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Receiving gifts of artistic spirit

July 26, 2004 By Uncategorized

Following on from the last posting on the labour of gratitude, I’d like to take a slight deviation back to the introduction of “The Gift” where Lewis Hyde is writing about how we receive the fruits of artistic gifts:

The spirit of the artist’s gifts can wake our own. The work appeals, as Joseph Conrad says, to a part of our being which is itself a gift and not an acquisition. Our sense of harmony can hear the harmonies that Mozart heard. We may not have the power to proffer our gifts as the artist does, and yet we come to recognize, and in a sense receive, the endowments of our being through the agency of his creation…When we are moved by art we are grateful that the artist lived, grateful that he labored in the service of his gifts.”

This was foremost in my mind when I attended Jon’s session at the Giving Conference on art and mental models. The idea is that we are all gifted with resources to create and receive artistic expressions. When art really affects us (moves us, pun intended) it activates these resources. It makes us want to create, to engage in a form of the labour of gratitude that leads to further creative activity.

We don’t need to be great composers to understand Mozart’s harmony, and the more we listen to it, the more we recognize it and the deeper we respond. We may yet evolve into composers, but I think the real value of a creative response to a creative expression is that it triggers something of a poetic impulse in us to respond creatively to the world around us. Thus the gift of art is the unlocking of the key resource for democracies and thriving societies: creative citizenship.

You don’t need to make poems or create music or draw figures to put this creative impulse to use. Creative entrepreneurship, citizenship and responses to societal problems all become arenas for the expression of this impulse. Through those arenas, we share our gifts with others and perpetuate the cycle. We become artists engaged in the collaborative creation of the world we want.