Didactic Artistry, Socratic Artistry?

Since November of 2011, I sought to certainly create more than I consumed, and accompany any broadcastings/re-broadcastings of my own work/lesser known work with explicit writing about something that I learned from the content or the circumstances surrounding whatever it was I created (see the text accompanying my youtube videos and soundcloud clip).

Better to ask questions in the School of Athens right?

A noble endeavor perhaps, but certainly cumbersome, sometimes burdensome, and for the most part, incompatible with the amount of things I created or found/re-discovered.

In opposition to sporadic postings of things I found (for an extreme example of what I'd call hyperbroadcasting, take a look at almost anyone's tumblr account that re-blogs material sans interpretation), a didactic approach to the arts almost threatens the notion of "art for art's sake".

Yet I also believe that as a form of communication, the arts have remarkable capacity to convey explicit or implicit information, and that many pieces that we enjoy and share sometimes do benefit from pointing to worldly context to enhance our appreciation for the world, or deepen our awareness with troublesome issues.  Based on the following statement:

"Art ain't about paint. It ain't about canvas. It's about ideas. Too many people died without ever getting their mind out to the world." - Thornton Dial, SR. [a folk artist whose quote is on display at a national museum in Washington D.C.]

I believe the integrity of a good idea withstands any questions about value and utility given appropriate context.  In the arts, you need only one of the three for an idea to appeal:

1.  good idea/intention
2.  good conveyance of an idea
3.  relevant circumstances that make parts of an idea more appealing

If you conceive and successfully create something that meets all three of these conditions, it's a wonderful piece and timeless adventure for anyone who has the privilege of experiencing it.

I'm backlogged almost beyond hope with incomplete broadcasts of ideas and pieces, and especially with neat findings of music, film, or imagery chiefly due to the fact that I start to notice that share common threads with other things I've done or seen (time constraints and other obligations being the other contributing factors to this backlog).

For a time, I considered just posting these out of the blue, but doing so degrades the novelty and joy of broader thematic discoveries I had for myself.  This evening, I realized: why not lay out the individual pieces and disclose that I encourage people to find and share any bigger themes they may  come to discover in what I've shared?

A savvy educator usually uses questions to uncover inspiration, appreciation, deeper inquiry, discovery, and understanding about the world.  Yet art also elicits many of the same outcomes in ways that don't necessitate the immediate presence of an individual to ask these questions.  We can communicate and stir the imagination of another person by sharing something that speaks to us.

What happens then, when we recognize something bigger about the things we appreciate?  As in, we've gathered enough information to discover a new level of themes and content among the individual pieces we love?  Can we guide imagination?  I think so, though the process must be done with ethical cognizance.

This is a bit like the success of the Socratic Method (thus the second half of this post's title), which uses a series of questions toward an individual/ group of people to examine the soundness of their foundational beliefs.

More accurately, what I've resolved to explore is a method of sharing glimpses of insight in a way that's akin to a Japanese style of academic essay composition (at least, according to an informational video for writing consultants I saw while working at the UM-Dearborn Writing Center about English as Second Language writers circa 2008/2009).

So here we go, will you kindly share your thoughts with me?

#Started 01:37 27 IX 2012 finished 3 X 2012 0:37 at home