(seen at The Searching)

"...Gertrude Stein said, 'Great art is irritation.' ...Sometimes to challenge the way we think we must develop a new perspective. Irritation mkes us move away from our comfortable way of looking and our comfortable way of creating art. It stimulates us to become part of a new conversation, with others and within ourselves, about who, how, why, where, and when we are. In modern Western culture, art serves a completely different purpose. It is a way to see into parts of our world that most of us cannot or do not look at or see. Western culture has always thought of art as an object that is a focus of harmony and beauty to which we could all aspire; we have resisted the idea of art as irritation. This has created a more passive audience, one that cannot differentiate between voices whose purpose is to hype or sell, and voices that are truly engaging their audiences in meaningful dialogue. We have become an evanescent community of consumers and observers rather than a dynamic audience whose members learn from one another. We have thought of the arts as conveyors of learning, attatching what we have learned to a specific form in order to preserve it for future generations. But the tools with which we present art have changed. When the context changes, the audience must change too. And when that happens, art itself is going to change."

---from "Interactive Excellence", by Edwin Schlossberg