The Hall Center for the Arts in Big Spring, Texas, opened in January 2001. Designed by national architect William Rawn Associates, the facility features 2,300 square feet of gallery space, a 1,200-seat auditorium, a 10,000 square foot outdoor amphitheater, a permanent visual arts exhibit space, and 200 studio art classrooms.
What if you could experience any work of art, live or on video, whenever you wanted?
For about 10 years now, people around the world have been able to do just that with something called the Internet Archive. The Internet Archive is a collection of computers and software that are always on, always running. The computers are constantly downloading and indexing files from the web, and the software is constantly searching for new files.
The Internet Archive includes, among other things, a catalog of all of the works ever published, and television shows, music, and movies from hundreds of companies, including Disney, Warner, Paramount, MGM, Sony, Universal, the BBC, PBS, and dozens of smaller labels.
The Internet Archive works, then, as a kind of bridge between the physical world and the digital one. When you visit the site, you see an index of all of the works available. When you click a link, you download a streaming video, or you listen to a song, or you read a poem.
The Internet Archive’s users are mostly ordinary users like you and me. But ordinary people have also made extraordinary contributions.
A group at MIT has scanned and indexed the entire contents of the Library of Congress. Their catalog makes it possible to look up any book, music, or film in the library, and to find copies, in digital form, all over the world.
The arts have pushed civilization forward by giving us new ways to think about things. The arts, in other words, have allowed us to keep thinking in new ways.
The arts have value because they are rare. They are the unusual. The odd. They are what we cannot explain or predict. In that sense, they are like science.
That may seem obvious, but what it means is that the value of art is not determined by how much people are willing to pay. The value of art is not measured in dollars.
The value of art is not determined by how much people are willing to pay. The value of art is not measured in dollars.
The value of art is not determined by how many people like or dislike it. The value of art is not determined by how many people like or dislike it.
The value of art is not determined by how many people like or dislike it. Value is understood to mean worth, and therefore value must be determined not by how popular or unpopular it is, but by how the work means.
And so the value of art lies not in its appreciation, but in its meaning.
A work of art that means nothing is not a work of art at all.
The arts have value because they give us a new way to think about the world, and that new way allows us to keep thinking in new and better ways.
The arts have pushed civilization forward by giving us new ways to think about things. The arts, in other words, have allowed us to keep thinking in new ways.
