11/23/2023 0 Comments Red aesthetic headerAnd also perhaps his neighbors, who must have heard the music. The music did nothing to deter the planes and bombs, but it must have fortified that conductor in some essential way. My Dante professor in graduate school once told us of some famous London conductor who, during the German blitz of his city in World War II, stuck his phonograph in the window and played Beethoven’s Ninth while the planes bombed and droned. But it is fair to wonder and speculate on art’s effect in our world. Auden famously said that “Art accomplishes nothing,” while, at the other extreme, Abraham Lincoln, upon meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe, allegedly said, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.” Of course, Uncle Tom’s Cabin did not make the Civil War: one half of our country allowing one race of people to own another race, and Lincoln’s refusal to let that continue, is what made that war. The role of art in our society and its impact on us both individually and collectively has long been deliberated. It was Ohio-centric art in celebration of its bicentennial in 2003, and it was amazing. I saw it on I-71 north of Columbus, Ohio, and then again on I-70 east of Dayton. It was against that backdrop that ten years ago, while driving across Ohio, I saw something wonderful and astonishing: barn art. There’s too much necessary rejuvenation occurring in those fallow fields of snow and corn-stalk stubble to call it bleak, but it is spare and severe. Winter across the vast expanse of the plains states is bare it is not bleak.
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