【辉太郎杀G大队】8/3 作业by applemango

ApplemangoUID: 2661244

TOPIC: ISSUE131 - "The arts (painting, music, literature, etc.) reveal the otherwise hidden ideas and impulses of a society."
WORDS: 591
TIME: 00:55:00
DATE: 2009-8-4 下午 05:48:59

What is the role of art in the society? The speaker asserts that, the arts reveals the otherwise hidden ideas and impulses inside a society. I generally agree with this conclusion because some arts can really tell us the concealed social ideas and spurs. However, we can not ignore the reality and popular culture arts reflect, the role arts play as recreation to common people and a way for the artists to express themselves.

To begin with, I concede that sometimes arts can well unveil the hidden ideas and stimulus of a society in an intelligible way. They provide us hints to better understand the society of their times. The Color Purple, as one of the famous Pulitzer Prize For Fiction Winner, focused on the life of female black during the 1930s in the southern United States. It uncovered their miserable life and unfair treatment they've experienced. It help the common people to get to know those hidden numerous issues including the exceedingly low position of the female black in American social culture. The well-known silent film of Charles Chaplin, namely The Modern Times, exposes how the workers struggle to survive in the modern, industrialized world, and it is also a vivid comment on the desperate employment and financial problems many people faced in the Great Depression. Those cases tell us that in some aspects, arts are able to make us know the concealed things.

However, the arts are from life and beyond life. They mirror the reality to the audience in a more colorful and artistic way. They enable people to understand life of now and past, deeper and easier. In the novel Pride and Prejudice, the Author Jane Austen wittily expressed the marriage values of society that, it is a life-long goal for the nubile to find a rich, promising bachelor rather than pursuing happiness and real love. The Chinese paintings, which have thousands years of history, also reveals the wildly accepted idea------ the harmony with nature and the moralities the Chinese are long respect through the depicting of plum of blossom, orchid, bamboo, chrysanthemum which are known as four gentlemen in Chinese classic literature.

Considering the nature of arts, we can also find that arts have also provided imaginations and entertainments to people rather than displaying aspects of life. The scientific fictions and movies give us opportunities to pre-experience the possible fantastic life in the far future. Like the Star War Series and the horror works of Stephen Hawking, they are marvelous stories but they hardly reveal anything about society. Also, the comedies and comics also provide us laughter, power and relief to overcome difficulties and bad times.

Moreover I would like to add that not all works of arts necessarily say something about a society's ideas and impulses. We need to look no further than the works of Van Gogh to find out works of arts that do not reveal anything about a society. Van Gogh's paintings can hardly reflect anything other than his own intensive and sensitive perceptions of colors and forms. His painting was driven by the emotions and spiritual impulses of his own, rather than the ideas and impulses that he found out about the society.

To conclude, I agree with the author that the arts do reveal something about a society's ideas and impulses. At the same time, we can not overlook other things arts have brought to us. The vivid reflection of life, the entertainments and the expression of ideas of artists, these are also the valuable things we benefit from arts.