Seats and forms of power : How can art inform, educate and eventually transform people and bring them together?

Seats and forms of power

As an introduction, I’m going to explain the terms of the notion seats and forms of power. Power implies a form of control on somebody or something. A person or thing that possesses or exercises authority or influence. It is defined by seats like the White House for example, which is a symbol of the American presidency. There are a lot of different kinds of power: financial power, political power, power of education or the power of the media.

But today I would like to draw attention to the power of art.

How can art inform, educate and eventually transform people and bring them together?

For a start, “ art is an irreplaceable way of understanding and expressing the world, it speaks to our intellect, our emotions, imagination, memory, physical senses and restores our humanity” says Dana Gioia. I agree with him because art creates the possibility to express ourselves in many ways: drawing, literature, dance or music. Photographs for example have the powers to capture moments, share and send messages about the events happening in the world. Thanks to pictures people are aware of critical situations like war, famine and political problems. They permit people to remind the views of many landscapes or quite simply exhibit these wonderful places on the web if some people can’t travel to see it in real.

I would like also to comment the power of art on the young people who have troubles and trauma. We saw in class “The healing Power of art” written by Alex Johnson who proposed to develop arts education for giving children and youth strategies to express their pain, cope with the stress and prepare them to a strong future.  According to him, arts save lives; people who are doomed to failure have just to express themselves; their suffering to restore their identity.  Thus art helps everyone to increase self-esteem.

Secondly, I would now like to talk about music. Songs permit to change people’s opinions on a lot of subjects; singers use their fame to bring changes in the world. To my mind, music is a wonderful thing; we can express ourselves not only by our voices but also with some instruments because music can born with everything and nothing. I am convinced that music is an international language. We saw in class a document by Robin Lustig that taught us the story of seventy young musicians from London who went in the black townships of South Africa. There are many prejudices about these places and people living there; like that it’s dangerous, people are miserable. But the musicians who went there said the opposite; of course they were poor but they were excited and full of life and enthusiasm. Music brought them together, musicians played for them and everybody sang and danced.  

To conclude, we are now apt to say that art has great powers over people; photographs, movies, songs, media permit to inform the others about the world, but also to educate people who have difficulties and bring everybody together.

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