For subscribers
Consuming art teaches you how to live your life
Culture remains vastly more important than politics or some pre-professional training in algorithms and software systems.
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox
Since the early 2000s, fewer and fewer people say that they visit art museums and galleries, go to see plays or attend classical music concerts.
PHOTO: AFP
David Brooks
Follow topic:
Recently, while browsing in the Museum of Modern Art store in New York, I came across a tote bag with the inscription “You are no longer the same after experiencing art”. It is a nice sentiment, I thought, but is it true? Or, to be more specific: Does consuming art, music, literature and the rest of what we call culture make you a better person?
Ages ago, Aristotle thought it did, but these days, a lot of people seem to doubt it. Surveys show that Americans are abandoning cultural institutions. Since the early 2000s, fewer and fewer people say that they visit art museums and galleries, go to see plays or attend classical music concerts, opera or ballet. College students are fleeing the humanities for the computer sciences, having apparently decided that a professional leg up is more important than the state of their souls. Many professors seem to have lost faith too. They have become race, class and gender political activists. The ensuing curriculum is less “How does George Eliot portray marriage?” and more “Workers of the world, unite!”
