What is art?

What is art – and what of the endeavour to try to harness the communicative power of the arts to bring important science to the community in new ways?

Presently CLIMARTE’s extensive exhibition brings many artists together in an expressive response to issues of climate change. The upcoming exhibition Vanishing Point will highlight plastic pollution in the exhibition that will run from May-July at IMAS, Hobart.

Programs like Lynchpin and Living Data work specifically with scientists in an attempt to faithfully respond to their rigorous analysis through the arts; an attempt to increase understanding, tell stories, seduce the viewer into unknown worlds of importance, using the senses.

What are we all doing here?  The late Leonard Bernstein wonderfully encapsulated something of just that “other space” we attempt.

“Any great art work … revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world – the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air.”  

Encouragement here to continue perhaps?  Whilst in no way claiming to have achieved “great art” but with the intent of moving towards other disciplines,  to open to difference,  to stimulate minds to be responsive to the future and to open to change; inviting us in to be “an inhabitant of that world” in a deeper way, using new and creative ways which are both knowledge based and presented, absorbed and “known” differently.