As I was re-reading an essay that the Art and Activism class covers early in the semester, I came across this passage that I had highlighted. I think this is a succinct explanation of why art is so important to society.
"The more that is hidden and suppressed, the more simplistic the representation of daily life, the more one-dimensional and caught in the dominant ideology the society is, the more art must reveal. In form and content its aggressive refusal to sustain society's illusions, demonstrates the "limits of immediacy." Art refuses to be easy."
(Carol Becker, "Presenting the Problem" in the introduction to The Subversive Imagination)
I believe this is why art often engenders such heated debates. It divides those who want to get deeper at the truth of reality from those who desperately want to keep the truth hidden, particularly when the truth doesn't line up with the reality they want to believe in. Art often shows us painful or dark things, but it is only by revealing those things that we have any chance of healing them.
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