What Role Does Art Play In American Culture

This semester, I was exposed to a wide array of speakers who presented information about the ways in which they had portrayed God within the realm of their disciplines, and how they had seen others do it as well throughout the ages. Some commons themes present within each of the respective disciplines were the shared history, and impact of society on the ways each group portrayed God. One cannot speak of the history of culture in the Western World without first discussing the reasons why increases in culture generally occur and the effect that the money has had on such developments. Cultural landmarks, pieces, and figures are the result of investments of wealth for either a personal or communal gain. With many of the major cultural objects

In a quote from Thomas Merton, “Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.” It is this transcendental aspect that art provides that allows one to enter into a sphere of thought, which is unattainable by any other means. This sphere of thought grants the ability to see beyond one’s self and view life from another perspective. While it may be argued that the art present in Christian churches is more “Christian” than the others, this mentality is the result of a deficiency in understanding what the purpose of Christian art is. This deficiency is commonly seen among Protestant circles as defining these types of objects as idols, but they themselves often keep an illuminated U.S. flag flying on their property, which is much more similar to idolatry than compared to a sculpture or painting depicting a Biblical scene. There’s something to be said about how, throughout the entirety of history, humankind’s religious places have been adorned with objects depicting gods and being concentrations of wealth. The value that these people had for their gods was embodied in the time and wealth they gave in adoration, and it is no different in the modern

I’ve been generally open to all genres of music, so that didn’t much change that, but I’ve been extremely interested in learning how to understand paintings and the intricacies with sculpture, and I believe that some of the ideas presented have helped me to better understand purpose in both a general context and with an individual piece. My facebook post after Scott Stearman’s lecture talks about this, and a couple of people commented as well and pointed out some of the intricacies that they themselves had