About a year ago, when I was trespassing on a Communication Theory class, my current advisor posed this question to a group of incoming graduate students. The ensuing discussion was a bit too scatter-brained, but the question remained with me for a long time. I’ve been thinking about it since then, and recently I started writing down what I think.
[Of course, at the time, my first reaction was: "What an artsy-fartsy idealistic question?! What a ridiculous waste of time! And THIS is where my taxpayer money is going??"]
However, over the past year I’ve begun to see just how complex this question is, and as I’ve thought through the question it has also spawned a bunch of other equally idiotic questions in my own head. Working through each of those led to quite a lot of interesting discussions (yes, in my own head…)
I am writing up a lot of the resulting thoughts and ideas, but, in the meantime, I want to pose the original question here, and also pose the questions that it spawned. Please think and respond! 
Here they are:
On surface, five mere words:
“can art change the world?”
but…
can
art
change
the
world
?
world
the world
change
art
can
?
!
questions…
1) What do we mean by “world”?
a) Is there such a thing as “the” world?
blue) What does it mean for a “world” to “change”?
pi.e) What is art anyway?! [Ah yes, that hoary old chestnut again... Might as well give up now...]
-4.0) And can art DO anything? Does it have intent, is it an agent? Is it static or dynamic?
?) Is there something more to this than cute/pointless analytical deconstruction? Anyone can dissect a sentence into its component words and cleverly analyze each word, and end up with a lot of words. ha ha, very smart, good boy, here’s a star for me. But… once the words are spilled out onto the table and dissected, what remains is the writhing still-alive question mark. The question still stands - and what enables it to do so? What makes a question so different from an answer?
!) How is our response to an idea, a question, conditioned by our ways of thinking? A question like this a year ago would have been dismissed by my younger self as a frivolous waste of time. Does art enable people to interpret their world differently in terms of questions rather than questions that need answers? How does the act of thinking about a question differ from the act of finding an answer? Is it a waste of time?
What do you folks think?
July 17th, 2008 at 8:28 pm
My simple, illiterate answer is: Arc changes you and as Gandhi says, you are the change you wish to see in the world.
August 11th, 2008 at 5:06 pm
Hi Hari.
My first thought was along the lines of your (blue). To me, everything changes the world. Each bat of the eyelash:
For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.
Otherwise known as “the butterfly effect” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect). So of course art can and does change the world. But maybe the enquirer meant something more “significant” or different by “change the world.”