Sunday, June 17, 2007

The Arts as Conveyers of Knowledge

  • Parables.
  • Sagas, that make information memorable using verse and drama.
  • The Cimabue and Giotto paintings in the Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi that made religious instruction available to the churchgoer as art. Indeed, the stream of Renaissance art that instructed viewers in religion, politics, and classics.
  • Essays, that when well written rise to the level of literature, while delving into and conveying information and analysis.
  • Novels may entertain, thrill, and have pure aesthetic value, but they can also inform. Indeed, literature can convey knowledge tacitly, helping us to understand people and society in ways not possible through virtual observation.
  • So too, film and theater may convey information not only by sugar coating it in entertainment, but also be linking it to the emotions of author, director, actors and audience in ways that make it indelible, and by conveying tacit knowledge that can not be expressed nor understood as well via prose.
  • Opera and the musical theater, conveying all the aspects of drama with music and thereby affecting more directly the emotions as well as the intellect. Indeed, music conveys musical ideas as the visual arts convey ideas from the visual arts in ways that can not be done via the spoken or written word.

This blog has focused on scientific and technological knowledge, and more broadly on other knowledge systems such as the bureaucratic, legislative, judiciary, and knowledge systems of other social and economic institutions. The arts too would seem to institutionalize their own knowledge systems, not only with the internal knowledge related to the making of art, but as a medium for conveying information of other kinds.

Indeed, as we try to understand people and culture it is often better to go to the arts than to the sciences.

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