made it this weirdly inaccessible thing to just everyday people when art is one of the things we did in our earliest like beings of people. When before we had anything else of writing and language, we painted on walls and that was art. We created things, we had master's of that. So I think that part of that goes into like when people say like, oh, I'm not an artist. Like you can just really doodling things. I'm like, yes, yes you are. Making any amount of art means you're an artist. I'm sorry, go on. I'm just gonna say the art establishment that we're talking about that tells us what is art and what isn't is famous for getting taken down. Okay, over and over and over in all mediums. In writing, in visual art, yeah, they say this is what, this is the reality of what art is and people say, nope, no, not anymore, no. That's kind of a historical thing too. Absolutely. I've been reading a lot of art. There's hundreds of years. Like renaissance stories about artists in that period and all these people was like, you know, there's the salon of artists who were like, this is what our art is right now and anyone who deviates outside of this is not making art and your art isn't art. And I'm like, oh, I'm just realizing we've been doing this for a while. We have some Wednesday season art. Long, long time. I find that really interesting because when I, we started, I was talking about our artistic or cultural inheritance and I wanted to, and Todd is joining us. Hi Todd. And I, so I started out talking about our culture inheritance and I backed up to say whose cultural inheritance and artistic inheritance and I meant human. But that's actually a really difficult thing to define because so often the art establishment hasn't led in non-white men. And I was an English major in the 90s and the late 80s and early 90s and I imagine that it's very, very different to be an English major now. I hope it is. Yeah. Are there benefits to saying what is and what is not art or what is good art and what is bad art? I was gonna ask a question about that because I understand and of course don't agree either with cliques that can shut out a bunch of people and sit and decide everything. But there's another side and I was wondering because being passionate about poetry and I write it too and I read a lot of poetry. There was a big, big movement and still is about anybody can just write poetry, right? And that's true. Anybody can, but does that make them a poet? Like if you sit and jot down your lines from your journal which we've all done, so nothing bad with that but you have never read much poetry at all. You don't know the craft. You haven't bothered reading and learning. You just jot down your feelings, which is cool but then you wanna go out of your immediate circle of your desk drawer and call yourself a poet and put this forward and some poor schmock has to tell you at some point that perhaps your words, because you didn't read much of the craft and learn the craft, they have to maybe tell you that your words have been written in the same way that you wrote them five billion times before by teenagers because you really did not relate your craft to a wider spectrum and you did not decide to have the craft and knowledge and express them and practice. So for me, the sweet spot must be somewhere in between but this is a discussion point. There is another point where now in the days of the internet everybody can do anything, right? But if you don't learn the craft, are you then an artist? I quickly wanna defend teenagers though. I hear what you're saying about there should be a certain maturity and a certain skill level or a certain maturity to art. What I meant for teenagers was not so much the craft but teenagers have the right to express feelings that are new to them. And sometimes those expressions are amazing but what I meant is if you are a 30-something and never studied anything and started doing this craft you are expressing something in the way that maybe some people did when they were 14 and then they developed and learned the craft. So nothing wrong but when you're a teenager you develop these amazing things which you go forward into is all I meant by that. And you learn and grow. Yeah. So what role does maturity play and what role does skill and practice play in making something art? Sophistication, maybe that's another word we could use. I think it was Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola who slammed Marvel movies and said that they're not art, they're not cinema, they're not real movies, they're not fit-ins. And that hurt because I love Marvel movies and Captain America means a lot to me. Well, I think that's snobbery though because it's very clear that the people who created the Marvel movies had extensive knowledge of various genres. It's just silly to think otherwise because it's plain and show. I would like to ask do you need any form of knowledge of your art form to be an artist in that art form? I think that's a very interesting question to me. Can I jump in? Of course. I'm coming late to the party so I'm not sure where we've been already. But as you were talking I was thinking about a man who I met years ago in Northfield, Minnesota, I worked for a church there and I did youth ministry and this particular congregation had a lot of artistic people in their congregation and every week people signed up to design a bulletin cover for the worship folder on Sundays. And the church was connected to St. Olaf College so there were people on faculty in the art department that were members there and one of them was named John Machistad and he would occasionally be in the rotation that provided covers for the bulletin and he did some pretty memorable things. He was very accomplished. He taught art at the college and funnily enough the bulletin cover that was most memorable in the time that I spent there had to do with passages of scripture. There's like five Sundays in a row where the appointed text for the day was Jesus saying, I am the bread of life. So he signed up for one of those Sundays and I'll never forget it was fabulous cover art. He took a slice of wonder bread and put it on the photocopy machine and pushed copy and that was the bulletin cover and the black and white texture of the bubbled bread and everything was a very gripping image for that Sunday. And here I think one of the reasons I liked it so much is that this was John Machistad who could have come up with some fabulous masterpiece but in his eyes, what do you do? Something that worked really well. I mean, anybody could have done that but really could have anybody done that? I don't know. The skill there is the concept. That's where the artist's skill comes in and his craft is in the design and the idea of course anyone could mechanically do that but they didn't have the idea for it and they didn't think, hey, this would be an interesting texture. I wonder what that would look like. That's the part of it that's art. That's the artistic process. It's not... Sorry, he probably had knowledge and could vision that. Before he did it, yeah. Yeah. Or he was curious and said, let's play with this. That's part of the process too. And then he had to be the one to have the knowledge and the skill to recognize that he had something good. Well, let me push that a little further. If let's say a high school kid had done that exact same thing, would it be as much? I mean, he's an artist with a concept but I think a fourth grader could have put a piece of bread on the copier. I don't know. It just always helped me put art in perspective because I mean, I don't think there's an answer to the question of what makes art art and all those kinds of things, really. But it captured something and it probably meant more to people to see, John Mockasted did the cover that week than Joe Olson who was in ninth grade. And I think it would have been received differently from someone else. Which then puts us as the viewers or recipients of the art in that judgment place, right? I mean, ultimately what's art is what I had experienced as art, you know? Whether it's John Mockasted or Joe Olson, it just happened. We talked about that just before you came in and you're not repeating anything but it's just interesting. I just posed, we discussed that there is the creative process from the artist and sometimes the receiver can perceive something as art that wasn't intended even maybe as art, but they have a process and thus they create it as art on the receiving end. Can I share a very funny story about that? And I'll be brief. When John Lennon and Yoko Ono released their wedding album in like 1969, it was pretty crappy music and I'll say that because that's why I see it, yeah. It was pretty crappy music, but what they did, it was one vinyl record, side A, side B, but they sent out promo copies for review that were two discs that only had the music on one side. So there was one side with the music banded and then the other side was just an empty band to carry your needle from. But one of the critics, and this was kind of a joke of avant-garde art and how it's received, one of the critics praised sides two and sides four of the record that he got because of the way that this constant small electronic tone varied in pitch at certain patterns that was just enough to keep the listener interested but not enough to trouble. And it's kind of a joke that there's a reviewer, the receiver at that point who received nothing. You know, it was really literally nothing and reviewed it as great art. Some reviewers also liked the more silent grooves because Yoko didn't scream a lot of that. Yeah. Well, I'm hearing a lot of ideas though. I'm hearing that art is what it does. What it does to you, if it makes you feel something, if it connects you in with the rest of humanity or with a concept. I love having that word come into this concept. I think that's really important. And then I hear that art is in part how it's made. It's the process from the concept to the actual craft, the actual skill. And I'm wondering what you think of that. Is art what it does to us? Is that how we know that something is art? Is art how it's made? And how can we separate our cultural inheritance that we've received? Like being told, this is the Western canon and these are the 100 books that everyone must read or this is the Mona Lisa and it's extraordinary. How can we separate that out from our experience of art? Can we ever decontextualize our experience of art so that we can fully trust our own judgment? I ask such easy questions. You really do. Come on, you can do better than that. Maybe what you're asking, and this might tie to what Yvonne had said earlier about a certain level of maturity, is that maybe the maturity that matters is in the receiver to see it. After you experience different things, after you've been to different museums, seen different things in the world, experienced different music, I think you do develop an eye or an ear for something that affects you over time. The experience that I've had, for instance, listening to music and playing music, that experience informs how I receive music today. And there's some music that I would call more artistic than other, you know? I mean, there's a wide range there, really. Some artists are capable of music that's very artistic and also music that's kind of not as artistic as my expectations might be. But that might be the, more than the artists, maturity and development in that, because somebody else is gonna have a, maybe different idea of what's art than I do and what I enjoy. But I've developed that from my experience and that maturity or whatever you wanna call it, how my experience has affected my interpretation and how I receive an artist's work. Any thoughts? I don't think you can ever take the context of the creation and the piece and the context of the viewer out of the equation because we don't exist in a vacuum. We're not raised in a vacuum. We don't live in a vacuum. The art didn't come out of a vacuum. Everything has context and experience. And like Todd was saying, if you yourself have worked in that medium, music or whatever, then you appreciate it or understand it or evaluate it differently. Or if you come from a Western culture and you're viewing something that's decidedly different, you know, it's Asian or it's African, or you come from one of those cultures and you're viewing Western European art. I mean, the context is critically important. I don't think you can ever separate it. And I don't think that there's any way to say that there's some kind of objective scale of value for art. It's completely subjective. You can certainly assess technical skill, but I don't think that's the same thing at all because you can be very technically skilled at your craft. And I'm mostly thinking of visual arts because that's what I have some experience with. You can be technically skilled and have nothing to say, you know? So that's only one piece of it. And it's, even that is hard to say objectively, you know, this one is better than that one because it's more representational. Well, that's not always the standard that they're going for. Rebecca, do you then think that there is no way of measuring the process of original idea? What do you mean by measuring? Well, I was trying to, I listened to what you said and I'm trying to remember how you phrased it. If art can be measured creatively. Like objectively valued. Yeah, so there, can you objectively, do you think value originality? It's a real question, I have- Yeah, there's a lot to that. I think you need a lot of experience with the context of the art. You know, like you were saying about poetry, you read a lot of poetry. You've studied the craft, you create poetry yourself. You are in a position to assess the originality of something whereas I am not because I haven't done any of that. I can read a poem and say, oh, I liked that or oh, that was terrible or wow, that made me feel something. But I can't say this is really original because I haven't read enough poetry to know. You can, you can probably more than you think because we have a huge collective around us where you would at least sort, oh, this poem taps into something that I've heard before a lot or you can at least assess, oh, this poem, I feel something that means I haven't actually seen this 5,000 million times before, you know. You don't have to be, I don't mean to say that everybody has to be an expert, but you have to, you've had a poetic eye around you somewhere even though you haven't extensively studied poetry. So you've noticed, you know, that's, you know, collective. You know, I worry though personally about valuing originality in art. I can under, or novelty because I can understand valuing sophistication, subtlety, nuance, even cleverness. But I worry about that thing that only something that's original is good art. And I'm not saying that you're saying that, but I do worry because I worry that we can confuse originality and novelty and shock value and things that are unsettling and things that are just new, that are novel and different. And sometimes that ends with things that don't, that we end up with works of art that are worth a lot of money in the moment or getting a lot of attention in the moment and maybe even getting big foundation grants for the artist, but they don't endure. So I wonder how you think, and gosh, I'm all over the place, but I just wanna underscore that, that doesn't mean that I don't think that originality in art is at all important. I just worry about conflating it with other ideas. So I wonder what you think about time as a test for what is valuable in art. Or I can pull back a little bit and ask in your personal life, have you found that certain things have stood the test of time for you and certain things haven't? And does that necessarily mean that they weren't good to begin with? No, it means that I can't. You know, I as the viewer, like Yvonne said, have a role in the creative process as the receiver of the item, the art, whatever it is. And at the time, you know, when I was 16, I liked different things than I like now. And that's, the things didn't change, I did. My taste changed, my experience changed, you know. My knowledge changed and my interests changed. But that doesn't, just because it didn't endure doesn't mean it wasn't necessarily as good. I mean, there can be some of that. Like sometimes I liked things that weren't very sophisticated because I wasn't very mature. And as you mature, in many cases, you need something that's a little bit more sophisticated, more complex, more nuanced to be satisfied with it. You know, the silly comedies and things that I watched when I was a kid are not that interesting to me now. So does that mean they weren't that good? Well, eh, I don't know. They don't endure as I change. But I don't know if that reflects on their value or just that I as the viewer have different standards. They did strike a legitimate chord at the time. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So if there's, whether or not there's such a thing as good art and bad art, is there such a thing as good taste and bad taste? I mean, instinctively, I just, I think most of us would say like, Tiger King is not a Marvel movie and the Marvel movie is not David Mamet or Shakespeare. Right. But philosophically, I want to know how we could justify that. Yeah, yeah. No, I get that because I want to believe, no, you can see, you can see what's in the artist's and what's in the artist's mind in all kinds of stuff that I may not relate to really well. And then I'd see something from Thomas Kincaid and I just, oh, gosh. Oh. Oh, my God. I'm sorry. I was watching this and they were like, I love Thomas Kincaid. Which actually, one of the really fun things that we do in some of our philosophy discussions about art is we have this bag of laminated cards with just statements about art on it. And some of them are quotes from famous artists and other people and some of them are just things that you hear. And one of them is, I don't know much about art, but I know what I like. I knew that was gonna come off. I'm an art teacher in high school and his quote to me, I've always read. Anytime somebody says, I don't know much about art, but I know what I like. What they mean is, I don't know much about art. Can be very, very limiting to just know what you like. Yeah. Well, I don't know much about gourmet food, but I know what I like and what I like has lots and lots of hot sauce on it. So I think like there's probably a lot of ways in which my taste in food is not very, I'm not gonna say good or bad, but not very subtle or sophisticated. I'm the same way, but yeah, I don't know a lot about how to create fine food. I know it when I'm eating it though. You're served something by a really good chef at a really good restaurant. Okay, this was worth it. Yeah, this is why we were spending this much money. I think to create something that is, to create a real artistic process as an artist, you need to be an artist on the receiving end too. But this is my opinion and I thought about it a lot. So shock value and all of that, I realized the risk that something is lost. But if you say write poetry, go back to that old horse again and beat it a bit more. If you don't, I feel for me personally, if you don't receive poetry as an artist, other poetry, then just sit and write in a vacuum like this, then I'm hesitant to call that person a poet, even though what they produce is certainly poetry of sorts. And that may make me one of the bad people, but I would say like if you receive as an artist, whatever it is, whatever your taste is, but if you receive it and have a process as an artist, then you have a very good shot of whatever you produce, you can call it art. I feel like for me, that's a fair conclusion in my cosmology, but I struggle with these things. And I posed it as questions before that didn't, so I didn't have a perfect answer, but I think that's as close as I can get. I think I at least understand to a point of what you're talking about, Ivona, where, because I get that especially in poetry, because I was thinking while you're saying that the first time, just that I was like, but then I think there's just different tastes in poetry and there's certain things where I've read poetry books that I know other people are like, this is in poetry and I hate it. And I'm like, well, I thought it had a nice ring to it and I enjoyed it, but there is other poetry where I think it's kind of in the same area of not, it doesn't feel like it has as much background in it and it's a kind of thing where I think you can produce certain things and you can be a poet in that way, but if you don't know some of the background, you're not gonna get as much of the nuance in it yourself and your own art is gonna suffer a bit. Like when we were talking about like, you go out to a meal and get that, I still think, I think that's the thing though where some people can't tell the difference between like a really good meal and just a basic meal because if you just don't know some of the nuances of like, well, there's this whole- Of how to do it, sure. Of how to do it and what you're tasting and there's certain things and I think there's like certain high art that people just don't care about, which is, you know, fine. I say high art is just like, you know, old like painting. That's what I'm picturing when I say this in that, but there's like a whole thing behind it. There's an old artistry to it of- A bunch of education. Transitions and lighting and symbols that I don't know myself, but I know it's in there. And so I think there's a lot to say for having more background when you're creating art or when you're creating and trying to experience it. You don't have to have vast knowledge, but there's a process of receiving that you are eager to have with the resources you do have. Then you can certainly create too. That's all I mean to say. Does that mean that artists are in some way in communication, in conversation with history? Is there such a thing as a cultural inheritance? And what is it if there is? There is. Well, there is. Yeah. Yeah. By saying that I have to explain it. Well, yeah. You have to go play and see you to have that explained to yours. Yeah. So we do, even on a microcosm, we carry cultural things around with us. There's a culture of this neighborhood we live in to a certain extent. These two, 300 houses right around here. And then you get into Longmont and there's kind of a different culture. It's kind of the anti-volder culture. It's a folder county and then you're taking on Denver's. Well, we're not bolder. That's where all the wackos live, you know? So, yeah. But it grows exponentially from there. And there really is, you can fault it. There really is a Western culture though that we grew into and horrible things about it. All kinds, but you cannot ignore it as far as if you wanna understand the history of humans today and art today as one subset of that, you know? Isn't part of cultural heritage what you wanna share with your friends or your kids or something like that too where you just see something that's like, you know, check this out. You might really like that because I enjoyed that, you know? I mean, I do that with music or it's like, well, here's this really good movie. You should go see it. You might like that. I have friends that recommend things to me and sometimes I get to them and sometimes I don't, but, you know, that isn't that kind of passing on the cultural heritage. Like, hey, if you like this, you should check this out, you know, or if you like this music, check this out sometime, you know? And that's the person-to-person cultural heritage more than like the pressure of what's selling or what generations, you know, pass on. But I think there is some of that that happens. It's the way I make the culture around me, you know? And people around me make my culture with me. You know, I don't think that we, I mean, we can't, but I don't think that we should maybe talk about the cultural inheritance without talking about cultural appropriation. I was reading an article months ago about whether or not Bruno Mars was appropriating black music. And as I read more in the article and then just kind of fell down a rabbit hole of reading, I realized that possibly all American music, maybe with some exceptions, but a lot of American music is black music or has its origins in black music, even country, which we think of as really white music. And whether or not you agree with that, what do you think is the role, what do you think our responsibility is to future generations when it comes to how we consume art and what we think of as art? Yeah, I think you have to be able to explain the history behind you, what were the cultural influences behind African American artistic creation. But I do get in, it's the same thing, is what is appropriation and what is just artists influencing each other? Where's the line between that? I don't know. You've been not even knowing all of their influences, not consciously. Or the opposite, actually working with somebody of a different culture and blending what the two of you do. Paul Simon got accused of artistic appropriation when he made his Graceland album, when he'd gone to Africa and was influenced by all kinds of different genres there. And he collaborated too, actually. He did, and that's who he was. It was truly collaboration, nobody on either side said, hey, the guy stole my music and ran off to America and made a million dollars. That never came up, nobody ever looked at it that way. That's a question of what's the cultural appropriation versus cultural exchange or cultural appreciation? And the collective will slurp up the arch over time in a way that is not easy to predict but always sort of happens. I was thinking of that before when we discussed what can prevail in our youth if it's as potent labor. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. But I remember Paul Simon is a good example. Today there's been a lot of collaboration. My partner had not listened to Graceland much so he ordered it on vinyl because I liked it so much. And he said, yes, I can see how it was great when it came but today, and he's black himself, by the way, but today Paul Simon started something that went away from him, other people took it other places and more original today. And the same I was thinking before when we talked, I love comic books and I love Neil Gaiman and very early on Neil Gaiman was part of the creation of the trench coat brigade. Supernatural investigators and angels even in trench coats. It's a thing that most of us geeks are familiar with today but it didn't just come from nothing. They was invented in the late 80s and it was a very creative streak. And today, when they do good omens or constantin or anything, people are like, oh yeah, I've seen that before. And I tried to like, no, it wasn't new, they invented it but to know then because the art went into the collective. And if you are the artist who are in the original, you just gotta roll with it. You gotta keep developing something else from what was. And the same kind of applies to like the Mona Lisa. We look at it now, it's an iconic image and nobody understands that nobody had painted like that before. No, it was completely new. Invented that, it was just bizarre at the time. It was as bizarre as the impressionists were in the late 19th century. I just wanna point out for myself that it's hard for me to talk about cultural appropriation in a really full way when I haven't personally been harmed by it. Right, yeah. Yeah, I wanted to say for when it comes to cultural appropriation, I think one of our only future routes to go towards with it, especially when we wanna hand off art to next generation is in part just to talk about how our current things that we love are from other cultures and from things that have been dilated, changed and mutilated and how it is complicated. And I think it's one of the biggest things that it's okay that it's complicated, but also to listen to people of color when they're explaining this, to elevate other people's art that's not just made by white people in every area. Cause I think that's just one of our biggest issues. It wouldn't be such an issue if people were taking things from other genres and genres and cultures if we also had the elevation of people who were actually from that culture in a... Jacob, hey! There was this controversy in the books area for this book, American Dirt, that Oprah put on her pick for her book club and how it's a story about Mexican immigrants, but it's written by a white woman and how people of that culture were talking to her like, well, this is really stereotypical and offensive to use this kind of story just to be like, oh yeah, it's just this story, but it's like our lives and it's still this unhappy thing. To when we could be elevating actual immigrant stories from immigrants who are writing about it. Like there's nothing wrong with this woman having written this story. It's that everyone else was like, oh, this is the story. This is great. I've never read something like this before when it's also not accurate to this point that people were like, oh, I really understand some of this now. Yeah. And representation matters too. Like seeing women that are not just like, they don't just look once a certain way. And LGBTQIA characters who have full lives and don't die at the end of the story, don't get me started, and characters of color and just like, I mean, how can it really be our cultural inheritance and tell the story of humanity if it's not telling everybody's story? But I'm using the, it strikes me that I'm using the word it to represent something that doesn't necessarily exist as an organic whole. Like there's nothing that you can really point to outside of what somebody says it is and say this is our culture. This is the human cultural inheritance. I don't know, what do you think? Can I ask a question that may be relevant or not to the cultural appreciation conversation, but it sort of ties into what was raised earlier about what's original and what's not and what's novel and innovative. And I don't know where that line is between what's innovative and what's culturally appropriative all the time. Cause I think it's a line that's pretty fluid actually. If we take a genre like blues music and look at what people did with blues music, yeah, I suppose you could call it appropriation or you could just say this one art form was put in the hands of this artist and look what they did with it and that kind of thing. I don't mean that to be insulting and devaluing anything, but even with painting and stuff, if we look at a style of painting that's associated with one culture and then someone from a different culture says, hmm, what if I did this? Is that innovation or is that appropriation? And I think that the big question with appropriation comes with one of the words you use, Kelly, when you said it depends on how we consume it and the consumer is often, I mean, consumption is usually a big piece of it and what we would complain about today about cultural appreciation is usually that one culture appropriates it to make money in a consumer market that is lacking for the person or the group that originated that. So the appropriation comes because it's able to sell to a block of consumers that it wasn't selling to before because it wasn't marketed or however we might look at it. But the actual appropriative act of taking one form of art and saying, well, what if I tried this with that? I mean, that can lead to the big innovations and the next step forward. A poetry, a style of poetry might look at Haiku and how that... I mean, what can you do when you take a pattern and look for repetition? Is that appropriation then or is it just a poet trying a different technique and say, what will happen if I do this? I don't know where that is. I've wondered it too. What is the line between appropriation and inspiration? Yeah. And I think it really comes back to the question about responsibility. So what's the responsibility of artists and what's the responsibility of audiences? And not just in terms of cultural appropriation but in terms of history and in terms of representation and in terms of what art may or may not get made in the future. That brings something to mind that I don't have an answer for. It's just made me think of it. I've seen people get angry when someone who looks like me, white Western wasp person, says like you were saying Alex about that book that it was about immigrants but it was written by a white lady. Someone gets mad and says, well, why aren't you looking for people of color writing or creating or why aren't you looking for this group or that group or the other group and going to the source? And a lot of the time the person in my position maybe doesn't even know it existed but it puts all of the burden on me to go to be really educated about everything I consume and take personal responsibility for exploring it to its fullest extent which is great but not always practical for everything. And I think, yes, I do bear some responsibility but I don't know that I bear all of the responsibility. I don't know, I don't know where I'm going with that. It's just something that came to mind with this discussion because I've heard that said many a time and the blame, frankly, is put on the consumer for not being educated enough. Certainly you don't wanna put all the emotional labor on the disadvantaged or disenfranchised group and say it's their job to educate me but on the other hand, how am I supposed to learn that it even exists? It's just tricky. It strikes me that there's somebody in the equation who has more power and that's the people who have put media out there. So the movie producers and the publishers and the art elite and museum curators and all of those people who are curating the content that we consume. And I don't want to have the last word on this but we only have four minutes left and so I wanted to ask you a kind of a wrap up question and then talk about what discussions we have coming up this week and next week. So my question is what art has been most important to you during this time of staying at home, of being ordered to stay at home? What has gotten you through and has your relationship with art changed and how do you think that this cultural moment, this historical cultural moment that we are going through right now is going to influence art in the future? So what's most important to you and has gotten you through this and how do you think it's going to and how has your relationship with the change and what do you think is this moment in time is going to mean for art in the future? In two and a half minutes or less. I think right now the most important thing is just the consumption of stories. Like I'm going between a lot of things, a lot of TV shows and movies and books and it's not really one thing it's just that getting to interact with a world that's not just this world is the thing that's going to be like, yeah, this world isn't all there is and it's not all that will be to that. And afterwards, I'm hoping that we'll have a better appreciation for our various forms of art and I know a lot of times it gets overlooked is things that aren't as important even though art is in everything and it's everywhere and it's one of our most human qualities. Yeah, I've been listening to podcasts with different people which I didn't do before but it's just different people talking about the same situation we're all in just getting different perspectives of it. But for going forward, it's between the joke if I knew what was going to happen going forward you would all be on your knees bowing before me and that's not going to happen but the one thing I was saying, maybe if we just, I don't know who I said it to. Maybe if we closed the retirement communities on December 26th, two visitors and opened them up on February 13th, we'd cut the flu deaths in this country in half. Maybe that's something we learn about this, the ones we just, sorry, 30,000, 40,000 people die of the flu every year, it's just the way it is. No, it's because of the way we live our lives if that many people will get the flu and it just ravages through the elderly population maybe we can learn to do something about that. So rather than just saying this is the way we've always done it, this is the way it's always been there's no other way, yeah. I hope that applies to a lot of things. Yeah, yeah, that's one example, there's a point. Yeah. I've been sort of, I've been consuming art that is not related to the current situation because I really need to get away from it sometimes because otherwise I'm just completely saturated with information about the virus and everything is about that. So I've been using art as a way to connect with other people, namely the artist and it's mostly music and visual art that I've been looking at and listening to and not thinking about the situation but appreciating what's there in a way that it feels different it feels more urgent or poignant somehow. And I think as far as how it might change things in the future, I just feel like there's this new appreciation maybe not new but enhanced appreciation for human connection and like you said, stories and that I don't think we're gonna lose that anytime soon. I can add a little bit. I think I've been doing, I'm a huge music fan and in the recent weeks I've had more time to be at home and listen to music and that and I've been turning to my comfort foods. My favorite music is still my favorite music and I think the context is cool. I'm a huge Pink Floyd fan and I was listening to Wish You Were Here a couple days ago and that whole cycle of music is about being absent physically, about something missing and it's perfect for today's day but it's also one of my favorites and I'm going to my comfort foods. I don't know what will happen down the road. I might expect that after this is over we see a lot of distant kind of art. So I wouldn't be surprised if a year from now we start seeing solitude and isolation exhibited in art because it's probably being made right now and it'll catch on but and I also think medium is changing crazy. I mean, here we are meeting tonight Zoom and we would normally be together. So that's gonna affect art because media always affects art. So we'll be, a couple of you have really cool backgrounds and I mean, that's artistic, right? You made a statement by choosing your background for us tonight. Think about that. I mean, something you wouldn't have considered two, three weeks ago. So here you are. I'm having so much fun with Zoom backgrounds. Yeah, there's art for you. That's art out of the virus. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I definitely like that. I definitely go to my comfort foods. Tot and Kelly know that like Star Trek, Voyager, stuff like that. I do balance it a little bit with edgier things, both shows and films. I watched the film brand at the other day, produced in Russia. Hugely many parallels to what we're going through here. Only what we're going through is much worse. Both with corporations, brands and a virus, strangely speaking. So in a more edgy shows too, that I haven't watched before, like Debs, which Kelly introduced me to. They're a little creepy and edgy, but I have to balance it with a lot of comfort food, like Star Trek. So, and as for the future, this will be a form, digital, digital art forms, digital discussions. It's here to stay. Yeah, we've been forced to admit that a lot of things that we were told weren't possible to do remotely, really are. Yeah. That's not going away. We're not gonna let that go. And so many of those meetings could have been emails. It's good for all of us. I mean, I'm really glad that Great Cubans Philosophy, for example, is starting to do more online because that's a way that we are making what we do more accessible to people who can't necessarily be at an in-person discussion. But just personally, I'm really not gonna miss unnecessarily long meetings, which is nice. But I have loved meeting with all of you and I love doing the series. We have two more left because we have two more Mondays in April. So today is Monday, April 13th. I'm actually really impressed with my ability to say what day it is. So we have a lot coming up this month on Tuesday, April 14th and Tuesday, April 21st. So the next two Tuesdays, we have our prefects and junior prefects. There are Harry Potter and philosophy groups. Normally there's one group for ages eight to 12 and another group, or eight to 11, another group for 12 to 17 or 18. But we're just going to combine all those groups and we're gonna be meeting on Zoom and we're taking lots of safety precautions for everything that we do on Zoom, especially for young people. And then Wednesday, we have our books and big ideas story times at 10 a.m., which I love and it's just wonderful to get to do this with kids, especially because when you're doing a story time with kids and they're in their own kitchen or their own living room, sometimes they just get up and wander around. I mean, that happens in regular story times too, but it's a lot of fun. So, and I really wanna encourage people that's every Wednesday at 10 a.m. And then Wednesday evening from seven to 8.30, we're doing an Earth Day discussion with Widespaces Community Initiative and Lions Regional Library, which I'm really excited about. All of this is taking place on Zoom. And in all three of those instances, you have to register. We have, there's an event right link. We'll get the Wednesday one up on our website, but it's already on our Facebook page, Grey Havens Philosophy. Our website is greyhavensgroup.org, G-R-E-Y, havensgroup.org. You can email me at info at greyhavensgroup.org and tell us what you would like to have a philosophy discussion about or if you would like for us to work with your community group or business or neighborhood or anything. We're really happy to bring philosophy to as many people as we can and to have these amazing discussions where there are no right or wrong answers. In fact, there are no definitive answers. It's just people thinking together and our catchphrase is thinking together makes our community better. So, oh, Anne, very important. This is very important. If you are inspired to consume some more art and to do it in a really thoughtful way, on Thursday, it's six, right? Alex, that's six. Yeah. So six to eight? Six to seven, three, eight. Yeah, it's starting at six. We're going to be doing our Contemplative Reading Group online and Contemplative Reading is applying sacred reading practices to contemporary poetry and fiction and it's just this really amazing, juicy, creative way to get the most out of words and out of poetry and stories and it also is wonderful if you're into contemplative practice or even if you've never tried it, it helps you get the most out of life too and it's something that I love and Alex will be leading it and I will be there enjoying it which I'm so excited about and then every Friday, we do fandom Friday from seven to eight, 30 p.m. And it's a different fandom. I don't, are we doing Harry Potter this Friday? Yep. Alex knows, I don't know. I'm the executive director, what do I know? I don't know. Yeah, so we're going to be really interesting. We're doing, the topic is problematic Potter so things about Harry Potter that haven't aged well. And it should be really juicy, I'm using that word a lot. It should be a really meaty topic and very interesting. And then Saturday is our young adult group which is for six to 12th graders. It's called Grey Havens YA and if you're interested in getting your kid or teen involved in that group or in any of our other groups, you can always email me again, that's info at gray g-r-e-y havensgroup.org. Okay, any last thoughts? I'm noticing there's something wrong with my green screen here. Okay, there we go. This, by the way, I need a lot of Star Trek. I need a lot of stories, a lot of audiobooks, a lot of movies, everything. But Star Trek has been my comfort food and this is Vasquez Roth's which is used in so many Star Trek episodes starting with that one with the Gorn in it where, in all the arena, we're Captain Kirk is fighting the lizard dude. So anyway, just in case you were wondering. I thought it looked familiar. And you can tune in next time to see what my other background will be. So thank you to Longmont Public Media but thank you especially to all of you. You are our wonderful regulars involved in our organization in other ways and it's fabulous to see you all and I miss you and I miss you like this. Thank you so much. I'm going to stop recording now. Recording. Okay.