The Cultivated Amateur

"I think that what is true of scholarship is also true of the creative arts: those who paint and write and compose are, again, producers. The process of liberal education seems to me to be concerned more with understanding and responding to the arts than with producing them, though, of course, this is a matter of emphasis, not of definition. As Castiglione showed for the Renaissance courtier, the artist needs to be complemented by the cultivated amateur, who represents the social vision of an educated public that has some idea what to do with the artist's work. Hence education in the arts is primarily critical: it struggles to attain a conscious knowledge and understanding of a kind that is normally detached from the creative process itself, though it should be as useful to the creative artist as to anyone else. The chief deficiency in today's literature, for example, is not the lack of good writers, but the lack of a reading public sufficiently large, informed, and articulate to establish the real social importance of the good writer."

In a recent study published, one of the findings was that "non-expert poetry readers prefer the more accessible AI-generated poetry, which communicate emotions, ideas, and themes in more direct and easy-to-understand language..." I think this is largely because we have failed to teach the arts with an eye to receiving and have only focused on production, forgetting that those who produce art must have an audience able to receive it.

     This is a topic I am passionate about. In more self-pitying moments, I have muttered to myself, "What's the point?" What is the point of taking classes, reading books beyond my level, studying things that seem to have no practical use? I'm no expert. I'm not a teacher or scholar or writer or artist. I am a homeschooling mom with no higher education. What is the point in learning these things? Why do I *want* to learn these things? What am going to *do* with it all?

     This is the point. This is repairing the ruins of our education. Not so that we join the ranks of the scholars and artists, but so that we can better receive the artist's work. It's the reception of cultivated amateurs that "establish the real social importance" of the artist. We are becoming an educated public.

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A Poem a Day:

An Excerpt from book 1 of "Endymion"

by John Keats

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:

Its loveliness increases; it will never

Pass into nothingness; but still will keep

A bower quiet for us, and a sleep

Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing

A flowery band to bind us to the earth,

Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth

Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,

Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darkened ways

Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,

Some shape of beauty moves away the pall

From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon,

Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon

For simple sheep; and such are daffodils

With the green world they live in; and clear rills

That for themselves a cooling covert make

'Gainst the hot season; the mid forest brake,

Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms:

And such too is the grandeur of the dooms

We have imagined for the mighty dead;

All lovely tales that we have heard or read:

An endless fountain of immortal drink,

Pouring unto us from the heaven's brink.