5) "Cultural expression finds a community purpose"These appear to be showing up more often, though.
Here's a call to action in today's Sacramento Bee: Let Art Define the Drought.
What does art have to do with the drought? Pictures of dried-up lake beds? Drawings of parched, snowless mountains? A poem about thirst?The example David Mas Masumoto (the editorialist) gives is "Migrant Mother, " a photograph taken in Nipomo California in 1936 by Dorothea Lange.
I have a favorite example of the art of drought.
While the situation of Florence Owens Thompson, pictured here, might have been due to the Dust Bowl, it is an oversimplification to call that environmental disaster a "drought." While drought years in the 1930s were the immediate cause of massive dust storms - and to people leaving Oklahoma and environs - the region had endured droughts before. It was the use of prairie lands for farming methods to which they weren't suited that loosened the topsoil enough to become dust in the first place. In many respects, it was another aspect of the Roaring 20s and similar excesses of that Third Turning.
In addition, the genesis of this image wasn't a "challenge" to "artists ...to create art." Lange was attempting to document the state of people during the Great Depression. Her photography was the product of talent, training, and a desire to fulfill a particular goal - which is where art usually seems to come from, anyway. The artist does what they feel they need to do, sometimes successfully enough to touch people who only know the art, not the artist. During a Crisis, that means letting others know that what they are going through is happening to more than just them.
Perhaps that's what Identifier Number 5 is all about.
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